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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My mother blamed calling it a “spontaneous abortion” for the “confusion” that led my neighbors health insurance company to deny coverage for her miscarriage. Now that I’m older I’m just like no the insurance company just didn’t want to pay and found a reason that would hopefully traumatize a woman out of fighting them on it and were backed by a wider society that just hates women in general. Like I’ve heard people say it’s more humane to call it a spontaneous abortion because “miscarriage” implies the woman did something wrong and idt the wording is actually going to manage to make the experience that much less awful but regardless I also don’t think the wording was actually the issue in that situation. And the word abortion wouldn’t be that stigmatized either if we didn’t consider pregnancy as a punishment for sex that must be meted out no matter the circumstances of the sex itself or the physical, emotional, or social safety of the resulting pregnancy.



  • That being said, these people were clearly unwell, punishing them for the horrors brought forth by their poor decisions seems gratuitous.

    Prostitution and sex trafficking are also pretty common among substance using women. The lower rate of homelessness among women is mostly just because a brothel has a roof. If we were just housing and feeding them in livable conditions and having them attend outpatient treatment while offering birth control you wouldn’t see this nearly as much. Birth control is pretty critical to giving a woman the immediate safety needed to exit any kind of abusive relationship whether it’s a domestic partner or a pimp / madam. Food and housing don’t hurt either, and if you can get them to break the addiction and not need drug money you’ve done pretty much everything possible to help them break the cycle. It’s actually pretty rewarding to see how many people can figure it out with the right supports in place.

    Oh this reminded me of this short (trigger warning for extremely dark / gross nurse humor).



  • Well, and this what men are getting to when they get upset about men’s rights and bring up the draft right? It’s genuinely something they should be mad about they’re just misdirecting their anger.

    I’ve thought about this one a lot; there’s several fanfics I’ve written that touch on this; one is an alternate of historical fictions and the other involves the Drow from the forgotten realms. There’s this tendency (especially in erotic media) for matriarchal societies to have women act more masculine and sexually aggressive and have men crawling around on the floor in excrement and it always bugs me. There’s so many existing negative stereotypes of men and positive stereotypes of women that could just be inversely accentuated to create that kind of society. I could talk for days about that one, LOL.


  • I feel like it’s less about putting people in power (although it may do that to a certain extent) and more about reinforcing the role of poor and minority men as disposable tools. War is a means for the rich and powerful to squabble over resources, but it’s also a way for them to exert their control over a large population of men. One of my bigger feminist sticking points on the topic of how patriarchy hurts men is that its not just about controlling women, its also about creating a class of men who are disposable by convincing them that it’s either for the benefit of women and / or to help them control women too (which it does a little, it’s just that most of that power is still going to a small subset of men).














  • I remember reading a paper on phage therapy ages ago. Iirc the implementation difficulty was that you have to culture the bacteria from the patient then use that culture to breed the phages. Culture & Sensitivity testing alone is already usually a 24h+ process and even a tricky sample collection process; at least when I was a phlebotomist 10 years ago it was the most complicated process I was qualified to perform.

    On the other hand phage therapy is great because you don’t really have resistance issues and they’re not going to be harmful to the person. Viruses are extremely host specific compared to bacteria so if they feed on a certain type of bacteria they’re unlikely to be or are even incapable of hurting a human. Vancomycin on the other hand requires regular peak and trough testing to make sure the person is getting enough to kill bacteria but not enough to kill the person.

    The issue being that in addition to the culture they then have to breed the phages with a sample of the bacteria collected from the patient. You could maybe develop a “library” of phages to try but I feel like you’d need to keep getting population samples because they’re that host specific. I’m also not sure how long breeding the phages would take vs how long it takes to test antibiotic sensitivity.