That Lady Eve

Like, seriously, women should be educated about their own bodies.

So if you're on the other side of 45 and suddenly everything is twice as difficult, you get more migraines, your blood pressure goes funny, you can't sleep and you feel like your entire psyche is unstable, you might be experiencing perimenopause. My gyn was like,oh, like think of it like reverse puberty, your entire body rearranges itself. I was like, Great, nobody ever told me it can be this bad. My GP didn't even ask me about my period or hormone levels or anything. He just told me I was probably depressed and sent me to a psychiatrist, who also didn't ask about my period or my hormones. If I hadn't experienced something akin to postpartum depression and therefore know what my body does when its hormones are out of whack, I would have had no idea.

Seriously, nobody tells you how much hormones fuck you up as a woman. Nobody prepares you for this.

I've been trying to talk openly about what's fucking me up right now, and I've discovered that it's a lot more common than I thought it was. I feel like every phase of life finds another way to fuck women over. Puberty: have fun with your period as it adjusts itself. Childbirth: prepare for a hormonal rollercoaster. PMS: oh, it can get BAD. Like, BAD. After birth: hormones out of whack for months, maybe longer. Perimenopause: can fuck up everything. Like literally everything. Osteoporosis is also hormonal. Post menopause: supposedly things get better, but they don't have to.

And I feel like we're left pretty alone dealing with all of it. And we know so little about it that we're left wondering why suddenly nothing works anymore. So we flail about and feel terrible about our sudden inability to cope with life, when it's in fact our bodies screwing with us. Again.

Tibetan gazelle Procapra picticaudata

Annie Soudain (British, 1949)

"Fire Hills" n.d.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

a) the most angry generation of lesbians ever is being produced rn who saw what gen x lesbians had and didn't get it. the rue is a lot worse when you not only can fathom what could be but have photos and videos of it. lesbians our age in 1954 thought it was really spiffy to be alive and not straightjacketed.

b) what gen x lesbians had wasn't made by them, 20-somethings in the 80s, it was made by middle aged women who grew up in the 40s, 50s, 60s

The study found that LGB women were more likely to be victimized by abuse than men, which most people took to mean that lesbians were more likely to abuse each other, but if you read the study you’ll find that the majority of the perpetrators of abuse of these LGB women were men, not fellow women.

And here’s a helpful article that breaks down the rumors/misinformation that have spread as a result of people purposefully misinterpreting this original study and other similar studies: DEBUNKING THE LESBIAN DOMESTIC VIOLENCE DATA. Useful to help understand the statistics and scientific language of the studies and provides a lot of sources and further reading.