Getting To The Root Of This

I feel like anything I'd read, including a great many medical sources, feminist sources, and the actual instructions given with the medication, didn't prepare me at all for what to expect, and in fact, I feel like it was minimized by a lot. I went into it expecting "extra rough period cramp" type of pain. Several articles (and the advice given by with the meds) advised to put on a comfort show and have some food that I enjoy; take some over the counter pain meds. It was easily the worst pain I've felt in my life. I had an abdominal surgery a few months ago, I've broken a few bones, I cut the tip of my finger off last year, and none of these, even a teensy bit, compared to the mildest pain I experienced during my abortion.

I was completely blindsided. I almost caved and asked to be taken to the hospital, because NOTHING I had read had described anything even close to how bad the pain was. It came in waves, and there would be thirty to forty minute intervals where I couldn't even speak if I wanted to. I curled into a ball and just laid there. I won't lie and say it wasn't traumatic.

My first thought, tbh, was "holy shit, is this what other women's period cramps feel like? Have I just been lucky this whole time?" But a while back, when I still used TikTok, I came across an abortion joke video, and a ton of women in the comments were discussing how painful it was, and how they weren't prepared for it properly because they'd been told to expect much milder pain.

It was about a 9 hour process, for me, and as soon as the pain waned, I was out like a light. I had no residual symptoms the next day, thankfully, but during it I was almost positive that something had to be going wrong, because I hadn't seen anyone anywhere mentioning that it could hurt that bad.

My partner gets flashbacks to it sometimes because I locked my bathroom door behind me when I bolted in there (the meds also gave me instant diarrhea) and then I couldn't stand long enough to unlock it again. He listened to me screaming on the other side of the door for 15 minutes before the pain abated enough for me to stand up and let him in. I bled so much we thought I was hemorrhaging.

I took all the pain meds we had in the house and was in and out of consciousness for 20 hours. I was too weak to walk up my stairs without a break for a week afterwards. I have come out of a surgery that required general anaesthetic in a better condition than I was after my abortion.

My two medical abortions (10 weeks and 11 weeks) were extremely easy. They were easy for me emotionally. I felt nervous beforehand but I felt relief afterwards. While I did experience some pain, it wasn't worse than my typical period cramps or bad food poisoning.

My two births and pregnancies were also extremely different. My firstborn extremely traumatized me. The delivery was wretched, my postpartum was horrible and slow and painful... I just assumed everyone else was lying about their positive delivery stories to save face. Meanwhile, for my twins, the pregnancy was horrible and I wanted to die, but my delivery was basically painless and was done super quickly.

For periods, I used to have cramps so bad I would lose consciousness and black out on the bathroom floor, whereas now, I get some back pain for a few days and get very sleepy.

What this has taught me on a personal level is that anything to do with a woman's reproductive system is incredibly varied, and there is nothing an individual can do to affect it. Someone having an easier time doesn't take away from the trauma of someone else's experience, and someone else having a horrible time doesn't mean that the women who have it easier are lying or covering anything up.

Culturally, we dismiss women's ability to tell their own experiences and relay their own narratives honestly and faithfully. Even after years of trying to deprogram, I still subconsciously do it, and other feminists do too - cultural programming is hard to completely rid yourself of. It's easy for people who haven't had these experiences to listen to the stories that validate their own worldview and dismiss the ones that "don't fit the narrative".

But their wife? Her genetic markers will be in her son, and his female children. And it will clearly show that she was his mother and their grandmother. It will show that her mother was there, and her grandmother, and her great grand mother.

This is just one source for why mtDNA is better.

Its because its more stable, doesn't degrade, and is very prevalent to all cells. And you get more information from it. The Y chromosomal dna is in the nuclear DNA and it degrades over the generations really quickly, even over time outside of the body. Where as the maternal DNA, mtDNA, stays stable for literally centuries!

A lot of the time they disregard nuclear dna entirely because its so unstable. They test just the mtDNA. And for a father or a grandfather, that's their mother's DNA!

Its one of my favourite genetic facts.

Source: Documentary lauds Hollywood stuntwomen, who do everything men do but in high heels (Sept. 22, 2020)

One of the most sought-after stuntwomen in Hollywood, Ms. [Zoe] Bell crashes through glass, slams into book cases and leaps from tall buildings. She has done stunts on more than 20 films and television series, including "Alias," "Kill Bill" and "Xena: Warrior Princess." Asked if she could accomplish a 22-story spinning fall from a skyscraper for 2004's "Catwoman," Ms. Bell thought for a moment and said, "Yes, I can." To get the chilling fall just right, she did it four times. "It's not until after you've been hit by a car and landed all right that the fear kicks in," she said. Stuntwomen often face greater dangers than their male cohorts. While stuntmen wear pads under their clothing, stuntwomen in action films are often minimally clothed; there is no place to hide padding or protective gear in their bikinis or ball gowns. Doubling for Sharon Stone, Ms. Bell had to do the high fall in "Catwoman" in high heels. "Because that's how women fight and die—in heels," she said, with a slight roll of her eyes.

Link to the article here.

Does anyone have the link to that post explaining how the term "assigned at birth" was originally coined and used by and for intersex people (or people with DSD) before it was completely appropriated by the trans lobby, to the point that the people it was originally about have largely been forgotten?

But then she has to concede that this new technology, like most others, also affected women negatively because men immediately started using it for porn (& to harm women, since that is the main purpose of porn). “The diffusion of the telephone facilitated the intrusion of pornography into the home, not only through intrusive and abusive telephone calls made by men to women, but also through the development of sexual services over the phone.” The same thing happened with the internet of course, but before the internet there was also the French Minitel service, which was a kind of small TV screen linked to your telephone that allowed for proto-emailing and instant messaging—and a study by the French government found that the Minitel “vastly contributed to the propagation of hardcore pornography”, notably the sale and purchase of paedophilic content.