This speaks to me on a level I can’t otherwise access.
Small Museum of Nature and Industry (2010) by Susan Collard
“The smallest book I’ve made to date, this is a little fatter than a perfect cube. Materials include birch aircraft plywood, basswood, slate, various metals, mirrors, linen thread, and a shell. With the title and materials in mind, I tried to make a book with the open-ended complexity of a miniature museum.”
SO COOL!
Cooking with R.o.y B.
Lately I’ve been discussing all the abortion drama happening in the U.S. today with friends and it’s getting me down. It disturbs me to think about who is making decisions regarding what I can or cannot do with my body in countless medical scenarios, because those people aren’t trained medical professionals, in a class situation in which even birth control exceeds one’s monthly budget, or in most cases even women, nor are they considering their options from these perspectives.
I want to take this moment to implore you to consider what it would be like to be a woman trusting her state representatives to have her best interests at heart, and then to think from this perspective about what decisions your state representatives are making on your behalf regarding your health. What do they think of your ability to make decisions about your body? How do they see pregnancy and birth control? How do they see the rights of women versus the rights of fetuses? How do they see the rights of women during sexual intercourse versus the rights of men? How do they see the rights of women and fetal possession versus the rights of men and fetal possession? How do they see the rights of women versus the rights of the state?
After answering these questions genuinely thinking from the perspective of a woman trusting her state representatives to have her best interests at heart, think about what those answers imply about your state representative’s opinion of women. Does it seem as if a woman placing trust in her state representative is a good idea? Does your representative have the knowledge, the experience, and the compassion necessary to properly represent a woman’s interests and needs? Does this representative understand what it’s like to be a woman, and do they care to? It disappoints me how often the answer to these questions is no.
Women make up fifty percent of the American population, but less than a third of the body that represents it. It’s difficult and often scary to trust men to understand and prioritize issues that are inherent to women, such as childbearing, rape resulting in pregnancy, female-specific birth control methods, and abortion. In a perfect world, our representation would actually show an accurate distribution of social classes, genders, religious backgrounds, and races; but we don’t live in a perfect world. We need to set goals for ourselves that involve moving issues of women’s rights into the proper arenas; some of these goals seem lofty and take lots of time and effort, such as finding and electing enough female representatives to even out the distribution of gender in representative bodies. However, many goals can be achieved immediately through a few very simple steps.
If you are a woman being represented by men within your governmental body, your representative needs your input. Getting a direct line to your state representative is easy, and discussing your opinions on women’s rights with your representative is important. Don’t trust your male representative’s wife or daughter to be the only female voice in his life; let yours be heard.
A democracy only works if everyone participates. Women’s voices are becoming harder to hear socially. We’re often catered to more as consumers than voters, thinkers, or contributors. If we make ourselves heard by calling our representatives and discussing with them how we feel about our rights as women, our bodies, and our desires, we could easily change their minds about how much we should be trusted to make our own decisions in favor of our authority. Who do you want deciding what you do with your body, what information you are given by a medical professional, what rights you have to your health and life, you or your male-biased upper-class-biased government? If you contribute to your government’s opinion, then you’ll get to keep control of your right to live, and perhaps even gain more.
Women may not seem to hold much sway in Congress, but we dominate consumer politics and can easily use that to our advantage. Product savvy is always important, but even more so in a capitalist society where corporations are considered to be people and have a large influence over campaigns and politicians. Since women make up eighty percent of consumers, why not use that power for good? Find out who your brands support, what rights your favorite products’ creators are advocating. Does whoever makes your laundry detergent feel that women don’t deserve a right you want to have or to keep? Ditch ‘em! Give your money to someone who wants what you want and allow them to use it to promote your rights and needs as a woman.
You don’t want to live in a world where you have to be spoken for, so speak for yourself while you still can. With all this abortion drama dominating the newsstands, it’s becoming more and more evident that women’s rights are receding. Every day new bills and laws are passed or considered that limit the rights of women, starting in school with sex education laws and ending up where women have no right to choose whether or not they have a child, even if they were raped or having the child will kill them. We still have the chance to speak up, to talk to our representatives, even to become them. We need to take advantage of that while we still have the chance, before we end up living out an episode of Madmen, before even having sexual desire makes a woman an outcast. This political situation is a battle we could actually lose. Use your voice to fight for your rights before you’re stripped of them. You owe it not only to your daughters, but to yourself.
Blood Brother trailer. I’m seeing the shit out of this when it comes out. Just seeing the trailer made me cry like a baby.
I read an article today that was describing a common situation a psychologist faces in couple’s therapy. It basically said women should be more open to their men indulging in pornography. The article implied that the root of the problem of women becoming frustrated with their husbands viewing pornography was a woman seeing her partner’s indulgence in pornography as infidelity, stemming from her own insecurity in her ability to arouse her partner. It got me thinking about many misconceptions about sex and misconceptions about how women think of sex.
Not many women (especially at young ages) are willing to discuss their feelings about sex and their sexual urges with their friends. Women being open with the public about sex is even more rare. Society portrays men as sex-craving machines and women as people there to fulfill a male partner’s desire for sexual satisfaction in a quest for intimacy. What often isn’t discussed is the idea that a woman could desire to have sex not out of a need for intimacy, but merely to obtain sexual satisfaction—and that a man could desire to have sex merely for intimacy’s sake. The last person expected to be viewing pornography is a young female, when in fact I’m sure it’s common practice for a girl to hop off the bus, see she has an hour before her parents get home, and pop onto her laptop for a little this-and-that.
As a result of these misconceptions, many women have difficulty, especially at young ages, discussing their sex lives with friends. I’ve compiled this list of reasons as to why it’s actually important to feel comfortable talking about your sex life with someone besides you and your partner.
1. Addressing the health of your own sexual relationships early in your sex life isn’t that easy alone.
A healthy sexual relationship isn’t as black-and-white as most American sex education programs lead us to believe. It’s not always a matter of yes and no, and most young girls aren’t prepared for those gray-area moments when they come about. Sometimes we find ourselves in uncomfortable situations where our feelings for the person we’re with heavily influence our ability to consent clear of mind or to understand when is too soon, where is too inappropriate, and how far is too far for us. Maybe you’re on the fence about something, have no clue how to decide, and don’t want to try until you’re certain it’s the right thing to do. The hardest thing ever is going to your friends and saying, “I think I want to try such-and-such sex act.” However, getting a fresh and more objective perspective often leads us to making the right decision that’s harder to make and staying out of unhealthy sex situations.
2. Every once in a while something doesn’t feel right.
American sex ed programs are pretty good at telling you how not to get raped by your partner, but they never tell you how to make sex feel more good when it feels bad. If you’re in bed for the first time and things don’t go so swimmingly, people can sometimes freak out and get feelings hurt (Just for the record, humor comes in handy in these situations; it’s one of the only ways to interrupt intimacy positively). Having someone to talk to, like someone you know has more experience than you with sex, such as a sex educator, a medical professional, a therapist, or just a friend who’s been where you’ve been before, makes those situations so much easier. Troubles getting things going in the bedroom aren’t deal-breakers. They’re often solved through simple communication, relaxation, foreplay, or lubricant. Sometimes you just need a little help to know which one.
3. Health problems relating to sex cause way more deaths, hospitalizations, and permanent defects than they need to, most certainly.
Most sexually transmitted infections are easily solved in their earliest stages through antibiotics. The longer someone waits to talk about what they think might be a problem downstairs, the more severe that problem can become. Women should never be held back by embarrassment from talking about potential health problems that can arise from sex. Doctors understand better than anyone how many people have sex. Your doctor isn’t about to judge you for having sex and contracting an issue from it. It happens to people all the time, people who aren’t promiscuous and have perfectly fine hygiene habits; every doctor knows this. If you aren’t married to your partner, that’s fine too: 95 percent of American couples have sex before they’re married. Every time I’ve talked to my doctor about being sexually active at a checkup, she’s just checked the clipboard to see if I’m on birth control and asked if I remember every time to use a condom. Then I say yes, we high five, she checks out my downstairs mix-up, and everybody leaves good to go.
I hope these tips were helpful! If you ever feel like your friends or your mom aren’t the best people to chat about what’s going on, you can always walk over to the nearest planned parenthood or talk to your doctor. Also, checking out this web site helps, too:
and this book:
good:
Recently, a female GOOD staffer was commiserating with a male journalist about the dearth of female bylines in major American magazines. She suggested a solution: He should speak to the editors of these magazines—people he knows personally—about how awesome she is. She was on the phone with a highly regarded editor within a week, discussing the possibilities for freelance work.
Reading big statistics, it’s easy to place yourself in a bystander role. You acknowledge that women are underrepresented in your industry—particularly if you work in media, design, or tech. You know that they are far less visible, and probably paid less, than men of equal experience. You’re frustrated at how difficult it sometimes seems to fill your workplace or panel discussion with enough women. But what have you ever done about it?
PROMOTE WOMEN. It’s time to stop lamenting and start doing. Here’s how:
1 Think of three women in your industry who are underpaid, underemployed, or under-noticed. Women who are rising through the ranks more slowly than their male peers. Women who are really great at what they do but haven’t been recognized as up-and-comers yet.
2 Think of three powerful people (of any gender) in your industry who you know personally and who are in a position to hire or assign to women.
3 Compose an email to each of those powerful people individually and recommend a specific woman they should meet, hire, or otherwise work with.
4 Email those women and tell them you’ve recommended them. We haven’t provided a form email by design—a genuine, original email is what counts.
Put your email where your mouth is. Use your network. Endorse women today. Then boost the signal. Women, share your stories about infiltrating male professional networks. Facilitators, submit your own accounts of giving women a leg up. Submit your stories here on GOOD’s Tumblr, on Twitter with the #promotewomen hashtag, or in the comments on our site. We’ll compile your stories and publish them as inspiration.
We have the power to end the gender gap. Take five minutes and send three emails to do something about it.
- kitchen bar table (via An Interior Decorator’s Home)
OPEN STORAGE FTW!
Isn’t open storage just the best thing ever? ISN’T IT?!
(Source: ohdeargodwhy, via prmurphy)
Most people on both sides of the pro-life pro-choice debate get caught up in the wrong aspects of the issue of abortion legalization. My classmates at Hendrix College recently began a somewhat heated debate on the Facebook wall of one Charlie Peterson who posted a pro-life hypothetical (and largely unrealistic) narrative on his wall a while back. What I noticed about the debate that ensued were three common mistakes:
1. People forgot about the reason why women have the right to choose an abortion in the first place
2. People pretended that the legalization of abortion was the only thing that could be altered to solve the issues, both ethical and otherwise, surrounding the debate
3. People only argued on the basis of ethics, which vary from person to person based on culture and lifestyle (an argument of ethics almost never yields a universal solution)
I’m here to fill in for some of those mistakes.
The reason why pro-choice legislation was passed in the United States was because regardless of whether or not abortion was legal, women were still getting abortions, and when it was illegal, were experiencing a myriad of health problems. Because they felt uncomfortable speaking with legitimate medical professionals about how to abort their babies, women were asking confidants for medical advice, and were often given incredibly misleading information that lead to vaginal mutilation, the birth of severely mentally and physically disabled infants, and often death. Some of the solutions women were told were the well-known throwing-oneself-down-the-stairs myth, drinking bleach or incredibly potent alcohol in near-fatal doses, or in some even more disturbing cases, sticking sharp or pointed objects far into the uterus and scraping out the endometrium and fetus, often leading to fatal infection or permanent disability. People operating “back-alley” abortion clinics were in multiple cases leading in women uneducated on abortion processes only to molest them or mutilate their vaginae for sexual pleasure. The government had to respond.
Making abortion illegal nationwide will keep some women from having abortions, but not all women, and those who choose to will be in dire and hopeless positions. Resigning them willingly to that fate, often to die, by denying them legitimate medical attention when they could potentially face psychological or physical trauma from having a child, is just as morally reprehensible as passing legislation that allows for the killing of fetuses. Either way, someone dies as a result of the legislation. But there are other viable solutions that work in the pro-choice situation which make more sense.
Our sex education system is flawed. Statistics show that the most logical reason why America has the highest rate of teen pregnancy and contraction of STDs per capita in the world is because we as a nation prefer abstinence-only sex education. It is rare that one finds a sex education system in America that covers what happens during an abortion, the difference between healthy and unhealthy sexual relationships beyond consenting and not consenting, and whether or not having sex is perfectly natural. Americans like to pretend that most people won’t have sex before they get married, when in fact, 95 percent of Americans do. The number of abortions in the country would drop drastically if we had a better sex education system. Illegalizing abortion will in fact decrease the number of abortions less than having better sex education and the option for abortion by a medical professional available, if one looks at other countries with similar situations.
Having the option for abortion available to women after seeking advice from a medical professional is more beneficial to society than making abortion illegal. Getting an abortion actually isn’t that simple. Most doctors advise against it, and there’s often hours of paperwork to go through, even weeks if the baby is more than two months along. A woman has tens of chances to back out of the process. All of the movies where the girls just walk right into the clinic and fill out the forms and seemingly moments later walk out baby-free are about as inaccurate as the time it takes to process DNA in an episode of CSI. One can’t choose to get an abortion that flippantly. It’s better that if a woman makes the choice to get an abortion she has the chance to talk about her options with a medical professional educated on the matter intelligently and receive accurate information. Only after addressing the truth about her personal abortion as a medical procedure can a woman really make a decision based on ethics; blanketing the issue with a generalized ethical statement cannot possibly account for every case in which an abortion could be considered.
Legalizing abortion did make the number of recorded abortions carried out in the U.S. rise. Often even despite advice from medical professionals women do in fact have abortions for the wrong reasons. However, there are justifiable reasons based on ethics that people who disagree with abortion morally can accept. Some women get abortions because they are forcibly raped and afterward become pregnant. Some women get abortions because having their baby could kill both them and the baby. Because there is such a wide range of situations in which abortion becomes an option, looking at abortion exclusively ethically or philosophically is something people should be able to do for themselves on a case-by-case basis; the issue is rarely as black-and-white as living child or dead child, and people’s ethics vary widely based on their cultural background. People who believe in reincarnation often are all right with abortion ethically because they can send the soul back to find a better life. People from a lower socioeconomic status are often more likely to approve of abortion because they know how unfair and difficult it is for a child to grow up in poverty. People who don’t judge the world based off of any religious belief find tons of scientific, political, and ethical reasons why abortion in many cases assists the population more than it injures it. Why should one social group’s ethical opinions trump all others’? People who aren’t all right with abortion have the right to choose not to have one, just as people who are all right with it can have the option available. The decision isn’t limiting to anyone.
If “pro-life” people (an incredibly misleading name) really want to do something to save lives, they should put forth an effort to educate people on sex and safe sex, to prevent the sexual assault of women, and to reduce the number of children in foster care or group homes by adopting and caring for the unwanted children they pump into the system every year. Otherwise they’re just as bad as the “negligent mothers” they condemn.
So recently I’ve been getting into the environmentally-friendly scene, trying to find more ways to be a responsible consumer, and taking better care of my body. Along the way I learned that store-bought shampoos are actually designed to use cheap chemicals that severely over-dry your hair and drain it of all its natural oils so that you are forced to purchase conditioner, which over-greases your hair so you will have to wash it again sooner. This frustrated me severely, because shampoo and conditioner are expensive, and I’m always feeling bogged down by overly-dry and then overly-greasy hair.
Then, after I got the Bust DIY Guide to Life, I found DIY recipes for homemade, all-natural, non-harmful beauty products and found some relief.
Cheap Alternative Shampoo: One of the best alternative shampoos you can use is baking soda. A giant box of it costs between two and three dollars at the grocery store, and you can use it for anything from shampooing to freshening fabrics to scrubbing your bathtub. It’s an all-natural environmentally friendly cleaner that doesn’t strip the natural oils from your hair, so no need for conditioner.
Take a couple generous pinches of baking soda in your hand while in the shower and make a paste with it and water, then work it through your hair and rinse out. Your hair will feel clean, but only smell like hair. If you want your hair to smell a little better, take a mason jar full of baking soda and add a few drops of essential oil, maybe six to ten, then shake well. Work pinches of this through your hair and it will make you smell like the essential oil of your choice. I use peppermint.
Cheap Alternative Conditioner: Naturally, the average woman’s hair doesn’t actually need conditioner, but we all have dry days and we all love shiny, healthy-looking hair. After shampooing with your baking soda and finishing up your shower, pour a solution of three parts water to one part lemon juice over your hair to make it shiny. If your hair is too dry for you once it drys, mash up an avocado really well and run it through your hair. I’m told not to get too carried away with this because it makes you smell like guacamole and it’s sort of hard to rinse out.
Cheap Alternative Skin Care: One of the most common causes of acne breakouts is over-drying of the skin. A great way to simultaneously cleanse and moisturize is to use this great sugar scrub:
Mix one cup of pure cane sugar (I get the kind with giant brown crystals because it exfoliates really well) with about an ounce of olive or sweet almond oil, half a tea spoon of vitamin E oil, and a few drops of essential oil of your choosing. Use this to scrub your face and even parts of your body, but probably stay clear of your lady parts. Sugar causes problems down there.
I have used this sugar scrub on my upper back for four showers and my bacne is almost completely gone. The acne on my face is gradually disappearing as well.
An all-natural toner you can try after you use your regular cleanser is witch hazel. An all-natural face mask that pulls oil from the skin (really really really effectively) is cooked oatmeal left on your face about twenty minutes.
A Few Things to Steer Clear of:
