USDA Choice motherhood! Yum!

YUCK!

I like the idea of every mother a mother by choice, but this is just stupid terminology. And the word "choice" doesn't even bother me that much in most contexts, but this diction is horrible. A choice should be a noun; "choice" used as a modifier means something entirely different, and something I don't think we want to apply to humans.

Maybe it's just because I'm a vegetarian?

Including veggie burgers, which I sometimes have uncontrollable cravings for. If you have to read a label to figure out what's in your food, you've already gone wrong. This does not keep me from occasional forays into the junk food thinly disguised as health food at my local co-op. However, I would be surprised if tofu and edamame were the problem, rather than genetically modified emulsified transgendered pesticide-laden overprocessed byproducts of factory-produced food. Too much of anything - including water and oxygen - can hurt you. And a LOT of the stuff in our food supply is less benevolent than those.

These people were punished for a crime without a trial. Even if you think the punishment was relatively humane (and I'd love to see how humane you thought it was if YOU were handcuffed and paraded in front of a jeering audience for any minor crime you might have engaged in), it is a human rights abuse to sentence and punish people without a trial.

Is it really that surprising when things go wrong in response to screwing around with body chemistry? - especially when we're overriding a healthy function instead of fixing something that's dysfunctional? Another attempt to throw a chemical wrench into natural systems bites the dust. Good riddance, HRT!

I am as shocked as anyone by the seemingly sudden descent of aches and pains and wrinkles and gray hair here in my still-early 30s, but I think I was still in my 20s when I realized that growing up means facing reality, even if it is really, really hard. Maybe we'll start to apply some inductive reasoning here and accept that there are limits, that we will eventually get wrinkly, suffer grievous illenesses and die. Maybe we'll stop screwing around with our physiology - maybe even with ecosystems too!

Yeah, well, a girl can dream.

I have not lived through menopause yet. I have a friend who is perimenopausal and is living with random hot flashes and mood swings. I am living through blessedly predictable ones (my menstrual cycle). What I am trying to say that when we - and I include myself - have problems we tend to look for a magic bullet. Afraid of terrorists? Bomb something! Don't like holes in your spinach? Poison the flea beetles! Having mood swings that don't fit into your lifestyle? Try our pill!

I did not mean to sound so accusatory. I just think our chemical dependency system is excessive. Our modern lifestyle requires us to be machines. And when we find out that filling ourselves with artificial hormones is bad for us, we seem so surprised. I think our cultural alienation from our bodies is frightening, and we are killing more than ourselves because of it.

The term "gender test" conjures up feminine stereotypes for the author because "sex" is physical and "gender" is cultural. Sex designations are male and female; gender designations are masculine and feminine. So it sounds like they're testing for femininity, not chromosomes.

Oh my. I truly wish you hadn't made me think about that. But thanks for making the great point, even so!

I am guessing that any man who was getting persistent violent abuse and murder threats from his wife of girlfriend would also be eligible for a panic room. I know that some men ARE abused by women, usually emotionally. But I grew up in a socioeconomic group that allowed and even encouraged physical and psychosexual abuse of girls and women. I have never witnessed abuse of men by women, and I don't know how many deaths, if any, it has actually caused. Have you, and do you? In any case, it has not become a major public health and criminal issue anywhere in the world, as far as I know. I'm not saying that's because it's not happening. Perhaps it's just because it's not a natural consequence of the dominant culture, and is therefore extremely rare.

I don't know why, as a non-feminist, you torture yourself by reading this blog. But I do appreciate that you post in good faith and always under the same name, unlike the trolls who seem to be infesting the place at the moment. So, thanks for that, and maybe since you continue to be here you could try to comment politely and perhaps at greater length on the topics at hand - in a way that shows you have read and thought about the original post, you know what I mean? If you're going to talk to people who disagree with you, it's good to try to find common ground first and lead the discussion to a different place if that's your goal. For example, "How terrible that women in Britain are experiencing this! And did you know that men do too?" Then you could post a link to something about that. I guess being a gadfly could be fun (?), but it doesn't generally enlighten anyone.