Unless you’ve been marooned in a different dimension all this
week, you’ll have heard about the casting of Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor.
The ripples of outrage among certain groups; the cries of triumph among others.
It sparked a discussion on Twitter, which escalated gradually into a heated
debate about male and female role models, during which a group of (mostly) men
asked me repeatedly why girls couldn’t be satisfied with Wonder Woman, Cagney
& Lacey, Minnie Mouse and Miss Marple, rather than trying to muscle in on
the Dr Who clubhouse.
Well, it’s a fair question. Why do we need specifically female role models? My daughter spent
her childhood playing at Harry Potter, wearing my old academic gown, liberally
splashed with fake blood. I myself spent much of my own childhood pretending to
be Kwai Chang Caine, or the Doctor (mine was Jon Pertwee), or Marine Boy, or
the Six Million Dollar Man. It never occurred to either of us to feel that we were
missing out on heroes of our own gender. But here’s the thing. Over the centuries,
girls have become used to the fact that most of their favourite heroes are male.
As a child, I wanted to be a boy, because boys seemed to get all the best parts
in the stories I liked to read. My daughter was the same; after all, who wouldn’t
rather be Harry than Ginny or Hermione?
Boys have no such problem. Even now, children of both sexes tend
to assume that the lead role in any story will be taken by a boy. Boys have
twelve Doctors of their own gender, but still manage to feel threatened when
girls claim just one for themselves. Boys have hundreds of superheroes;
detectives, action heroes, spies, wizards, knights and cool villains. And yes,
girls do have those things too, but in far smaller numbers, and with the
unspoken assumption that female heroes are somehow less interesting to boys than
they would be to girls. Girls are happy to dress up as characters of both genders, from
Captain America to James Bond, but how many little boys would dare to dress up
as Wonder Woman?
Let’s face it: most little boys (with the help of the toy and
game industry) find it easier to identify with a cartoon dog, or a robot, or an
anthropomorphic car, or a two-headed alien, or a villain who wants to blow up
the world than a female human being. Why? Because they’ve been taught from the
earliest age that behaving like a girl
is the most shameful thing a boy can do. If a boy cries, he’s being a girl. If he shows vulnerability,
he’s being a girl. If he’s afraid, he’s being a girl. No boy wants to run like a girl, it means not being able
to run properly. Same with fighting like
a girl: it means not knowing how to fight. And by dint of being told that being like a girl means being silly, and
weak, and afraid, those boys will grow up into men who look down on women, and who
find it impossible to believe that a woman could be their equal in any way.
And yet, you could argue that this is precisely why little
boys need female role models. Boys need female role models to teach them how to
identify with women, rather than just
see them in terms of attractiveness or unattractiveness. And there’s no reason that
a boy shouldn’t be able to identify
with a female character as easily as a male one – as long as that character displays
qualities to aspire to.
Which brings us to the crux of the thing. What qualities
make a hero?
Opinions differ, but most agree that courage is essential. And
courage comes in many forms, none of which are restricted to a single gender.
One man on Twitter, sneering at the thought that women could ever show real heroism, implied that giving birth
was the closest a woman could get. Well, childbirth is certainly painful and
hard, especially in those parts of the world in which women are more likely to
die in childbirth than from any other cause; where women are forced into
marriages at the age of twelve or thirteen, and forced to give birth time and time
again. Yes, that takes courage. And so does enduring rape, or FGM, or war, or
displacement, or the kind of oppression forced upon women in countries all
around the world. But courage and heroism aren’t the same thing. The courage of
the oppressed and downtrodden, though real, is not a courage young boys are
encouraged to aspire to. It’s a passive kind of courage, a courage based on
endurance, rather than action. And to dwell upon the courage of oppressed women
is to feed into a narrative that says: women
are weak, women are helpless, women need the protection of men. In short,
it’s a narrative that casts the men as heroes, and the women as those in need
of rescuing. Casting women as heroes challenges that narrative. It suggests
that, in some cases, at least, women can be their own saviours – or even save men from oppression, instead
of it being the other way round.
But the idea that courage, like Lego, comes in two colours –
the passive, “feminine” courage of childbirth and bringing up kids on a
shoestring, and the active, “masculine” heroism of going to war, driving
fighter planes or risking your life working with power cables – is ultimately toxic,
feeding the idea that men and women’s bodies and minds are radically different.
They’re not: and courage, like human beings, is a complex and personal thing, spanning
a whole spectrum of colours. Here are just a few of them, challenging the
narratives of what makes a woman and what makes a man, but all of them showing
courage:
The all-women Kurdish groups of soldiers fighting ISIS
The Nigerian girls, risking their lives to go to school in
defiance of Boko Haram
Those who challenge the stigma of mental illness
Those who come out as gay or trans
Those who find the courage to leave their abusive partners
Those who stand up for their beliefs in the face of their
peer group
Those who fight for justice against brutal or oppressive
regimes
Those who fight to overcome fear, anxiety or depression
The aid workers and peacemakers who risk their lives in war zones
But action isn’t the only way to show courage. It is also:
That time you thought you couldn’t go on, but did
That time you stood up for yourself when you didn’t know you
could
That time you intervened when someone was bullying somebody
else
That time you faced your deepest fear
That time you dared to be yourself
That time you were brave enough to apologize, or admit you
were wrong
All the times you kept going in the face of failure
All those times, whatever your gender, you were a hero. Remember that. You were a fucking hero.
I was inspired by severalarticles about the Tampon Tax recently and some of the protests against the categorization of tampons as “luxury items,” so I made this up. It’s funny because it’s true.
Tampons are a “luxury item”
Once I worked as an intern in the state capital. One of the representatives I worked for was this middle-aged guy. And he hated the tampon and napkin machines in the women’s bathrooms. Hated them. He insisted that they weren’t necessary.
I found out why after I’d been working there, oh, about a month. My period started suddenly, as it sometimes does, and I asked to excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room. He wanted to know why. I told him.
He started ranting about how lazy women were. How we wasted time. How we were so careless and unhygenic, and that there was no call for that. He finished by telling me that I certainly was NOT going to the ladies’ room and that I was just going to sit there and work. He finished this off with a decisive nod, as if I’d just been told and there could be no possible argument.
“If I don’t go,” I said in an overly patient tone, “the blood is going to soak through my pants, stain my new skirt that I just bought, and possibly get on this chair I’m sitting in. I need something to soak up the blood. That’s why I need to go to the bathroom.”
His face turned oatmeal-gray; an expression of pure horror spread across his face. He leaned forward and whispered, “Wait, you mean that if you don’t go, you’ll just keep on bleeding? I thought that women could turn it off any time that they wanted!”
I thought, You have got to be kidding.
Several horrified whispers later, I learned that he wasn’t. He actually thought a) that women could shut down the menstrual cycle at will, b) that we essentially picked a week per month to spend more time in the bathroom, i.e. to goof off, and c) that napkins and tampons were sex toys paid for by Health and Human Services. I didn’t know the term then, but he believed that tampons were dildos. Which was why he and a good number of his friends considered them luxuries.
And that’s how, at twenty, I had to give a talk on menstruation to a middle-aged married state representative who was one of my bosses. American politics, ladies and gentlemen.
“You think because I’m young I haven’t faced any real challenges. But one time I lost a foil ball under the fridge. I dealt with it fine, but I’ll never not miss it.”
i’ve been working 3+ years in a job during which i’ve seen hundreds of women’s bodies in a medical context
lemme tell you a thing
women are fucking hairy, ok? i’ve seen women covered with hair from their ankles to their armpits. women with super visible pubic hair that approaches their bellybuttons, regardless of race/ethnicity. we have hair absolutely everywhere and our public image as women is totally devoid of this reality.
men really have no idea how hard women have to work to make ourselves hairless. it’s as unnatural for us as it is for them but this is something that doesn’t even cross their minds as they emerge from their caves looking like unwashed wookies not even aware of how much they’re just allowed to exist.
I am an ER nurse and this is the best description of this event that I have ever heard.
FEMALE HEART ATTACKS
I was aware that female heart attacks are different, but this is description is so incredibly visceral that I feel like I have an entire new understanding of what it feels like to be living the symptoms on the inside. Women rarely have the same dramatic symptoms that men have… you know, the sudden stabbing pain in the chest, the cold sweat, grabbing the chest & dropping to the floor the we see in movies. Here is the story of one woman’s experience with a heart attack:
"I had a heart attack at about 10:30 PM with NO prior exertion, NO prior emotional trauma that one would suspect might have brought it on. I was sitting all snugly & warm on a cold evening, with my purring cat in my lap, reading an interesting story my friend had sent me, and actually thinking, ‘A-A-h, this is the life, all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up.
A moment later, I felt that awful sensation of indigestion, when you’ve been in a hurry and grabbed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with a dash of water, and that hurried bite seems to feel like you’ve swallowed a golf ball going down the esophagus in slow motion and it is most uncomfortable. You realize you shouldn’t have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thoroughly and this time drink a glass of water to hasten its progress down to the stomach. This was my initial sensation–the only trouble was that I hadn’t taken a bite of anything since about 5:00 p.m.
After it seemed to subside, the next sensation was like little squeezing motions that seemed to be racing up my SPINE (hind-sight, it was probably my aorta spasms), gaining speed as they continued racing up and under my sternum (breast bone, where one presses rhythmically when administering CPR).
This fascinating process continued on into my throat and branched out into both jaws. ‘AHA!! NOW I stopped puzzling about what was happening – we all have read and/or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the signals of an MI happening, haven’t we? I said aloud to myself and the cat, Dear God, I think I’m having a heart attack!
I lowered the foot rest dumping the cat from my lap, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, If this is a heart attack, I shouldn’t be walking into the next room where the phone is or anywhere else… but, on the other hand, if I don’t, nobody will know that I need help, and if I wait any longer I may not be able to get up in a moment.
I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed the Paramedics… I told her I thought I was having a heart attack due to the pressure building under the sternum and radiating into my jaws. I didn’t feel hysterical or afraid, just stating the facts. She said she was sending the Paramedics over immediately, asked if the front door was near to me, and if so, to un-bolt the door and then lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in.
I unlocked the door and then laid down on the floor as instructed and lost consciousness, as I don’t remember the medics coming in, their examination, lifting me onto a gurney or getting me into their ambulance, or hearing the call they made to St. Jude ER on the way, but I did briefly awaken when we arrived and saw that the radiologist was already there in his surgical blues and cap, helping the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambulance. He was bending over me asking questions (probably something like ‘Have you taken any medications?’) but I couldn’t make my mind interpret what he was saying, or form an answer, and nodded off again, not waking up until the Cardiologist and partner had already threaded the teeny angiogram balloon up my femoral artery into the aorta and into my heart where they installed 2 side by side stints to hold open my right coronary artery.
I know it sounds like all my thinking and actions at home must have taken at least 20-30 minutes before calling the paramedics, but actually it took perhaps 4-5 minutes before the call, and both the fire station and St Jude are only minutes away from my home, and my Cardiologist was already to go to the OR in his scrubs and get going on restarting my heart (which had stopped somewhere between my arrival and the procedure) and installing the stents.
Why have I written all of this to you with so much detail? Because I want all of you who are so important in my life to know what I learned first hand.
1. Be aware that something very different is happening in your body, not the usual men’s symptoms but inexplicable things happening (until my sternum and jaws got into the act). It is said that many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn’t know they were having one and commonly mistake it as indigestion, take some Maalox or other anti-heartburn preparation and go to bed, hoping they’ll feel better in the morning when they wake up… which doesn’t happen. My female friends, your symptoms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call the Paramedics if ANYTHING is unpleasantly happening that you’ve not felt before. It is better to have a ‘false alarm’ visitation than to risk your life guessing what it might be!
2. Note that I said ‘Call the Paramedics.’ And if you can take an aspirin. Ladies, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!
Do NOT try to drive yourself to the ER - you are a hazard to others on the road.
Do NOT have your panicked husband who will be speeding and looking anxiously at what’s happening with you instead of the road.
Do NOT call your doctor – he doesn’t know where you live and if it’s at night you won’t reach him anyway, and if it’s daytime, his assistants (or answering service) will tell you to call the Paramedics. He doesn’t carry the equipment in his car that you need to be saved! The Paramedics do, principally OXYGEN that you need ASAP. Your Dr. will be notified later.
3. Don’t assume it couldn’t be a heart attack because you have a normal cholesterol count. Research has discovered that a cholesterol elevated reading is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it’s unbelievably high and/or accompanied by high blood pressure). MIs are usually caused by long-term stress and inflammation in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hormones into your system to sludge things up in there. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let’s be careful and be aware. The more we know the better chance we could survive to tell the tale.“
Reblog, repost, Facebook, tweet, pin, email, morse code, fucking carrier pigeon this to save a life!
I wish I knew who the author was. I’m definitely not the OP, actually think it might be an old chain email or even letter from back in the day. The version I saw floating around Facebook ended with “my cardiologist says mail this to 10 friends, maybe you’ll save one!” And knew this was way too interesting not to pass on.
Female heart attacks are much different, and most people don’t know it!
This is so much more helpful than the fucking lists that basically describe everything that happens during a really nasty panic attack and then tell you to go seek help as if you don’t have an anxiety disorder that does this to you on a regular basis and can afford to go to the emergency room.
My mother had a heart attack and drove herself to the hospital. She said to her it felt like an asthma attack.
