Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Having it both ways with gender
One moment I'm being lectured about the unique talents women bring to the table, that companies with more women on the board tend to perform better and how the government ought to impose quotas on the number of female MPs.I guess, women are different than men in every area of life, except those which biology would suggest. That seems like a reasonable hypothesis.
The next moment I'm being told that in the family, the number of women involves is absolutely insignificant. Women being nothing to the table. Two men can themselves up as Mr and Mr Dad and only a nasty bigot would dare suggest that something is missing from the equation.
Labels: feminism, humor, trends
Thursday, April 03, 2014
Tampons and the Village Voice
I'm rather unpopular when I talk about ladies. But I'm rather unpopular anyway. So I'm going ahead. 4d's blog has this post which in short notes that while people are happy to view women as sex objects, they get grossed out if you mention such as the menstrual cycle. This drives me up a wall, and while it's not really my battle to fight, I think it's a sick culture that makes women (and men) deeply uncomfortable with the natural state of their bodies.
Friday, February 21, 2014
Sweetening the Pill
Book Review: Sweeteningthe Pill by Holly Grigg-Spall
Or How We Got Hooked
on Hormonal Birth Control
The
medicalization of women’s bodies has a dark and bloody history. Throughout
history, but perhaps most prominently from the Victorian era onward, women have
been subjected to all sorts of poisons and ills to “treat” those processes which indicate good health. Why is it that the very things that make us women, (menstruation,
gestation, ovulation, lactation, birthing, and menopause) have so often been
treated by the medical field as problems to be dealt with? Perhaps because the
medical field has been dominated by men for the past several thousand years, with
the exception of midwifery and “witchcraft,” which in some cultures may have
simply been female herbalists who used spirituality and natural treatments for
common ailments. But most of what we think of in the past two thousand years as
“medicine” has been a male-dominated field. Are hormonal birth control pills a
conspiracy of the patriarchy to oppress women? To reduce and regulate those frightening menstruations, to render women infertile, to blunt the effects of testosterone and
other “raging” hormones, and make women more available sexually? Maybe. Is it a conspiracy of capitalism to make women
buy a drug that they need to take every day, even when they are perfectly
healthy? Just as women need to buy tampons and pads, shavers and creams, moisturizers,
make-up, deodorants, and a hundred other products, just to function daily as a
woman? Maybe that is also true.
These
aren’t my ideas; I came across them in reading Holly Grigg-Spall’s wonderful
work, Sweetening the Pill. Grigg-Spall
is a feminist and writes from a non-religious perspective on the dangers of
hormonal birth control and lauds fertility awareness methods and other non-hormonal
forms of birth control. I found reading this book refreshing and empowering. It
has been sometime since I read truly feminist literature, and I felt as though
reading this helped put me in touch with the broader struggle women face today.
Grigg-Spall
posits that ditching the pill can be an act of rebellion against the
patriarchy, and encourages women to reclaim their bodies and their biology. She
discusses feminist groups in California who meet in circles and use speculums
to observe the changes to their cervixes and mucus throughout their cycles, and
also learn first-hand the many variations of the female body. It is a radical
act of taking gynecological knowledge into their own hands. Most women have never
seen their cervix, or even looked properly at their own genitalia, and this
allows women to familiarize themselves with their own bodies. I loved this
example, although just one of many instances in which Grigg-Spall describes
women reclaiming their biology through self-knowledge and awareness. I love it
because it is a metaphor for NFP or fertility awareness methods of birth
control. These methods are first and foremost about KNOWLEDGE of a woman’s own
body. So many women don’t understand why at certain times of the month they
find a lot of fluid and mucus, and may even think this is abnormal, such as an
infection, and don’t realize it is a sign of healthy fertility! So many PMS symptoms,
risks of miscarriage, hormonal imbalances, PCOS, and other health problems can
be detected from charting a woman’s cycle. Grigg-Spall argues these health problems can be
treated best, not with the magical cure-all pill, but with synthetic hormones
that very closely mimic the ones in our own bodies, which is not the same thing
as what is in most hormonal birth control products.
Right
as I was finishing this book, I attended a talk by Dr. Nolte of the Gianna Center in New York
City. Her talk was on infertility, the bioethical problems of IVF, and the
alternative of NaPro Technology. It
is funny how Dr. Nolte, a conservative Catholic, and Ms. Grigg-Spall, a secular
feminist, agreed on so many things. For one, they both agreed on the use of
synthetic hormones that more closely match real estrogen and progesterone to
treat hormonal problems in women. Too often the pill is used to “treat” these
conditions, when in fact it does nothing to treat the underlying cause of the
hormonal imbalance. Dr. Nolte says she does a full hormonal profile, which
means drawing blood every few days from the woman for a cycle, to see exactly
which hormones are out of balance and in which part of the cycle. Then she will
use the closest thing to the actual hormone that is available, and only administer it during the part of
the cycle it is needed. For example, if a woman is not making enough
progesterone, she will take progesterone supplements, but only AFTER ovulation,
which is when that hormone naturally spikes. To take it over her entire cycle
would actually shut down the cycle and suppress ovulation (which is what some birth
control pills do.) Dr. Nolte has found that women who have undergone this
particular therapy who previously had a very high incidence of miscarriage,
have been able to successfully maintain pregnancy to term, and have even had
their cycles begin self-regulating, increasing natural progesterone and
dispensing with the need to medicate.
Grigg-Spall and Nolte both would agree
that hormonal contraceptive is grossly overprescribed and that most women are
lacking a basic understanding of their own biology. For example most women don’t
know that they are in fact only fertile for 12 to 24 hours a month, with sperm
able to survive for a few hours to 5 days. The length of sperm survival
actually depends on the woman and HER mucus. If she has fertile cervical mucus
that nourish the sperm and allow them to enter the cervix, they can live for
days. But if there is no cervical mucus, the sperm die in a matter of hours in
the acidic vagina. Most people don’t know this! Why isn’t this basic biology
knowledge taught in high school? (Well, I am teaching it in my classroom, but I
can’t vouch for other biology teachers.)
Or
course Dr. Nolte and Ms. Grigg-Spall would have their differences. Grigg-Spall
is still pro-abortion and pro-condom, and favors a form of fertility awareness
that is not kosher in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Ms. Grigg-Spall did not
say much if anything regarding IVF in her book, but one of the downsides to hormonal
contraceptives she did highlight, was the sometimes months or even years it can
take for a woman’s natural cycle to return fully after quitting hormonal contraceptives. Dr. Nolte pointed out that
many women are on hormonal contraceptives for most of their fertile years, and
then when they want to conceive, have difficulty doing so. Part of the problem
though, is lack of patience. A couple may feel their biological clock ticking,
and rather than waiting and taking the time to chart cycles and detect the underlying problem, will go to an infertility specialist, and if they have
the money, they are inevitably offered IVF. One of the main bioethical problems
of IVF, from a Catholic perspective of course, is the creation of extra embryos,
and the subsequent freezing of them. There are millions of embryos in frozen
storage from IVF, and this in the eyes of the Church, is the same as creating
human beings, with souls, and freezing them indefinitely. Big problem.
Moreover, there is low success rate with IVF (around 30%) and this number doesn’t
even account for the women who drop out due to complications before
the IVF process is complete. It is very expensive, and has a high risk of multiple
births. Often if a woman becomes pregnant with more than twins in IVF, she will
be counseled by her doctors to “reduce” the pregnancy, by selecting one of the
fetuses to be terminated for the sake of the other two. So now, after the
heart-break of years of infertility and desperation for pregnancy, the woman is
put through the painful decision of deciding which of her children to
terminate. Dr. Nolte has had a very high success rate with her use of NaPro
Technology, and boasts much higher success rates than IVF, although granted her
process takes longer. She also has very rarely had twins, although it has
happened. In the spirit of honesty, I should note that Dr. Nolte is my OB/GYN,
although I have only just been recently seeing her. So far I have been
extremely happy with her and the Gianna Center clinic. The level of care and
concern was phenomenal. She didn’t just treat my reproductive system, but takes
into account the whole individual. It was the first time I had an OB/GYN ask me
about my diet, exercise, vitamins, etc. It was the first time I had an OB/GYN
screen me for PMS and other hormonal problems. These are the things you would
expect from your gynecologist, but usually all they are checking for is STDs and cancer and then they ask
you what method of birth control you are using.
But I digress. Even though Dr.
Nolte and Ms. Grigg-Spall may not see eye to eye on the sanctity of the embryo,
I think they have a surprising amount of common ground and if women came
together over fertility awareness, instead of arguing over our differences,
much good could be accomplished. For example, I think both women would agree
that fertility awareness could be taught in a high school biology curriculum.
They might disagree on some of the details, but the basics of biology, the
hormonal, mucus, temperature, and cervical shifts over a woman’s cycle, should
and can be taught to young women (and men.) They both agree that hormonal
contraceptives are over-prescribed and often have undesirable side effects such
as depression and loss of libido.
My only major critique of Sweetening the Pill is a lack of
citation for her scientific facts. Most of her science, to the best of my
understanding and from what I have read in other sources, seems accurate. But
it would strengthen her arguments if she bothered to properly footnote her
statistics and facts with references to peer reviewed science journal articles,
or at least something. She does reference many other books, most by fellow
feminist authors, and she gives those books proper credit. She also has a list
of recommended reading and resources in the back. Still, there is nothing like
a good-old footnote to support your point if someone calls into question the
integrity of this or that fact. Furthermore, I think she could have discussed
IVF and infertility treatment and the modern process of birthing as yet other
ways women’s bodies have been medicalized. But in her defense, the thrust of
this book is the use of hormonal contraceptives and the effect on the bodies of
women, and some topics she touches upon, such as menstruation, she does not
have time to delve into in this slim book.
As for my own personal experiences,
like Ms. Grigg-Spall and millions of women, I went on hormonal contraceptives at
a young age. I was 17. Unlike Ms. Grigg-Spall who was put on the pill by her
mother, almost as a rite of passage into womanhood, I chose the pill for
myself, against my parents’ wishes. I was on it for nearly four years. During
that time I experienced weight-gain and depression. I don’t personally
attribute my depression to the pill, as I was going through many life-crises at
that time, but Grigg-Spall recalls many anecdotal cases, particularly with
Yasmin/Yaz, of women suffering from depression and lack of energy while on
hormonal contraceptives. She claims that doctors and the medical industry don’t
take these complaints seriously, but dismiss them, putting the blame on the
women, not on the drug. There must be something else wrong with them, it can’t
be the drug they are on, even though so many report mood changes when going on
the pill, and then that fog lifts once they go off. But no, it couldn’t be
the pill! Grigg-Spall seems to indicate that this dismissal of women’s reports
of emotional side-effects, is yet another way the medical industry is silencing
women and delegitimizing their experiences. It was Grigg-Spall’s own struggles with
depression on Yasmin/Yaz and her subsequent recovery after eliminating hormonal
birth control that prompted her to write this book. How many of my friends have suffered
similarly? I don’t know. Although almost all my female friends have been on
hormonal contraceptives at some point in their life, it is something we sadly
don’t talk about. I do know that I had one friend become hospitalized from a
blood clot that was partly a complication from her birth control pill. I also
had a friend who always had very regular periods her entire life, experience
loss of her menstrual cycle after using the morning-after pill. Her entire
cycle shut-down and she went months without a period. Her doctor finaly had to
put her on hormonal contraceptives just to restore her cycle. It was never the
same after she used the morning-after pill.
Maybe what we need is some sort of Wikipedia
space for women to report out about these side effects and document them
publicly. There are many online forums where women gripe about this or that
hormonal contraceptive and the side-effects they are experiencing. We need to
make our voices form a collective and get these numbers to the FDA. Too many women bear
their suffering in silence and alone, thinking it is just them, it must be a
problem with their body, not the drug.
As an exciting development, just as
I was writing this, several friends shared with me
that Ricki Lake is teaming up with Abby Epstein to make a film documentary
based on Sweetening the Pill. Awesome! I think a documentary by
Ricki Lake will reach a wider audience than Grigg-Spall’s book alone. Women
need to not be afraid to take on Big Pharma, and challenge what the ads claim
is “natural, safe, and effective.” That fine print, those warning labels, need
to be given a face and voice. Even if the percentage of women experiencing
these side-effects is small (which it probably isn’t) with over 80% of women
taking birth control pill at some point in their lifetime, we need to take
these side-effects very seriously, and ask ourselves, is it worth it? Is this
truly the best and healthiest way for women to prevent pregnancy? I hope Ms.
Lake’s documentary will include alternatives, such as fertility awareness methods.
Labels: book, contraception, feminism, NFP, prolife
Friday, January 03, 2014
Why I lift weights
70s Big gets into what it's all about.
Whether you realize it or not, your training and lifting means something. Are you experiencing an eternal struggle of personal growth and introspection? How will you respond in a moment in which all of the odds favor failure? Can you summon the courage and intensity to finish that pull or to stick the jerk? Or is your training a reminder that success comes with not only a price, but a slow, grinding process that leaves your sweat and blood behind you as you step towards your goal. Or is the end product what matters; that you stand at the top of the mountain and revile in the days, the hours, the minutes that it took for you to squat 405, or 500, or 600 and so on. Or is it a tool that improves your self confidence, letting you be more bold at work or with the opposite sex? Or is it something that effects your gender role and exhibits masculinity or a powerful woman?Also includes some discussion of Camille Paglia, which is always excellent.
Labels: a full life, feminism, strength training
Saturday, September 28, 2013
New advancements in strip club lingo
I just coined (ha ha) the phrase "Make it hail" to refer to "making in rain", as in a strip club, but using dollar coins. Though this is not appropriate for this blog, I wanted to record it somewhere on the internet for posterity and to contribute to the development of the English language.
EDIT: Counting drafts, this is my 5000th post. Also, someone else came up with the phrase but referring to small change. Alas.
EDIT: Counting drafts, this is my 5000th post. Also, someone else came up with the phrase but referring to small change. Alas.
Labels: feminism, humor, trends, words
Tuesday, July 09, 2013
Females define femininity, not the other way around
The fullness of femininity can only be revealed and understood by the total aggregate of every individual woman's experience. All are valid and all are feminine. The femininity springs from the nature of the female person. If the ideals of femininity within a culture do not conform to the personality of a particular woman, this invalidates the ideal, not the woman. Her femininity is primary, the cultural image is only its dim and imperfect reflection.
Friday, March 08, 2013
Catholic Feminism!
So happy International Women's Day! I was not aware of this day existing until ... today! But I am happy it exists. Apparently it has socialist roots, but that doesn't bother me.
So I have two suggestions for how to observe:
1) Read up on women's issues today, in the Church, in society, in politics, in terms of healthcare, education, religion, etc. There are so many places where women still need to be treated with dignity and respect. We may think those places are far-away, but we really don't have to look to far to see how women's issues are still a hot topic right here in our own backyard.
This article by Fiorella Nash published by Faith magazine in 2009, is just as relevant today about the unique and challenging position of Catholic women. It's not what you may think- a lot of oppression of women can come from within the feminist movement itself, silencing dissonant voices that do not agree with the central tenant of feminism these days: total self-autonomy. This article is an excellent read, I highly recommend it!
Why, right here in New York State, a bill has been proposed that will make New York have the least restrictive abortion laws in the country. As a feminist myself, I suppose I am to laud this in the name of women's rights. However, this tramples on the rights of women doctors to follow their consciences, and forces them to perform third trimester abortions on demand, like the one that recently claimed the life of a 29-year-old New York school teacher, who had a late-term abortion in Maryland after a poor diagnosis of the baby. When self-autonomy and rights to our bodies involves high risk procedures that can kill a perfectly healthy mother along with her child, rendering her surviving husband and two children wife and motherless, I would rather NOT have that freedom in our society.
2) Second way to observe International Women's Day: Take action! Email your state representatives about the Abortion Expansion Bill, letting them know that you believe this law would further put women at risk for coercive abortions and physical harm, rather than foster a pro-woman and pro-family society that values the family, motherhood, and children.
Donate money to Catholic Relief Services, or another charitable organization, that helps women in third world countries meet their basic needs of sanitation, food, shelter, and education. Or get involved through volunteer work, such as serving women at a local soup kitchen or shelter.
I am a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, and have considered myself a feminist since high school. Yet, I often feel that I am considered "the enemy" and my opinions are treated with horror by my pro-abortion-rights friends. Similarly, there are some men (and women) in the church, who treat the word "feminist" like it is a dirty word, something completely incompatible with Catholic values. I believe that I, and millions of other Catholic women, would argue that Catholic values WITHOUT feminism is incompatible. But feminism does NOT simply mean unfettered abortion and reproductive technology access. It was NOT about this to begin with, but was about access to the vote, the workplace, and higher education. Women still need wider access to many fields, and stronger laws protecting the family. Family values HELP women and society, by making healthcare, education, and childcare, more affordable, and putting in place stronger maternity and paternity leave laws, etc.
I am so glad I read Nash's article. I do believe that I myself need to be more outspoken about being feminist and Catholic, and to take more action myself on these issues that lie close to my heart.
So I have two suggestions for how to observe:
1) Read up on women's issues today, in the Church, in society, in politics, in terms of healthcare, education, religion, etc. There are so many places where women still need to be treated with dignity and respect. We may think those places are far-away, but we really don't have to look to far to see how women's issues are still a hot topic right here in our own backyard.
This article by Fiorella Nash published by Faith magazine in 2009, is just as relevant today about the unique and challenging position of Catholic women. It's not what you may think- a lot of oppression of women can come from within the feminist movement itself, silencing dissonant voices that do not agree with the central tenant of feminism these days: total self-autonomy. This article is an excellent read, I highly recommend it!
Why, right here in New York State, a bill has been proposed that will make New York have the least restrictive abortion laws in the country. As a feminist myself, I suppose I am to laud this in the name of women's rights. However, this tramples on the rights of women doctors to follow their consciences, and forces them to perform third trimester abortions on demand, like the one that recently claimed the life of a 29-year-old New York school teacher, who had a late-term abortion in Maryland after a poor diagnosis of the baby. When self-autonomy and rights to our bodies involves high risk procedures that can kill a perfectly healthy mother along with her child, rendering her surviving husband and two children wife and motherless, I would rather NOT have that freedom in our society.
2) Second way to observe International Women's Day: Take action! Email your state representatives about the Abortion Expansion Bill, letting them know that you believe this law would further put women at risk for coercive abortions and physical harm, rather than foster a pro-woman and pro-family society that values the family, motherhood, and children.
Donate money to Catholic Relief Services, or another charitable organization, that helps women in third world countries meet their basic needs of sanitation, food, shelter, and education. Or get involved through volunteer work, such as serving women at a local soup kitchen or shelter.
I am a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, and have considered myself a feminist since high school. Yet, I often feel that I am considered "the enemy" and my opinions are treated with horror by my pro-abortion-rights friends. Similarly, there are some men (and women) in the church, who treat the word "feminist" like it is a dirty word, something completely incompatible with Catholic values. I believe that I, and millions of other Catholic women, would argue that Catholic values WITHOUT feminism is incompatible. But feminism does NOT simply mean unfettered abortion and reproductive technology access. It was NOT about this to begin with, but was about access to the vote, the workplace, and higher education. Women still need wider access to many fields, and stronger laws protecting the family. Family values HELP women and society, by making healthcare, education, and childcare, more affordable, and putting in place stronger maternity and paternity leave laws, etc.
I am so glad I read Nash's article. I do believe that I myself need to be more outspoken about being feminist and Catholic, and to take more action myself on these issues that lie close to my heart.
Labels: catholic, feminism, health care, politics, prolife
