34% have heart, kidney, & circulation-based symptoms; risk of heart failure post-COVID is almost doubled
33% have respiratory & sleep problems, anxiety, headache & chest pains
23% have musculoskeletal & nervous system symptoms
10% have combined digestive & respiratory symptoms
From Weill Cornell Medicine’s press release:
Only in the first symptom pattern was the sex ratio roughly 1 to 1; in the other three, female patients made up a significant majority (more than 60 percent).
Researchers have spent the last decade trying to develop a “pink pill” for women to function like Viagra does for men. So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never exist—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and Come as You Are explains it all.
The first lesson in this essential, transformative book by Dr. Emily Nagoski is that every woman has her own unique sexuality, like a fingerprint, and that women vary more than men in our anatomy, our sexual response mechanisms, and the way our bodies respond to the sexual world. So we never need to judge ourselves based on others’ experiences. Because women vary, and that’s normal.
Second lesson: sex happens in a context. And all the complications of everyday life influence the context surrounding a woman’s arousal, desire, and orgasm.
Cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it. Once you understand these factors, and how to influence them, you can create for yourself better sex and more profound pleasure than you ever thought possible.
Learned lots of interesting things, especially in the first section. I didn’t love the examples of real people. The last chapter has a clear connection to her next book Burnout, here emphasizing completing the cycle of emotions rather than stress.
Democratic voters were fired up about abortion — the number of Dem voters who listed abortion as their #1 issue far outpaced Dem voters who listed anything else.
In the midterms, an astounding 72% of women under 30 voted for Democrats. Among men the same age, it was 54%. These gaps persist with age: Among women 30-44, 57% voted for Dems, while just 43% of men did.
I highlight these age ranges because these are the people getting pregnant.
I am a woman who does not want and has never wanted children. This is an unpopular choice in our culture. But I must renew this decision on a daily basis when I take my birth control pill* to prevent pregnancy. Every day of my adult life, I have started my morning by making the choice not to be a mother again.
Even for those not on the pill, reproduction is embedded in the typical adult woman’s physical lived experience, with thirty-odd years of monthly reminders of our fertility.
Maybe men also think about having kids every day. Without the daily reminder, I probably wouldn’t that often. I’m guessing most don’t? I hope not, because if they do and half of American men still care more about tax rates and gun rights than women’s right to choose whether to have (more**) kids or not, that’s even more depressing.
It is a very, very complicated thing to hold that a man can love you personally — as your father, your brother, your partner — but also devalue women as a class. Even more difficult is to truly understand that when he devalues women as a class, that includes you.
I see how women are being treated in Iran *today* and know how lucky I am to live in a Blue state. And I fear the American evangelicals who are just like the religious extremists in power in Iran, who want America to be a Christian nation so they can control women’s bodies and minds. They are chipping away at us, little by little. The courts recently ruled businesses don’t have to cover pRep in their insurance plans because they’re allowed “not to support the gay lifestyle.” It isn’t much of a stretch to extend that to birth control: they will paint women who use birth control as promiscuous and they will come for it.
*I could switch to another birth control method that doesn’t require daily use, but even with the annoyance of remembering to take it every day, the pill still seems like my best option. The side effects are minimal, and I suspect it might help prevent hormonal migraines which seem to run in the family. I know many women with an IUD and every one has told a story of agonizing pain to have it inserted, so I’d rather take the daily chore and need to get my prescription renewed annually.
I just want men to recognize just how much thought and effort women put into reproductive choice, constantly. Abortion is a last defense when our other tools fail. See also: who our culture considers responsible for contraception
** The majority of people who get abortions already have children.
Images of what an early pregnancy looks like rattled through social media recently, creating an unexpected backlash for abortion rights commentators.
@auntiekilljoy #greenscreen they need to show these images at every political debate about abortion #feminism #abortion #fyp ♬ original sound – Jessica Valenti
I took an ethics class in college, and one of our topics was abortion. Tl;dr it’s hard to argue that an unimplanted blastocyst — a tiny bundle of cells that grows for a few days before attaching to the uterine wall — is a human being entitled to the same rights as me, a fully formed adult*. And even after implantation, the tissue doesn’t look like what we’d think of as a human for a long time, per the above TikTok.
* Basically it requires belief in a soul. I don’t believe in souls. So passing laws that prohibit drugs that inhibit implantation — which are based on this belief — means politicians are imposing someone else’s religious beliefs on me. Which is not constitutional.
Basically anti-abortion advocates are lying and manipulating the public by using images from the very small portion of later-term abortions to weigh on people’s emotions and take away women’s right to an abortion before then. They know that it’s hard to show most people that tiny bundle of tissue and tell them it has more rights than they do.
And this is why truth matters.
Hustle culture is dead. Did American women’s drive go away, or has it morphed into something new—and maybe better?
For every woman who is burned out after placing too much value on work as a key component of her identity, the task isn’t letting go of ambition altogether. It’s relocating those ambitions beyond the traditional markers of money, title, and professional recognition. Ambition does not have to be limited to a quest for power at the expense of yourself and others. It can also be a drive for a more just world, a healthier self, a stronger community.
Autism in women and girls is still not widely understood, and is often misrepresented or even overlooked. This graphic novel offers an engaging and accessible insight into the lives and minds of autistic women, using real-life case studies.
The charming illustrations lead readers on a visual journey of how women on the spectrum experience everyday life, from metaphors and masking in social situations, to friendships and relationships and the role of special interests.
Fun, sensitive and informative, this is a fantastic resource for anyone who wishes to understand how gender affects autism, and how to create safer supportive and more accessible environments for women on the spectrum.
Like the color palette with teals and pinks. The cover illustration is especially nice. I liked the use of textures though text didn’t read well over halftones.
Very slender volume with simple explanations, suitable for teens and pre-teens. Mostly info I knew already. I did like how they broke down the main elements of the autistic experience for women:
I was happy to see another woman attending this IndieWeb popup event, but would like to figure out how to bring more women into the IndieWeb sphere. There are usually many fewer women than men at the IndieWeb events I’ve been to over the past year or so. (Two of twenty at yesterday’s event unless I missed someone… it is a small sample size though… 🤷♀️) Is it a lack of awareness, a perception issue, a lack of interest or perceived value, or another barrier that could be overcome to welcome more women to the community? Figuring out barriers is key in social marketing to help people adopt better behaviors.
I can’t imagine other women are uninterested in critically thinking about the online spaces we use; women are major users of social platforms. Social sites put a lot of mental burden on women by inviting comparison and making them feel bad about what they have — there’s a lot to be gained from moving away from toxic, draining systems and reimagining them. Yet as Oliver Burkeman pointed out in Four Thousand Weeks, we are complicit in our own submersion in social media, and Anne Helen Peterson highlights that we often don’t have mental energy for anything more. Maybe the thought of creating a new system seems hopeless, too much work and no promise that it wouldn’t just devolve into more toxicity? Or, people want to keep what they have, feeling they would lose something without the feedback and interactions of social media, even if they often make us feel worse?
Are women generally more interested in other social causes besides online surveillance and the negative cultural impacts of social media companies? Given limited time and energy, there are only so many groups anyone has time to get involved in. Perhaps this particular issue isn’t a top priority issue for most women?
Is it linked to women’s lower participation in STEM fields? A worry that they won’t fit in because they’re not programmers, or fear that they’ll “look dumb” by not knowing things and embarrass themselves? (I haven’t found this to be true but could understand a perception that it’s “meant for” programmers — I was a bit concerned before I went to my first event.) Maybe feeling like they have nothing to contribute to the movement? Worried it’ll be too hard to start a website (or just too much work)? Or simply down to an identity mismatch where they don’t see getting into this world something “people like them” do? (One of those chicken and the egg things where you can’t attract new folks until you have new folks who are like them already participating?)
As a variation on that thought, do women assume (or see in photos) that it’s mostly men at events, and they don’t want to get involved in a group that’s dominated by men? There’s a bit of cultural eye-rolling about dudes “in power” I’ve seen in recent years. (Even though the Indie Web doesn’t have a traditional leadership structure, it could be a perception.) Or maybe just want to spend their free time with other women, so are more likely to seek out groups of mostly women?
Mommy bloggers and influencers are a thing (with their own maybe toxic subculture), along with plenty of woman-led reading blogs, home design blogs, craft blogs, and cooking blogs, so I don’t think women are less interested in blogging — though potentially I could see that limited time might be spent more on making content and worrying less about how it’s posted? Maybe it feels like there’s no way around posting to these platforms because that’s where the people are, and there’s no solution to discoverability yet, and if you need / want to make money off (or get your personal validation from) posting then you need to go where the people are? (Especially in recent years that revenue from blog advertising has mostly gone away in favor of sponcon which often has social media posting requirements.)
After the Facebook and Instagram outage this week, Tantek commented that those most likely to be open to the IndieWeb were those who had the strongest emotional reaction. I then saw Meg Conley’s defense of Instagram. She shares how much of a community she’s built on Instagram, and that’s why she keeps going back. Her commitment isn’t necessarily to the platform but the conversations it engenders, and the ability to meet and connect with people. After seeing how locked in she is to connecting with her community there, and how much an outage (or Instagram’s closure) affects her ability to connect, I bet she would be open to an alternative. She already has her own website, but doesn’t seem to have comments enabled. (It appears she offers a paid subscription Discord channel that probably does a good job keeping out trolls — though may also limit others who would have participated.) If the women in her Instagram community had an easy way to interact directly through her website, to know when an update was posted they should chime in on, would they?
She also echoes my thoughts above about women using Instagram to start making money, as a low barrier to entry. Her proposal for an internet that’s less centered around social media monopolies is founded on building equity: supporting caretakers financially (UBI please!), building systems of mutual aid, and fostering racial and environmental justice. It makes sense that these would be key drivers for people to keep using social media aside from community: making money (to pay for childcare), getting support in personal emergencies, and organizing for activism. So it’s an interesting perspective to come at escaping social media from the other side, to see the barriers in the economic systems that drive the need to stay on these toxic platforms.
Our Wikipedia WikiProject focuses on creating content regarding women’s biographies, women’s works, and women’s issues. The objective is to turn “redlinks” into blue ones. That’s why we are called “Women in Red”.
Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_scientists
Via https://www.glamour.com/story/the-women-of-wikipedia-are-writing-themselves-into-history