My great-grandmother was pregnant for over a decade of her life.
She was pregnant at least fifteen times, had over a dozen children. Raised all of them in a big rambling farmhouse in central Pennsylvania.
And I thought about her this afternoon, lying in bed with my spouse after my lazy weekend nap, snuggling him and burying my nose in his hair, taking deep breaths of the scent of his skin. This man who is the center of my universe, my best friend, one of two reasons why I literally decided I had to live and kept fighting through the pain after surgery when I really wanted to just let go and die: I held him closer and I thought of her.
I thought of how family myth tells us that after a decade of being pregnant pretty much constantly, she kicked my great-grandfather out of their house. How she made him go live in his workshop, and he came to the house for meals and to check in.
But he slept in his workshop.
Not because she didn’t love him, but because she did.
She loved him, and if they slept in the same bed together, these two people who had crossed an ocean together, had built a life together after getting out of Poland together, they’d have sex. And because cheap, reliable, universal birth control wasn’t available then, and she was terribly fecund, apparently, she’d become pregnant again, inevitably.
My great-grandmother was TIRED of being pregnant.
So she kicked her love out of the house, and he went. He lived in his workshop, on their farm, and they stopped sleeping together, in every sense of the word. My father tells me he remembers as a child his grandfather sitting outside his workshop, leaning back on his chair, and looking up at the house in which he couldn’t sleep anymore, just… sad.
They missed each other desperately from across the yard.
I listen to @adhocavenger sleep, to the sound of his breathing, a sound that’s as familiar to me as my own heartbeat, and I can’t imagine having to sleep away from him for long. To have to separate myself from my spouse or to have to completely eschew having the kind of sex they obviously enjoyed having. To not have him close enough at night that I can curl up to him and breathe in the scent of his skin.
And that, I think, is the sort of thing that I think maybe I take for granted. That I know I can be secure in the knowledge that I can have sex with my spouse when I want to, and not have a baby.
The personal is political. I do not want our country to continue to slide backward on reproductive freedom. I do not want us to lose our freedom, threatened and small as it may be.
There are a thousand small tragedies that we talk about from the Olde Days. The unwanted baby of the unmarried lass, of course.
But my heart breaks tonight for the story I was told as a child, of the lovingly married couple who had to sleep apart because she was just damn tired of being pregnant.
Because she’d been pregnant for a DECADE of her life.
Thank you for sharing this. I had never considered that aspect of the birth control revolution.
“Personal is pollitical”, agreed, whole heartedly.
So we’re teaching girls to be anxious wrecks and boys to disregard the possibility of consequences for incautious behavior.
This explains a lot of things. Like… why women are anxious wrecks and men are frequently surprised when it turns out their actions do in fact have consequences.
And why men don’t bother asking for help even when they really need it, and thus more frequently die from treatable health conditions (including depression), while women end up getting a broad stereotype of being hypochondriacs (and then having a hard time getting treatment for legitimate health concerns).
I want men to try and imagine going about your day–working, running, hiking, whatever–and not being allowed to wear pants under threats of violence or total social and economic exclusion.
That’s the kind of irrationally violent and controlling behaviour women have been up against.
Also for anyone who thinks it’s easy for women to be gender non conforming because we can wear pants.
The only reason we can is because we fought tooth and nail for the right to! Any rights we take for granted today we’re the result of a prolonged, bitter battle fought by our predecessors for every inch of territory gained. Never forget that.
Title IX (1972) declared that girls could not be required to wear skirts to school.
Women who were United States senators were not allowed to wear trousers on the Senate floor until 1993, after senators Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun wore them in protest, which encouraged female staff members to do likewise.
This was never given to us. Women have had to fight just to be able to wear pants. Women who are still alive remember having to wear skirts to school, even in the dead of winter, when it was so cold that just having a layer of tights between them and the elements was downright dangerous. Women who remember not even being allowed to wear pants under their skirts, for no other reason than they were female.
So don’t talk about women wearing pants being gender nonconforming like it’s easy. It’s only less difficult now because your foremothers refused to comply.
My mother spent her entire school career up until high school having to wear skirts, no matter how horrible the New England winters got, because she was forbidden to do otherwise. There were times when the weather was bad where my grandmother kept her home rather than make her walk to and from the bus in a skirt.
They rebroadcast a few old interviews with Mary Tyler Moore, and in them she addressed the pants issue. There was a strict limit on what kind of pants she could wear (hence, always Capri pants, nothing masculine), and to use her words, how much cupping the pants could show. A censor would look at every outfit when she came out on stage, and if the pants cupped her buttocks too much, defining them rather than hiding them, then she had to get another pair.
(Lewis’s Law states that the comments on any article about feminism will justify the need for feminism.)
So today someone posts a thing about how it’s hard to talk to men about issues that affect primarily women.
And this dude responds saying he doesn’t think this is a real problem that women experience:
Apparently without irony. So of course he gets the response:
Not getting it:
STILL NOT GETTING IT:
Does he get it yet? Nope:
He goes through this ENTIRE EXCHANGE without realizing that he is demonstrating the exact issue being discussed. I’m still not sure he understands what’s going on, despite multiple people trying to explain it to him. It’s just… this is a work of art. It’s mansplaining all the way down.
omg I’m doing research for one of projects for college, and apparently, girls learn better when they’re in an all girls class, but boys learn even worse when they’re in an all boys class, because all the negative things become even stronger of there are no girls to act as “buffer”
get rid of the boys and let girl learn in peace, i couldn’t care less about them
It’s not our job to be a “buffer”
Separate boys from girls then, they don’t have to be acting like mothers at age 12, if boys ruin the education of others boys, um, idk, fix their behavior maybe?
I work at uni. My program is very competitive. Like you need a 92% or more to get in. We get 10x the applications than we can accept. So. This means our program is 95% female. Simply because girls do better in highschool than boys. Its literally that simple. However. This is a HUGE deal in the administration! Because OMG all those poor boys with less than a 92% can’t get into our program and woe is me, those poor poor boys. Every year we meet to talk about ways to “rectify” this “problem”. One year they’re going to stop inviting me to these meetings. Because I always ask questions like “how do we get boys into the program with lower GPAs without denying girls with higher GPAs? And how is giving boys preferential treatment not sexist?” Keep going good ladies, I’m saving your seat!
This type of thing always happens when women are dominating something, protocols are changed to accommodate and benefit men, and if this strategy isn’t successful the field is devalued.
Keep the good work!
The amount of times I heard my grandfather talk about the ‘feminization’ of schools because he wanted to blame the system for boys under performing (or, more accurately: girls out performing the boys) instead of, ya know, boys’ entitled attitudes and overall piss poor behavior when at school.
When women fail at something: there must be something wrong with women When women succeed at something: there must be something wrong with the system
I think I’ve talked about it before on other posts, but I once had an anthropology class that, completely unintentionally, was all women and one man, and he dropped the course after two weeks. The other section of the same anthropology class, taught by the same professor, was mixed with men and women. So, since it was anthropology, she asked if it was cool if she took notes. She said right away that the all female class had a wildly different vibe, that we spoke and acted differently and had different social expectations of her and the rest of the class, and that we let students complete their thoughts before disagreeing, while the mixed class was highly traditional and almost entirely male dominated because every time a woman spoke, a man jumped in halfway through to “correct” her by saying the same thing. Its a very small sample size, but I think about this a lot
When women fail at something: there must be something wrong with women When women succeed at something: there must be something wrong with the system
^ As a woman in a male-dominated field that’s wrestling with the shortage of women… it really is a struggle to convince people that the gender imbalance shows that there’s something wrong with the way the discipline is conducted, rather than that women are just inherently worse at philosophy. But as soon as women start to outnumber men in university education as a whole, everyone starts wringing their hands about how K-12 education is “failing boys.” Fuck you, the entire world has been failing girls and women for millennia.
Thor is the next feminist film you’ve been waiting to see since Wonderwoman (spoilers!)
* Hela is a badass female villain who is so powerful and unbeatable they have to create a super-powered team to combat ONLY her
* Thor admits Hela is the rightful heir to the Asgardian throne (over him)…and the only reason he fights her for it is because but she’s a warmongering asshole
* Valkyrie drinks like a sailor, is drunk half the time (and not in a cute, giggly, girly way – the chick is hammered) and gives zero fucks about your sob story – plus, instead of getting the usual tragic victim backstory reserved for women, she has the guilt-ridden backstory and character arc usually reserved for male anti-hero characters
* The movie is female-gazey af – Valkyrie is fully covered in utilitarian armor the whole film, but Hulk has a naked ass shot and Thor walks around like a Chippendale dancer half the time…and the camera is super into it
* The most elite warriors in Asgard were a group of women on flying horses
* Thor admitted he wanted to join the Valkyries as a boy – when he learned they were all women it didn’t make him want to join less, he was just bummed out bc he knew they wouldn’t take him
* Nobody ever calls Hela a ‘bitch’, and nobody underestimates her scary ass just bc she’s a woman – she might be the most frightening villain Marvel has had outside of Thanos
* Though there are definitely stirrings of romantic interest between Valkyrie and Thor that may be explored in future films, she’s not the *love interest* character – Thor wants her around bc she can fight
THOR WANTED TO BE A VALKYRIE WHEN HE WAS A LITTLE BOY!!!!!
evidence that ancient paleolithic venus statues were made by women who were examining their own bodies and sculpting them from their own point of view, not, as previously assumed, exaggerated features from an outside perspective
SHOUTOUT TO THE MISS PERU 2018 CONTESTANTS FOR GIVING STATS ABOUT WOMEN’S ISSUES INSTEAD OF THEIR BODY MEASUREMENTS
AHHH PERÚ DID THAT!!!
Not just the contestants. The women who organised the event decided to base the whole
event around speaking out against violence against women. They even had the
host to take time during the swim suit round to make a statement about how a woman
showing some skin does not make her any less worthy of respect than a woman in
a business suit.
Loki is the Philosopher King 