I’m Australian and can’t stand hearing my own voice within 20 mins of bedtime.

It’s like the people who pine for the “good old days” of the 50s. They think it was so much better when in fact it was much worse for a lot of different people.

I’ve never understood the romanticizing of the Victorian era or ANY era pre-women’s rights movement. Even 50 years ago, women still needed a husband to get a credit card or a bank account.

I’m glad to hear that. Here in the Midwest, I have felt downright shat on. and that includes the time my kid needed emergency surgery at 6 months old and I was told I would have to feed her in a bathroom because it was a Baby Friendly hospital and I, a mom on atypical antipsychotics not safe to breastfeed on, would…

My husband and I said just yesterday that we are basically waiting for the boomers to start dying in large enough numbers that we can remake society...hopefully before global warming is irreversible and kills us all. 

Thank you for the view from the other side of the doctor/patient divide. We love our doctors, mostly, except for the ones who tell us 1. we’re making things up to get pain meds (there are people who do this, and I don’t deal with it so I don’t know how you’re supposed to tell who is making it up and who has crippling…

True but it’s really the misogyny of the institution that is the problem (which is what I am taking issue with). And since it is IMPROVED by female support, I think it will lessen. I worry about the degree to which it will, however.

I work in a male-dominated industry and have had female bosses (or big bosses) for my…

Yeah, Jez isn’t the best at science writing these days.

Many doctors are wonderful. The ones I have a problem with are the ones who look at me with my complicated history and tell me I’m lying about the pain and trying to get drugs, conveniently ignoring that I told them at the beginning of the appointment that I don’t want or need drugs because I’m working with a pain…

I hope you told him to go to hell. Or alternatively, grabbed a ball with you fingernails and twisted and asked him whether that was imaginary. I always think of these things MUCH too late. One summer job I had one year was to take care of two kids who were blind, deaf, and severely intellectually disabled at the state…

To be fair, the academy basically DOES hate women.

Signed,
Someone with a PhD who is also a woman

However, funding is how to solve this (you are right). Maybe before I hit menopause in 20 years, they will have a treatment.

At the same time, most doctors (most of which were WOMEN) have made fun of/ignored/refused to care…

3 surgeries for peritoneal endo here! I had my last 3 years ago. My most recent surgeons are experts and I love both of them. They did an incredible job removing old scar tissue and some endo lesions that had caused pain since I was about 9... But, because my lesions are superficial and I react so negatively to EVERY…

Oh for sure. There’s a big reason the Dakotas are as conservative as they are.

Thank you for pointing out that this is cultural genocide. People need to be reminded about this more often. These children were not allowed to speak their native languages, not allowed to follow their cultural traditions or worship the gods of their peoples, were forced to adopt “christian” names, and were completely…

Oh god I hear ya about living a life ignorant of these places. They weren’t exactly talked about. I grew up near one of the biggest schools, in an area that teaches a very weird version of First Nations history (I’m from Brantford, named for the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, who fought for the British in the American…

Absolutely—none of this is “in the past.” It’s not even the generational trauma suffered by people who are children and grandchildren of now-dead people who suffered through this system. It’s a live legacy, and the legacy lives on in the oppression of and danger experienced by First Nations people.

The impact is so real, even generations later. My grandmother and uncle were taken and sent to boarding school. My grandmother was beautiful, so beautiful. She was a lifelong alcoholic, my uncle a street person. He was a man of tremendous talent and dignity, known as “The Duke.” He just couldn’t stand to be inside.…

As the article noted, this is not a surprise to anyone paying attention—it’s a horrific fact of life in Canada. I would like to emphasize the fact that these schools were operational well into the twentieth century. They were operational in my lifetime. The Canadian government has had a long standing policy of “assimil…

I think one of the many, many reasons this has been allowed to continue so long is that Britney’s “brand”—developed for her and foisted upon her when she was a teenager—is that of a shiny, happy child. Her sexuality was our society’s degrading version of Lolita—an underaged female person being layered and lacquered…

It’s obvious she has been fighting for her own dignity privately in vain. The fact that she has to leverage her privacy for her own freedom by publicly talking about the contents of her uterus is so utterly wrong.