Posted: April 28, 2012 at 4:34 pm | Tags: body, Feminism, gender, gender roles, medicine, science, WTF
*Warning – the link for the article that I am quoting from below may be considered NSFW*
So what happens when you get a GP and Family Planning Specialist, and a Psychotherapist and Life Coach together to write about sex after giving birth? You end up with this train wreck of an article. Honestly I expected that two such qualified people would be able to write an article that used language that was easily understandable and didn’t read like the two authors were thinking that their 12 year old children might read it.
My first issue with the article is not the language, but instead the hetero-centrism, that the only people who give birth are women who are in relationships with men (not other women), and secondly that sometimes people who give birth don’t identify as women.
Continue Reading
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Posted: April 11, 2012 at 9:31 pm | Tags: bisexuality, body, craft, Feminism, gender roles, pregnancy
Well I’m slowing being poisoned by chocolate, and I’ve been recovering from a bad cold – so have some linkspam while I get my writing mojo back on (I have posts planned on pornography and one on Pell’s appearance on Q&A).
A great article in Salon about being bisexual in a small town in the US, “Rebel girls“:
“We need to talk,” said my mom. I was 14, and this could have meant any number of ominous things. We’d had many “talks” over the years, most of them related to my adolescent misbehavior, which arrived at 12 in particularly worrying form.
We sat together at our breakfast counter, she with a mug of Bengal spice tea, me with a glass of OJ. My mother was, and is, a very pretty woman, with bright blue eyes, skyscraper cheekbones, and an easy laugh. She sipped her tea and took a breath.
“Karen and I aren’t just friends, honey.” Her features tightened, but her eyes met mine, clear and steady. “We’re more than friends.”
“Yeah, I figured that out,” I said.
“You did?”
“Of course!” I gulped. “Jessica and me aren’t just friends, either, you know.”
“I had a feeling about that.” She nodded with a faint smile.
Mine was the most amiable coming out story I knew. If only the experience of my early sex life were so breezy.
N K Jemisin performs her awesome writing magic with “There’s no such thing as a good stereotype“:
The strong female character (SFC) is a stereotype. It’s gone beyond just a trope at this point. It’s ubiquitous; we see this character appear in films, in books, in video games — and because it’s a stereotype, we’ve started to “see” it in real life. Conservatives love Sarah Palin because she shoots things, and Ann Coulter because she thinks women should never ask for help, and should tote guns (and vote the way their husbands tell them). We celebrate images like this one, which has been all over my Facebook feed this week. We warn that the Republican “war on women” will “awaken the sleeping giant” — with violent, threatening language re what will happen when women fight back.
This is a good thing, right? We all know women can be strong. Us women can wield the big guns like the big boys. We can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan; we can do anything, everything, we can work and have babies and cut the cords with our teeth and then still get up and punch a motherfucker in the face with our brains –
– Yeahno. See, that’s the problem with stereotypes. They contain a grain of truth, sure, but the rest is all melodramatic bullshit.
Elisabeth Soep at Boingboing writes about, “The cool new thing with tweens? Sewing“:
Even so, while sewing’s getting more popular and more techie, Luna can’t totally shake the pastime’s old-lady associations among some of her friends. “Most of them think it’s cool because I always make stuff for them for their birthdays,” she says. “But one of my friends, when I say I have sewing on Saturday, so I can’t hang out, she calls me grandma.”
“Young women and girls are reclaiming that image,” says Luna’s mom, Mimi Ito. “They’re making things that are quirky and funky and tied to a punk DIY aesthetic.” Mimi thinks there’s a culture shift going on, even though we still have those old images of what crafting means.
Libby Anne at Love Joy Feminism writes, “My rights as a pregnant woman or the lack thereof“:
Growing up surrounded by people who were anti-abortion, one thing I heard all the time was that all that it would take to make pro-choice people change their mind was for them to get pregnant with a wanted child. They would then see clearly that it was a fetus was a baby, not a ball of tissue, and that it was a person, not just an inconvenience. Weirdly, my experience has been only the opposite.
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Posted: March 8, 2012 at 8:50 pm | Tags: beauty, body, linkspam, racism, relationships
Hello readers, I have joys of posts to share with you and then to blog about something else, this just closes the tabs I’ve had opened for the past couple of weeks.
First up is a post by China Mieville on the Belgium’s recent court ruling to not ban Tintin in the Congo.
ii) One can insist that the book’s attitudes ‘reflect its time’, as the court held.
There are two interesting points about this ultra-common defence for every undeniably racist (sexist, homophobic, &c) text in existence. The first is that it is historically bogus. Such ideas, like all ideas, were – are – contested. Certainly & obviously the mainstream shifts, the balance of forces alters, but the implicit or explicit claim that there were no dissident voices on supremacist agendas is a lie. To claim that everyone talked like Tintin about the Congo back in the day is (whatever other serious political arguments we may have with them) to slander, say, Felicien Challaye, Albert Londres, the French Socialist movement that declared at its 1907 conference that colonialism ‘relies on violent conquest and institutionalises the subjection of Asiatic and African peoples’.
The second point is that even if these attitudes do ‘reflect their time’ in the sense of reflecting a then-more-mainstream agenda, so the fuck what? The point about attitudes is that they change, in response to struggle, to a battle for ideas. The question here is whether or not Tintin au Congo is racist. Which it is. That may perhaps in part be because white supremacism was less contested back then – just as well we’re not back then, then, isn’t it? & that instead we live in now, when the resistance of those deemed unable to add 2 & 2 has forced the recognition that this kind of shit is shit. These days a ‘collective synapse’ should kick in ‘forged by mass movements … that have forced a lot of people, particularly white straight men, to have a clue.’
Next is a post by Franklin Veaux on Radical Honesty, which neatly dovetails into my post recently on “Responsibility“:
The folks I have met to advocate Radical Honesty™ tend to fetishize blunt, unvarnished, raw communication, at the expense of compassion or of any sort of concern for the emotional response of the people to whom they are speaking. Like the main character in Bones, they tend to display a lack of empathy toward their fellow human beings that, from the outside, borders on active hostility.
And that’s unfortunate, because it means that conversations about Radical Honesty almost always end up being framed in terms of “Is honesty good, or do we need little white lies and other small deceptions in order to make civilization go?” The debate gets set in terms of honesty vs. dishonesty, and that’s a damn shame.
…
Honesty without compassion is rubbish. The question should not be framed as “Which is better, honesty or dishonesty?” but rather “How can we strive for absolute honesty in a framework of respect, compassion, kindness, and sincerity?” All too often, when the question is framed as Radical Honesty™ vs. The Little White Lie, the only compassionate answer is The Little White Lie, because the philosophy of Radical Honesty™–at least as I’ve seen it practiced–treats compassion with disdain, or even contempt.
And then Margaret Cho with her beautiful post, “You are not ugly. Don’t make videos“:
I thought I was so ugly for so long and I wasted so much of my life on this dumb notion. I punished myself and avoided my reflection in mirrors and any windows. I would see myself reflected back and I would look away, trying to pretend I didn’t exist because I hated myself so much. I hated the way I looked and it started early on. My father found a school project from 1st grade, where I had written on a photo of myself that I looked like a flat faced mummy – and firstly, how does a kid that young know what a flat faced mummy is and secondly, I cry at my own self judgement and thirdly, I was such a cute kid. Imagine my face and then miniaturize it in your mind until the age of 6. I know, fucking adorable.
One day I looked at myself and I thought, shit, this is it. this is what I look like. No amount of self hatred is going to change my appearance. I am who I am. I am stuck with this and I have to love it or else I am going to die early from my own suffering and idea that I got shortchanged in the looks department.
And finally from Geek Feminism, “Why do we watch Doctor Who?: A fan scholar’s perspective“:
Yes, the female characters are secondary. But that’s a production decision. And fans don’t generally let production decisions get in the way when there is still something to scavenge from the show. This is the beautiful thing about fans: they don’t let creators tell them how they get to experience the show. I mean, the creators often do tell us how to experience the show (*cough, cough,* George Lucas), but fans don’t comply. And I would say that fans don’t just ignore the voices from on high that directly tell them “You can’t read it that way,” but they also ignore plot details, the structure of casts, and other elements in shows that tell them how to read it indirectly. So even though the companions are definitionally sidekicks to the Doctor, plenty of women will still read those companions as the heroes. They’ll still read the Doctor as a genderqueer character they can relate to. And they can do all that while complaining that Doctor Who needs a lady protagonist every once in a damn while.
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Posted: January 30, 2012 at 12:50 pm | Tags: body, cis, exclusion, Feminism, genderqueer, trans*
Just need to close some tabs, and share some awesome writing by s.e. smith, and another equally awesome author.
The Lorax at Liar, Lunatic, or Lorax writes, “I am Cissexist” (trigger warning for discussion of transphobia and suicide):
There are 40 babies being born today that will find themselves in hell. And it will happen again tomorrow. And the next day. And forever.
I am cissexist when I am not angry about this. When I am choosing my words carefully so as not to offend anyone. I am cissexist when I think I am doing some good by talking, writing, telling others how it is and how it should be. I am cissexist when I start talking and stop listening.
s. e. smith writes “Beyond the Binary: But What Does It All Mean? I Don’t Get It!“:
What does it mean, I want to ask cis people, to be a cis woman, or a cis man? What does it mean? How do you know that you are a woman, or a man? Is it a conscious choice? Do you wake up in the morning every day and decide to do that? How do you express your gender? What things do you do or not do as markers to signal your gender to the world? What does ‘woman’ mean to you? People have also been grappling with these questions for a long time, in larger discussions about masculinity and femininity, in discussions, for example, about cis women who are challenged on their gender because they’re too butch.
People want a smooth, flawless, easy definition of what it means to be genderqueer, but I look at cis women who have never encountered challenges about their gender and have never stopped to think about what it means to them to be a cis woman, and defy people to come up with a single neat definition of what it means to be a cis woman. Is it how someone looks? Dresses? Behaves? Is it about chromosomes and phenotype and endocrinology? Is it about reproductive capability? What is it? How do people define ‘woman’? Many of these questions sound offensive and intrusive and ridiculous because they are, and I use them illustratively to demonstrate how some nonbinary trans people feel in discussions where cis people are trying to ‘get’ their gender.
s. e. smith writes “Fat-Positive Shopping Is More Than Garments“, a post that should be compulsory reading for anyone who sells plus sized clothes:
Clothes shopping while fat can be an exercise in frustration. Many stores don’t stock larger sizes at all, or if they do, they offer a narrow range, like 14-18. Those clothes may still fit poorly, or don’t mesh with the taste of the dresser, because they’re designed in the belief that all fat bodies are the same and that all fat people want to cover their bodies in shame and misery. Some stores only offer larger sizes online, for fear of having actual fat people in their storefront, which would of course upset the other customers. Finding environments that don’t just sell a wider range of sizes but actively welcome the people who wear them is rare and such spaces are to be treasured.
What was offered at Re/Dress wasn’t just a chance to buy awesome vintage clothes in a range of sizes meant for fat bodies. It was also an environment to be yourself in. It was an environment where fat bodies weren’t things that needed to be hidden and minimized and controlled, but could be celebrated and embraced.
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Posted: January 21, 2012 at 12:47 pm | Tags: body, fat, Feminism, gender roles, identity, lgbtiq, sex
From the new and awesome blog Queereka, “Sunday School Salutations” which is soon (probably already has) launched a sex advice column and is seeking questions:
The most instructive answer I got was “your first column must contain at least two (2) hymen jokes.” However, this answer is mostly useful because it is pretty bad advice, at least as regards the goal of this column and this blog. I mean, not to get all RAWR HETEROSEXISM on my friend (who was, of course, making a joke), but one of the goals I have for Sunday School in the first place is to tear down the dominant narrative about sex. Raise your hands, dear readers: did your first sexual experience involve hymen rupture?
Yeah, mine didn’t, either.
The Huff Post lists some very interesting tech failures at marketing products to women, noting that women are already big consumers of electronics.
On Monday HSN announced the results of a survey by the international research firm Parks Associates that asked 2,000 adults about purchases they wanted to make before 2012. The results showed women outstripped men in their interest in owning electronics, with 18 percent of women planning on buying a tablet before 2012 (compared to 15 percent of men), 20 percent of women wanted a laptop (only 14 percent of men did) and 20 percent of women planning on purchasing smartphones — compared to 17 percent of men, Mashable reports.
The MailOnline has an interesting piece on the BMI of models and how they would be ranked as anorexic. This article is NSFW – there is nude “plus” size model posing with a “straight” model.
Tesseral Harmonics reblogs (it’s Tumblr, I’m not sure how it works really) on ““Bisexual” is not oppressive, can we talk about biphobia and straight privilege? and other thoughts on bisexuality”:
It’s a big problem that people who are bisexually identified (or engage in bisexual behavior) are dismissed and mocked by gay/queer/lesbian people. I honestly don’t think I need to spell out an explanation of why it’s important for spaces that call themselves “queer” or “LGBT” to be inclusive. In short, anyone who is bi (in name or behavior) is still queer and may need support as a queer person. Biphobia also makes it difficult for anyone who is gay-identified and experiencing sexual fluidity (Lisa Diamond’s research on sexual fluidity (pdf) is super interesting, btw). It also means that gay people who are in “straight” relationships for whatever reasons (family and religion are two examples) are dismissed by the queer community. Biphobia is part of a culture of identity-policing, where if you don’t adhere closely enough to the requirements delineated by the official bureau of gayness you’re out of the club.
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Posted: January 18, 2012 at 11:17 pm | Tags: abortion, body, Feminism, science, study
I’ve been following the MTR debate with some interest. I had planned to write a blog post about how she’s not my kind of feminist, and I may yet do, but a statistic she quoted today in an article with Mamamia caught my eye.
6. How do you resolve the apparent divide between being pro-life and a feminist?
…
A growing number of feminists are questioning abortion as safe, simple and risk free. Research is also indicating that women have significant negative mental health outcomes after abortions. The UK Royal College of Psychiatrists has published a meta-analysis in the British Journal of Psychiatry finding that women who undergo abortions are 81% more likely to experience subsequent mental health problems. (Substance abuse increased 340%, suicidal behaviour by 155%).
I looked at those statistics and boggled, because when I last looked at Wikipedia regarding mental health and abortion the information suggested that there was no correlation between negative health outcomes and abortion. I went and tracked down what I could find of the British Journal of Psychiatry article. Sadly I found it was behind a paywall, so I went and looked at what other people had said regarding the article, the methods used, and the author of the piece. It was an interesting read. To start off, I’ll quote the Results section of the abstract:
Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems* (my own asterisk) was shown to be attributable to abortion. The strongest subgroup estimates of increased risk occurred when abortion was compared with term pregnancy and when the outcomes pertained to substance use and suicidal behaviour.
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Posted: December 17, 2011 at 3:00 pm | Tags: body, body image, equal marriage, Feminism, lgbtiq, marriage, politics, Religion
Stuff I’ve been reading about the place:
Stephanie Bolt’s (Andrew Bolt’s sister)’s piece: I want marriage equality for all
Some gays and lesbians view their relationships as equal to those of straight people. But I know of others who would admit to feeling “lesser” or, even if they don’t, are fed up with receiving negative physical, verbal or other signals from the world around them.
Burt Humburg’s journey to outing himself as gay: ‘There’s only one Burt’
“(Suppressing the desires) worked for a while. … but I started to become quietly insane,” Humburg said. “My craziness was getting worse and worse and worse. I was a jerk.”
He said he briefly considered suicide.
“Within 10 seconds I concluded that was not the answer,” Humburg said. “I just thought, ‘You’re a straight-A student headed (into) medicine at some point. What are you gonna do – throw that all away just because of some Bronze Age understandings of the Bible and human sexuality?’ Let’s just take this slow and see how it goes.
“So I stopped fighting it. And as soon as I allowed (homosexuality) to be a consideration – bam. I knew.”
A fascinating article on the Christian basis of the understanding of marriage in Australia: Should Marriage Be A Life Sentence?
In order to preclude the legal recognition of same-sex marriages, the 2004 Bill proposed to incorporate the common law definition of marriage set out by Lord Penzance in the case of Hyde noted above, which involved the status of Mormon polygamous unions made in America. Lord Penzance noted: “marriage, as understood in Christendom, may for this purpose be defined as the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”. The words, “as understood in Christendom”, do not appear in section 46 of the Marriage Act nor in section 43 of the Family Law Act. The Hyde definition is otherwise intact in those sections.
Sady Doyle’s article: The Girl’s Guide to Staying Safe Online
For years, it’s been an open secret that having a visibly female online identity – especially if one writes about sexism – is a personal security risk. Highly visible bloggers such as Jessica Valenti report receiving hate mail every day. Some have been subject to campaigns aimed at getting them fired. This doesn’t only happen to high-profile feminists, or women; some people, including men, have been harassed at work simply for commenting on the wrong blog. But it is a gendered phenomenon: W.H.O.A. reports that, in 2010, 73% of cyberstalking victims were female.
A great article on body image and how large women with breasts can been seen as problematic in the office: It Happened to Me: I Got in Trouble for Bringing My Boobs to the Office
At one point in the “conversation,” I’d tried to point out that my dress wasn’t any different from what the other women in the department wore. In fact, it was pretty common knowledge one of the other women had a certain outfit she wore when she wanted something from her boss. I, uh, did not mention that to the department head. That was when my department head told me, in uncomfortable and tentative wording, that the issue was really my large boobs.
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Posted: May 29, 2011 at 9:48 pm | Tags: body, body image, Christianity, Feminism, gender roles, identity, media, privilege, Religion, sexism, slutwalk
James (my husband) at Slutwalk. Photo taken by me
*Trigger warning for discussion of rape*
I was at slutwalk yesterday, and as I’d volunteered to be a marshall at the Melbourne event, apparently I was a “slut wrangler” – thanks The Age. It was a fantastic event and the organisers did a great job liaising with the police and the city council regarding the march, getting great speakers and keeping everything together. This post isn’t about the great signs, fantastic people, great speakers and the courage that everyone showed by marching or attending yesterday, no, this post is about the protesters to the march who just don’t get it.
As reported in The Age today:
Two lone Christian protesters holding signs saying ”Rape is horrifying but so is immodesty” and ”God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble” were the only visible opponents.
There was perhaps a third protester on the steps of Treasury House at the top of Collins Street. I heard that there was someone there with a sign that was very close to illegible due to the amount of text on it, who ended up being surrounded by people who were marching before the police took them away (the sign holder, not the marchers). I have no idea what was on that sign, so I’ll leave my commenting to the ones reported in The Age.
Rape is horrifying but so is immodesty
So, apparently being immodest, is as bad as being raped. I take it that the author of this sign hadn’t:
a) thought for more than 5 seconds;
b) been raped;
c) know anyone who has been raped (though if they do, they probably think that it was the victim’s fault); and/or
d) listened to the experience of someone who has been raped/sexually assaulted and asked why/how the rapist could do that.
The author of that sign also clearly missed the entire point of the march. The fact is, that regardless of what women wear, rapists will rape. I was (sadly) briefly friends with a woman at university who was raped at knifepoint when walking home from school one day. She had her throat slit during and was incredibly lucky to survive. She was wearing her school uniform and carrying her school bag – she was not dressed immodestly. I was raped by my then boyfriend. I was partially naked at the time, which I suppose is considered immodest, but given I was in a relationship with him, then again no – any more than I’d be immodest if I was raped today by a partner (which wouldn’t happen).
Before I started reading this post I thought I’d do a little bit of reading about modesty (on wikipedia of course), to make sure I understood what the protesters were talking about. There are some very interesting quotes in the wikipedia article on modesty which I thought I’d share.
Modesty may be expressed in social interaction by communicating in a way exhibiting humility, shyness, or simplicity. The general elements of modesty include:
- Downplaying one’s accomplishments;
- Behavior, manner, or appearance intended to avoid impropriety or indecency
…
Standards of modesty vary by culture, or generation and vary depending on who is exposed, which parts of the body are exposed, the duration of the exposure, the context, and other variables.
…
Proponents of modesty often see it as a demonstration of respect for their bodies, for social norms, and for the feelings of themselves and others. Some people believe modesty may reduce sexual crimes. Some critics assert that modesty reflects a negative body image, and there may be a correlation between repressive body attitudes and undesirable outcomes such as sexual crimes, violence, and stress.
…
Most discussion of modesty involves clothing. Issues of modesty and decency have arisen especially during the 20th century as a result of the increased popularity in many countries of shorter dresses and swimsuits and the consequential exposure of more of the body. This has been more pronounced in the case of female fashions. Most people consider the clothes that they are wearing to be modest. Otherwise, they would not wear the clothes. What is considered “modest” in this context will depend on the context when the clothes will be worn and can vary between religions, cultures, generations, occasions, and the persons who are present. [emphasis added]
Modesty is such a fluid concept, it changes year to year, and what is considered modest now, would be considered highly immodest 100 years or more ago. The fact that modesty has different rules depending on which gender you present is also incredibly suckful and unfair, and good reasons for it to be ignored. Immodesty is not as horrifying rape, I’d happily walk naked across the CBD of Melbourne, but I’d not happily be raped.
God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble
I’d just like to laugh at the irony of this statement. Humility is nicely defined as:
Humility (adjectival form: humble) is the quality of being modest, reverential, even obsequiously submissive, and never being arrogant, contemptuous, rude or even self-aggrandizing.
I’d like more Christians to be humble, and to not attempt to dictate to others what they should and should not do.
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Posted: May 22, 2011 at 10:03 pm | Tags: body, health, taboo, thoughts
Over the past two weeks it’s been brought back to me the things that we just don’t talk about, and this is mostly women stuff, I’m not sure about the man stuff, because I’m not a man. But anyway, a couple of weeks ago, my new coworker confided in me that she had just started her period, via our work IM system, and that she was feeling rather cruddy. She then asked me if that was too much information – to which I replied, “If women can’t talk about periods, what else can we talk about?”
She then told me that she sent that message through IM rather than just telling me (we sit next to each other) because she didn’t want to freak the men out (we’re surrounded by male colleagues) and although I understand this, I also find it puzzling. Surely these men have sisters, wives, girlfriends, female friends, and/or mothers who have at some point in their lives had a period. Surely the fact that women have periods is not shocking news.
But then again it is because of the whole lady-business taboo of which we cannot speak – for no real good reason. The taboo of sharing personal information – which generally has anything to do with stuff under your skin – is exacerbated for women when existing as female brings along a whole range of health issues (hello period pain to say the least), and these health issues (be they minor or major) cannot be spoken freely about in public for fear of… something (which I never quite get).
Which means that support that might otherwise be given, may not be as some people may be ashamed to talk about some health issues because of social taboos, and these social taboos are taught young. I remember when I first was told about getting periods as a 10 year old or so. It was something that my mother was clearly uncomfortable in telling me, so I understood that it was a shameful thing. I also understood that it was not something that you spoke about with people, so when I got my period one Christmas day (I was 10!), I told my mother… who then told my father. I was outraged – how could she tell him after basically telling me that you didn’t talk about it with people? One of my many introductions to double standards – and an indication that some social taboos weren’t real.
So I get to go back to work tomorrow, after having a cyst removed and I have to figure out how much information is going to be TMI for some people. My manager knows I had an operation to remove an infected cyst, but he doesn’t know where it was – and do I feel comfortable and safe enough to tell him? One of the other flip sides of these taboos is that even though I don’t necessarily think that they’re worthwhile, not keeping them may not be safe.
I’m generally an honest person and will answer pretty much any question asked of me honestly, provided it isn’t an effort to shame me – and then I’ll deflect the question. The need to abide by social taboos about what I can and cannot talk about in relation to myself is frustrating to me.
And because I’ve now run out of brain I’ll close this with part of a piece attributed to Gloria Steinem:
Since history was recorded, male human beings have built whole cultures around the idea that penis-envy is “natural” to women – though having such an unprotected organ might be said to make men more vulnerable, and the power to give birth makes womb-envy at least logical. In short, logic has nothing to do with it. What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? The answer is clear – menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event:
…
- Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (“MENstruation”) as proof that only men could serve in the army (“You have to give blood to take blood”), occupy political office (“Can women be aggresive without that steadfast cycle governed by the planet Mars?”), be priests and ministers (“how could a woman give her blood for our sins”), or rabbis (“Without the monthly loss of impurities, women remain unclean”).
- Male radicals, left-wing politicians, and mystics, however, would insist that women are equal, just different; and that any woman could enter their ranks if only she were willing to self-inflict a major wound every month (“You must give blood for the revolution”), recognize the preeminence of menstrual issues, or subordinate her selfness to all men in their Cycle of Enlightenment.
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Posted: May 21, 2011 at 5:53 pm | Tags: body, fat, health, me, story
Before reading this post you may want to consider that it details some personal medical information about myself and my recent hospital experience. If you are someone who doesn’t deal well with TMI, you might want to stop reading here and go and play somewhere else – you can come back when the next post is written.
On Tuesday I noticed a painful discomfort in my vagina. I had previously had what I thought were called Barton Cysts – which had all been painful, but I knew that they could get infected and possibly need surgery to be repaired. So I looked it up, it was indeed a Bartholin’s Cyst and I would probably need to have it looked at. I poked at it, and it was tender and large, and so I went to bed thinking about what I was going to do about the whole thing. On Wednesday night it was sufficiently painful and uncomfortable to stop me going to the gym, and I decided to take Thursday off to go and see my GP and see what could be done. This was also on the recommendation of my sister who has previously had infected Bartholin’s cysts and had had surgery to resolve them.
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