My new meds make my skin throw a fit. It’s not terribly bad, just a few things here and there, but it’s bumming me out because I’ve never really had too many run-ins with acne.
My four-year-old sister, however, is under the impression that it’s just “3D freckles”, and that they look very, very pretty. She wants all of my freckles to “pop out”, especially the ones across my nose; they’re her favourite.
And it puts me in this weird position where I can’t say, “No, this is acne, and it’s bad,” because I don’t want to teach her that it’s a bad to have unclear skin, you know?
Because the more I think about interactions I have with children, the more I realise that children will consistently compliment “flaws” until they’ve been taught not to.
Like, a kid at the library, whose sister has vitiligo, saw my scars once and suggested that his sister and I should be cats for Halloween, since I have “tabby skin” and she has “calico skin”. “I can be a black cat,” he immediately added. “It’s not AS cool, but they’re the spookiest.”
When I started losing weight, my little brother immediately demanded that I gain it back, because I wasn’t as comfortable to cuddle with anymore.
And my other little sister always wants to wear her paint-stained clothes to school so that “everyone can tell [she’s] an artist”.
I don’t know. I guess talking to little kids just reminds me that all of this superficial shit we worry about really is 100% made up.
Another woman utterly failed by our society’s devaluation of women’s reproductive health.
We can’t wait around for male doctors to decide what we need to know.
This is why we need to take control and educate ourselves about our own bodies.
and here’s some comments i saw under the post. why is this a pattern?? why is this a recurring theme?? why is this information not common knowledge? what the fuck are doctors doing??
This is news to me so let’s share it so people will know!
Gross tmi: but i passed a pretty big clot after having my daughter. It was about the size of a baseball. It actually hurt worse because while 15 hours of labor opened my cervix, i passed the clot in 30 minutes. I knew it was a possibility because of my midwife and reading, but everyone Ive told after this (mostly other pregnant women) were shocked that this could happen.
In our culture, it’s much more common to do deep research about what family cars we want to buy than we do about childbirth when we ’re pregnant.
Tmi: I passed a huge clot after birth in the bathroom of my hospital room and called the nurse sobbing because I didn’t know it was normal. She treated me like an idiot, but NO ONE told me it was a possibility. And the pain associated with healing for the first couple of weeks after birth was worse than the labor imo. Again, I had no idea. They didn’t tell me a thing besides “sitz bath regularly and change your pads.” Before discharging me from the hospital.
I was most definitely told about this in school. Fucking hell, 4-6 weeks of bleeding? My periods were/are bad enough, why the hell don’t we get told this?
I didn’t know it could last so long, wtf? Is the bleeding inevitable after birth?
Bleeding is inevitable after birth – your uterine wall is shedding a fuck ton of lining. It can last from three to six weeks (possible longer) and it tapers off.
More TMI – I passed a MASSIVE clot after my fourth birth. At this point I already knew this could happen – it’s normal. What I DIDN’T know, was that I had caused it.
My post birth contractions were so bad after the birth that it felt like full transition labor. And they don’t give you anything for the pain. So I used a hot water bottle, without the nurses knowing, and it caused me to bleed even more. I lost so much blood that by the first time they sat me up to go to the bathroom, I fainted. It took three more tries until I could sit up.
Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, the next morning I passed a clot the SIZE OF ANOTHER PLACENTA I KID YOU NOT, and I know what is and is not normal. So I called for the nurse and through the door told her I had passed a huge clot, and her response was – “It’s not big. I know what big is.” She hadn’t even looked. So I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, no. It’s big, I’m telling you.”
So, sounding extremely put upon, she asked me to open the door. I did, and after a long pause she goes, “Okay, yeah, that’s a little big.”
YOU DON’T SAY.
The point I’m trying to get across is that this shit is so common – women not knowing this stuff is so expected, and it keeps getting reinforced. People don’t expect you to know anything, don’t teach you anything, and then make you feel like you’re totally ignorant and a burden for your lack of knowledge when THEY WON’T SHARE.
Fucking learn EVERYTHING you can when it comes to childbirth, girls. It is the single most empowering thing you can do for yourself. And if you missed something, that’s okay. But the more knowledge you arm yourself with, the more in control of your situation you’ll be.
A few post partum tips:
DON’T use a hot water bottle – lol.
ONLY pads – NO tampons. Tampons can cause severe infection, not to mention, you probably don’t want to be shoving anything up there any time soon.
If you’ve had stitches, sitz baths DO help relieve the pain. Another great pain reliever? Dampen some pads and freeze them. Let one thaw slightly and use it on top of another pad. This will help with the pain as well as reduce swelling. Change the pad out as soon as it’s thawed completely. This REALLY helps on the first couple days after giving birth.
If you pass a clot, don’t sweat it. Even the one I passed, which was fucking massive, just required that we keep an eye out to make sure it didn’t happen again. If it does, talk to your doctor.
Take a pain killer half an hour before nursing. Because YES – your uterus is contracting after you give birth, to get back to its original size, and nursing causes much stronger contractions. Taking nursing-safe painkillers won’t prevent the pain, but it will reduce it.
Buy disposable underwear for the first few days after birth. They will get VERY dirty. Or use your ratty old pairs that you’re ready to get rid of. Double up on pads – line them all the way up your ass-crack. I am so serious. And wear dark pants.
Pee in the shower. You do NOT want to wipe down there right after birth because ow. Peeing in the shower lets you just rinse afterwards. Especially if you’ve had stitches, peeing in the shower, with the shower-head rinsing AS you go, keeps stinging to a minimum. And fuck everyone else – keep on peeing in the shower until you feel ready to move back to toilet paper. Middle of the night and need to pee? Get your pants off – get in the shower and just go.
This is just a few things, but PLEASE feel free to send me an ask if you have any questions about ANYTHING childbirth/pregnancy/nursing related. I have four incredible kids. I’ve done it all – c-section, vacuume birth, episiotimy, stitches, with an epidural, without an epidural. I’m here.
….I know I keep reblogging this but people keep adding super important information.
I feel like no one tells women this stuff because if a woman was even a little on the fence about having a baby before this would kinda make them run for the damn hills.
…..you are correct, typing.
300% EXTRA SURE I’M NOT HAVING BABIES.
peri bottles, witch hazel or anti-pain anticeptic spray are your friends. Also passing large clots after birth is a WARNING SIGN. Bigger than a half dollar is a sign that you have not passed your entire placenta (this is most common in hospital vaginal births where the mother is not allowed to naturally birth the placenta and instead has it ripped out by the doctor) if there is any placenta left in your uterus you can get extremely ill. This happened to both myself and my mother in law
WOW I didn’t know any of this and I’m terrified of what more I’m unaware of about my own body 😦 Honestly when will we fucking abolish this taboo about the female body…
I had pretty great sex ed in school (lots of contraceptive information, and totally acknowledged that teenagers might have sex) and all of this is news to me.
And, as a 28-year-old person with a uterus, I’m extremely appalled I’m just learning this.
Long, but very important information, even for those who don’t plan to have children, because you will almost certainly know someone who will, and you might be able to to help them. Or at least increase your level of empathy for them.
…HOLY HELL. REBLOG TO SAVE A LIFE, SERIOUSLY.
A lot of tmi but I had literally no fucking idea this happens
At all
And my mom was a nurse with two kids
What the FUCK?!
I’m not planning to have children because there are so many without homes- but if you want to have your own baby, PLEASE read this information.
I’m 48 years old, well on my way into menopause…and I have NEVER HEARD ANY OF THIS BEFORE.
I hate this puritanical fucking society we’re in.
But of course your parents tell you all about this so schools don’t need to.
Today I overheard the most ridiculous conversation in the train lol. Basically guys in college have created a point system for sex. Not a joke. The amount of “panda points” measures how long you have not had sex: 1 week equals 1 point. This guy was complaining about how he had 60 points already because apparantly he actually counts that? And then you can earn “tiger points” for having had sex in weird places, e.g. at church or whatever. And then this one guy stated he would consider having sex with his ex girlfriend just to erase his panda points like… Do you see this as a game? Is sex just a fun game to men that is completely devoid of human connection and emotion????
You were probably asking hypothetically but the answer is yes
Actually I was being serious. This really made me feel uncomfortable, just overhearing these dudes casually talking about sex like it’s similar to sports or hunting. Sex isn’t an activity you do to gain points or credit. It can’t be measured with numbers. Good sex is sex that makes you feel good (and your partner too!), not sex that grants you a number of points in a system you made up. I don’t know, thinking about how men view sex is really depressing in some way, as a straight woman and as a feminist. Some dude is arguing in the notes too about how this point system is not creepy. Not living for it. If sex is not about feelings of love (aside from the physical aspect), then what is it about? Earning imaginary points?
social capital. it’s how they “bond” with other men — “i’ve deflected my aggression onto women, and now the other men around me are safer”
Yes and no. Men will do this to women, treat it like a game, nail and bail, etc. because they expect by default that women will provide emotional labour and a possible romantic connection if the man so wants. The second women treat sex the way men do, just fucking watch them turn into “hopeless romantics” who are looking for “more than just sex”. They do want an emotional connection, but they want it to be the woman who provides it, and they want options, which means most of these kind, empathetic women they sleep with they will happily drop as soon as they have no more use for them. But they don’t want women to be like that with men.
I grew up in the 1960s on the West Side of Chicago. My mother died when I was six months old. She was only 16 and I never learned what it was that she died from – my grandmother, who drank more than most, couldn’t tell me later on.
It was my grandmother that took care of me. And she wasn’t a bad person – in fact she had a side to her that was so wonderful. She read to me, baked me stuff and cooked the best sweet potatoes. She just had this drinking problem. She would bring drinking partners home from the bar and after she got intoxicated and passed out these men would do things to me. It started when I was four or five years old and it became a regular occurrence. I’m certain my grandmother didn’t know anything about it.
She worked as a domestic in the suburbs. It took her two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. So I was a latch-key kid – I wore a key around my neck and I would take myself to kindergarten and let myself back in at the end of the day. And the molesters knew about that, and they took advantage of it.
I would watch women with big glamorous hair and sparkly dresses standing on the street outside our house. I had no idea what they were up to; I just thought they were shiny. As a little girl, all I ever wanted was to be shiny.
One day I asked my grandmother what the women were doing and she said, “Those women take their panties off and men give them money.” And I remember saying to myself, “I’ll probably do that” because men had already been taking my panties off.
To look back now, I dealt with it all amazingly well. Alone in that house, I had imaginary friends to keep me company that I would sing and dance around with – an imaginary Elvis Presley, an imaginary Diana Ross and the Supremes. I think that helped me deal with things.
Even though I was a smart kid, I disconnected from school. Going into the 1970s, I became the kind of girl who didn’t know how to say “no” – if the little boys in the community told me that they liked me or treated me nice, they could basically have their way with me. By the time I was 14, I’d had two children with boys in the community, two baby girls. My grandmother started to say that I needed to bring in some money to pay for these kids, because there was no food in the house, we had nothing.
So, one evening – it was actually Good Friday – I went along to the corner of Division Street and Clark Street and stood in front of the Mark Twain hotel. I was wearing a two-piece dress costing $3.99, cheap plastic shoes, and some orange lipstick which I thought might make me look older.
I was 14 years old and I cried through everything. But I did it. I didn’t like it, but the five men who dated me that night showed me what to do. They knew I was young and it was almost as if they were excited by it.
I made $400 but I didn’t get a cab home that night. I went home by train and I gave most of that money to my grandmother, who didn’t ask me where it came from.
The following weekend I returned to Division and Clark, and it seemed like my grandmother was happy when I brought the money home.
But the third time I went down there, a couple of guys pistol-whipped me and put me in the trunk of their car. They had approached me before because I was, as they called it, “unrepresented” on the street. All I knew was the light in the trunk of the car and then the faces of these two guys with their pistol. First they took me to a cornfield out in the middle of nowhere and raped me. Then they took me to a hotel room and locked me in the closet. That’s the kind of thing pimps will do to break a girl’s spirits. They kept me in there for a long time. I was begging them to let me out because I was hungry, but they would only allow me out of the closet if I agreed to work for them.
They pimped me for a while, six months or so. I wasn’t able to go home. I tried to get away but they caught me, and when they caught me they hurt me so bad. Later on, I was trafficked by other men. The physical abuse was horrible, but the real abuse was the mental abuse – the things they would say that would just stick and which you could never get from under.
Pimps are very good at torture, they’re very good at manipulation. Some of them will do things like wake you in the middle of the night with a gun to your head. Others will pretend that they value you, and you feel like, “I’m Cinderella, and here comes my Prince Charming”. They seem so sweet and so charming and they tell you: “You just have to do this one thing for me and then you’ll get to the good part.” And you think, “My life has already been so hard, what’s a little bit more?” But you never ever do get to the good part.
When people describe prostitution as being something that is glamorous, elegant, like in the story of Pretty Woman, well that doesn’t come close to it. A prostitute might sleep with five strangers a day. Across a year, that’s more than 1,800 men she’s having sexual intercourse or oral sex with. These are not relationships, no one’s bringing me any flowers here, trust me on that. They’re using my body like a toilet.
And the johns – the clients – are violent. I’ve been shot five times, stabbed 13 times. I don’t know why those men attacked me, all I know is that society made it comfortable for them to do so. They brought their anger or whatever it was and they decided to wreak havoc on a prostitute, knowing I couldn’t go to the police and if I did I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I actually count myself very lucky. I knew some beautiful girls who were murdered out there on the streets.
I prostituted for 14 or 15 years before I did any drugs. But after a while, after you’ve turned as many tricks as you can, after you’ve been strangled, after someone’s put a knife to your throat or someone’s put a pillow over your head, you need something to put a bit of courage in your system.
I was a prostitute for 25 years, and in all that time I never once saw a way out. But on 1 April 1997, when I was nearly 40 years old, a customer threw me out of his car. My dress got caught in the door and he dragged me six blocks along the ground, tearing all the skin off my face and the side of my body.
I went to the County Hospital in Chicago and they immediately took me to the emergency room. Because of the condition I was in, they called in a police officer, who looked me over and said: “Oh I know her. She’s just a hooker. She probably beat some guy and took his money and got what she deserved.” And I could hear the nurse laughing along with him. They pushed me out into the waiting room as if I wasn’t worth anything, as if I didn’t deserve the services of the emergency room after all.
And it was at that moment, while I was waiting for the next shift to start and for someone to attend to my injuries, that I began to think about everything that had happened in my life. Up until that point I had always had some idea of what to do, where to go, how to pick myself up again. Suddenly it was like I had run out of bright ideas.
A doctor came and took care of me and she asked me to go and see social services in the hospital. What I knew about social services was they were anything but social. But they gave me a bus pass to go to a place called Genesis House, which was run by an awesome Englishwoman named Edwina Gateley, who became a great hero and mentor for me. She helped me turn my life around. It was a safe house, and I had everything that I needed there. I didn’t have to worry about paying for clothes, food, getting a job. They told me to take my time and stay as long as I needed – and I stayed almost two years. My face healed, my soul healed. I got Brenda back.
Usually, when a woman gets out of prostitution, she doesn’t want to talk about it. What man will accept her as a wife? What person will hire her in their employment? And to begin with, after I left Genesis House, that was me too. I just wanted to get a job, pay my taxes and be like everybody else. But I started to do some volunteering with sex workers and to help a university researcher with her fieldwork. After a while I realised that nobody was helping these young ladies. Nobody was going back and saying, “That’s who I was, that’s where I was. This is who I am now. You can change too, you can heal too.” So in 2008, together with Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, we founded the Dreamcatcher Foundation.
A dreamcatcher is a Native American object that you hang near a child’s cot. It is supposed to chase away children’s nightmares. That’s what we want to do – we want to chase away those bad dreams, those bad things that happen to young girls and women. The recent documentary film Dreamcatcher, directed by Kim Longinotto, showed the work that we do. We meet up with women who are still working on the street and we tell them, “There is a way out, we’re ready to help you when you’re ready to be helped.” We try to get through that brainwashing that says, “You’re born to do this, there’s nothing else for you.“
I also run after-school clubs with young girls who are exactly like I was in the 1970s. I can tell as soon as I meet a girl if she is in danger, but there is no fixed pattern. You might have one girl who’s quiet and introverted and doesn’t make eye contact. Then there might be another who’s loud and obnoxious and always getting in trouble. They’re both suffering abuse at home but they’re dealing with it in different ways – the only thing they have in common is that they are not going to talk about it. But in time they understand that I have been through what they’re going through, and then they talk to me about it.
People say different things about prostitution. Some people think that it would actually help sex workers more if it were decriminalized. I think it’s true to say that every woman has her own story. It may be OK for this girl, who is paying her way through law school, but not for this girl, who was molested as a child, who never knew she had another choice, who was just trying to get money to eat.
But let me say this too. However the situation starts off for a girl, that’s not how the situation will end up. It might look OK now, the girl in law school might say she only has high-end clients that come to her through an agency, that she doesn’t work on the streets but arranges to meet people in hotel rooms, but the first time that someone hurts her, that’s when she really sees her situation for what it is. You always get that crazy guy slipping through and he has three or four guys behind him, and they force their way into your room and gang rape you, and take your phone and all your money. And suddenly you have no means to make a living and you’re beaten up too. That is the reality of prostitution.
Three years ago, I became the first woman in the state of Illinois to have her
convictions for prostitution wiped from her record. It was after a new law was
brought in, following lobbying from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual
Exploitation, a group that seeks to shift the criminal burden away from the victims
of sexual trafficking. Women who have been tortured, manipulated and
brainwashed should be treated as survivors, not criminals.
So I am here to tell you – there is life after so much damage, there is life after so
much trauma. There is life after people have told you that you are nothing, that you
are worthless and that you will never amount to anything. There is life – and I’m not
just talking about a little bit of life. There is a lot of life.
i have seen this post many many times on my dash, and yet it only has 2200 notes…. it makes me think that the only friends of prostitution survivors are radical feminists. no one else will listen.
Wow, she’s incredible. What a woman. And I didn’t know that those convictions could be expunged. That’s a really good law.
“It’s unacceptable that so many young girls are dying simply because they don’t have access to contraceptives like condoms or the pill, or because of myths and cultural barriers. Girls need to be given greater access to contraceptives, and contraceptives should be made free. We also need to ensure that myths about family planning are dispelled so that every girl feels empowered to decide what happens to her own body.”
Men raping girls and getting them pregnant is the number one killer of teen girls. These girls didn’t “get pregnant”, some dude had sex with them without protection. And we know that the father’s of teenage moms are 60% adult men in the states. The numbers are definitely worse elsewhere. Name the problem.
They need access to abortion, too. Contraception and abortion won’t protect girls from rape but it’ll at least give them a chance of not dying in childbirth.
“American kids are immersed in a ruthless culture of violence through entertainment and television, but unless they’ve grown up terrorized by gangs or poverty, they have no idea what war feels like, how it effects every aspect of your life and psyche. They have no idea what kind of harm this ‘cowboy’ culture perpetuates against human beings around the world, let alone in their own towns and cities. War is the natural extension of American popular culture and values. Look at the camouflage clothing parents are drowning their children in. This military clothing is at once a symbol of sex appeal and naive, rebellion without context. And it’s shamelessly flaunted while people are being slaughtered in the Middle East as a result of American aggression. We are objects of indoctrination and recruitment the moment we’re born.”
i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again. transphobes are terrified of butch trans women because the idea that a trans women would not wear makeup all the time, would not wear dresses all the time, and wouldn’t even have a desire to do that DESTROYS their worldview in which trans women are just men who like to dress up as women. they’re so attached to these crazy stereotypes of what they think trans women are that this really scares them. they can’t comprehend trans gender nonconformity because it shakes their base assumptions.
“shakes their base assumptions”, no lmfao, it shows me that men will appropriate literally anything and that their entitlement stems so far that they can conceptualize themselves as women, lesbians, and butches in the first place, of which they are neither. I am butch because I am female and because I am homosexual. A male being exclusively attracted to women and conforming to masculine gender roles will be percieved as a heterosexual man (which he is).
And terrified? Lmfao. Personally I would love to see one of these men walk into a dyke bar and tell me and the other butches he considers himself one of us. He would be laughed at, and best case scenario would get his ass whipped by a squad of old-school dykes.
Men having a desire to enjoy their male, heterosexual privilege while also trying to insert themselves into lesbian spaces is completely unsurprising or shocking to me. Regardless of what they wear or how they identify, males will never be female or lesbians. Absolute nonsense.
#not all transphobes
I guess it can’t shake assumptions that begin and end with “trans women are males” and don’t care about the hows and whys.
Also, why does “not wearing make-up and not wearing dresses” equate to “presenting as a man/not even trying to pass”?
It sounds to me that They’re the ones with the “womanhood=make-up and dresses” issue.
Wow like wow. Yall are so dense. I feel real sorry for yall. Transwomen are male. Its a fact. You can be mad about it all you want but you dont get to choose your sex. No one actually cares what you do or what you call yourself. But like just because i like to conceptualize myself as a dragon. That doesnt mean that i am one.
I am reminded of a prof I once had who invited us to stand facing a wall, close our eyes, envision ourselves in a soccer stadium, and go for the winning kick. When the class declined to bruise our toes, he went on to say that this is the failing of Pomo theories: the wall is still there.
Babby is still formed the same way as ever. And at the end of the word games, it’s still the dick people who expect automatic compliance and still the uterus people expected to make room and comply.
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