the thing is like. i get that it’s scary and makes people who do desire to get pregnant uncomfortable when we talk about the brutality and violence of pregnancy and the damage that pregnancy can do to your body
but you deserve to give informed consent to that process.
the lies around pregnancy - that it’s inherently safe, that it doesn’t do you permanent damage, that it’s only extremely rare for people to die of pregnancy complications, etc like
all of these are lies constructed so that more people will get pregnant w/o knowing all that
there needs to be more talk about the impact of miscarriages and how common they are, how different abortion processes are and how accessible they are
but also like. talking about how pregnancy fucks your body up should not be taboo
this is a process that permanently changes most people’s bodies, and that’s even if the pregnancy doesn’t do them like. severe illness or injury
and i just think everybody should have a right to KNOW that
bc to live in a society that intentionally obscures and hides facts about a completely optional and dangerous process does so for a reason, and that reason is based in a very sinister ideology that does not value bodily autonomy or informed consent
the number of people who are pregnant and don’t know about what induced labour entails and what post partum bleeding is horrifies me
Here is a story about the depths to which pregnant people are seen as a vessel for a baby, and the importance of finding prenatal care that assumes you are a human and not a baby holder:
When I was pregnant I was in a million forums for pregnant people because (cough adhd hyperfixation) and I had something called SPD (Symphysis pubis dysfunction) (not Sensory Processing Disorder though I also have that) which is where your pubic bones separate early (more or less) because they get all loosey goosey as your body gets ready to crank that baby out.
Except my pubic bone got confused and got misaligned at like 3 months pregnant. I could barely walk. I couldn’t roll over in bed. Doing something that required me to shift my weight from one foot to another like opening a door knob was like an excruciatingly painful knife being stabbed into my pubic bone, I can’t express how intense and blinding it was.
So I am in one million baby forums like “am I dying what is happening why is there a knife in my pubic bone” and all these people are like “I have that too! my doctor says it’s normal and not to worry because it doesn’t hurt the baby. I just deal with it by laying in bed for months in excruciating pain and think about how lucky I am to be having a little miracle growing in my body.”
So lol nope. I went to my midwife and they are like, “Oh squeeze a can between your knees look up a physical therapy youtube on SPD” and I did that can-squeeze thing and it CURED THE PROBLEM in ONE DAY. I had been SUFFERING, y'all, it felt miraculous.
And I was so full of rage (flames, flames on the side of my face) that people are being told “Oh, it’s NORMAL just deal with it” “It doesn’t hurt the baby.” Like, look, yes it’s NORMAL but it’s 100% treatable!!! SPD (again, not Sensory processing disorder) affects 1 in 5 pregnant people.
I was lucky to have amazing midwives (need a gender neutral term for that profession, but they see pregnant men and women)(side note highly recommend midwives if you are gender nonconfirming/a man/etc) and I have DOZENS of examples of shit like this.
(Another example is post partum friends being like “oh I am peeing my pants 900x day after giving birth” and my doctor says it’s NORMAL so I just dealt with it for decades. My midwives were like “Oh that’s normal and also physical therapy cures that in like 2 sessions”)
When my sister was looking to get pregnant she was given the best advice. She was told that being pregnant is an experience akin to being in a moderate sized car crash, in terms of risk and lasting injury.
Some people in moderate car crashes are very lucky, and walk away with zero injury. Some are very unlucky, and die. But most people fall into the third category, where they’ll be injured at the time, then heal, and then for the rest of their life they have some minor and liveable complication from the injury. Like a knee that lets you know when the rain is coming, or a back that doesn’t like seats without lumbar support, or a shoulder that never quite gets its full range of motion back.
The vast majority of people survive and thrive, like. But their body is never the same again. And people should know that when they make the choice of whether to put their body through that or not
“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”
— Vincent Van Gogh
“If I am worth anything later, I am worth
something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in
the beginning.”
tbh shoutout to the over 40s on tumblr, sorry the internet acts like yall belong in the retirement home when ur literally just regular adults with hobbies
I was going to leave comments in the tags, but I decided this was important enough to put on main.
In college, my friend group collectively got into the SCA - Society for Creative Anachronism. They’re the people who get really into medieval reenactment, the fighting and crafts and cooking, they have kings and queens and knights and events and a good percentage of them (but not all!) work or have worked at Ren Faires.
I am forever grateful my friends dragged me into that, because it was my first introduction to fandom in older adults. Middle-aged dorks. Elderly nerds. Absolutely as intense and weird and hilarious and fun as any fan in their teens or 20s. I started getting into fandom already knowing there was a road ahead for me as I got older, full of handmade costumes and late night movies and shelves of pewter dragon goblets and mixed-aged road trips to meet ups and conventions.
And it kills me that so many people don’t know that sort of community even exists. On both sides, even! I went to Philcon a few years ago, which tends towards older fans, and an older woman I was talking to sadly told me that she thought fandom was dying out, because she never saw younger fans any more.
Over the past decade, there’s been a really toxic movement towards keeping different ages strictly separated, both in and outside of fandom. There’s this strong implication that if an older person wants to interact with a younger person, there is something inherently predatory about that.
Yeah, that attitude sucks. That drive towards separation and puritanism sucks. Declaring that younger people should have nothing to look forward to and that older people should stay separated and lonely sucks. It sucks and we are all worse for it.
Don’t fear age. Don’t put an age limit on having fun. Give yourself a damn future.
Beverly passed away in 2019, but she was one of many of my favorite, elder cosplayers that frequent DragonCon and remind all of us to keep playing as long as we can.
“nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them” Assata Shakur
Writing Advice: How to Create Conflict when Your Characters are Competent.
Featuring Leverage, the ultimate in Competency Porn.
Make them so good it gets them in trouble. So you’ve got a hacker and he’s the best, definitively. Okay, well, one of his fake IDs just got called for jury duty. You pretended to be a psychic so well, someone kidnapped you to talk to a dead crime lord.
Make them targets. You’re so good, enemies you didn’t even know about are trying to kill you just so they won’t have to take you on in your element. You’re being blackmailed into doing a thing because you’re the only one that can.
Limit the scope of competency. Sure, you’re competent as a fighter, but your hacker is in jail and now you have to do his job and you are not competent in that. Yeah, you can climb a building, but do you know what you need to do to not end up in a crevasse while climbing a mountain?
Raise the stakes. Can you handle extracting a orphan being used by a washed up actress to fund her extravagant lifestyle? Yes. But can you handle extracting 30 orphans being used by the Slovenian mob to fund gunrunning? Maybe all you wanted was to get enough money to buy back a house, but instead you have to ruin the company so that all houses they illegally obtained are returned to their rightful owners.
Make others competent, too. Your characters are the best, but are they the best of the best? If you take you enemy down, do you go, too? If you win, does it make them win? Does it get out of hand and make other people start noticing when you’re trying to keep your head down? Do they know every trick in the book and know the next move before you make it?
Make others painfully incompetent. Your characters are the best, but are they woefully unprepared for people who are not even good? Can your hologram hacker roll with it when the vital information is on a casset tape? Is the old mentor up to date on the recent technology, or is he going to screw you because he assumes the cops are just as corrupt/incompetent as when he was young?
Have some standards. Specifically, morals that make it impossible for your characters to back out or gets them in trouble for doing things “off-script.” You can’t leave on the train someone just stole for you because you’ve got to go back and stop the bad guys from bombing the IRS (even if we don’t like them). You wish you could just say no to that assassin contract and leave, but someone’s getting assassinated and you have to stop it because you’re a good guy.
Bring up the past. Do you think that bad guy you brutally scarred a decade ago is going to carry a grudge? Do you have to save your ex-wife from the bad guy, who may also be her boyfriend, and if you suggest that she’ll shut you out and you won’t be able to save her or get paid? It’s Draaamaaaa, babee.
