I’d like for you to share your opinions/thoughts/ideas on what you consider to be the main two differences you see. I’d like perspectives from all kinds of women, from midwives/doulas/nurses to women who consider themselves fairly uneducated about these things.

I’m also missing a few statistics from the article, and would like suggestions from those who have had personal experience and those who can suggest places where I might find the statistics. I’ve done so much research already, but I figured the more research the better really.

My questions are:

-How many insurance policies/companies cover the cost of a birth centre or midwife led birth?
-How much does a midwife led pregnancy birth cost *on average*?
-How much does an ob/gyn led birth cost *on average*?
-Is there somewhere I can find a rough breakdown of the costs of birth/pregnancy in the U.S? For all sorts of things such as birthing pools, drugs, hospital rooms, birth centre stays, pitocin/other induction methods, blood tests, amniocentesis etc?

I’d like those of you that feel comfortable sharing to share your birth stories, whether negative or positive. I’d like a fair balance of stories from the U.S and the U.K if at all possible. If negative experiences, what could have been done to change them? Would those things be able to happen in the area you live in? If positive, what do you think helped you to have a positive birth experience?

You are free to stay anonymous or not so as you see fit. I will of course link anyone who has contributed to the finished article.

Thank you for those that are willing to participate and help me with my research. Blessings to all!

http://ghostlove.livejournal.com/224095.html

What do you recommend?

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904/case-against-breastfeeding

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page18684

Thoughts??

Fat.

Oh my gosh fat is a dangerous and loaded word.

Three little letters, that’s all it is. F-A-T. Fat, a word that is used to control and shame a large portion of the female population.

With a few exceptions, fat is generally a word that inspires fear in most women. Nearly every woman you meet will dread this word. None of them want to be told that they are fat.

To be fat is to be slovenly, slothful, greedy – at least that’s the connotation in this culture anyway. We are surrounded by mixed push/pull messages. We are sold horrendously unhealthy junk foods by the medium of intense advertising and then dismissed as unattractive if we dare to indulge in them and become fat. To be fat is to not fit into the beauty mould.

To be fat is to show that we are people. Being fat reminds men that we are not dolls. Being fat shows that we are not suppressing our natural urges as we should. We are not supposed to be fat, we are not supposed to be horny. If you dare to commit the double sin of being fat and having a sex drive, you can expect to be an object of ridicule and disgust to many men..

Our thunder thighs, our cankles, our bootylicious cans, our jelly bellies, our spare tyres, we are hated by men for these because when we allow the extra flab to cushion our bodies we are denying male control.

It has been quite obvious to me since I was a youngling – I was raised by a fat mother who was always dieting, ALWAYS – that fat isn’t the simple descriptor it should be. It’s a frame of mind, it’s an abject horror.

Of course, women come in all shapes and sizes, many are naturally thin and I’m not denying that. There are precious few women that I know however, that accept their natural shape. Most of the women that I know are either fat women trying to become thin or thin women who think they are fat. So warped is our self perception that we constantly aspire to thinness and then rarely recognise it when we achieve it.

To be thin against your will, against your natural urge is to be controlled. Patriarchal society wants to keep this issue at the forefront of our minds because it keeps us servile. As long as we are constantly worried about our fat, we continue to be corporate whores, to be media slaves. When we are consumed with worrying about our fat, we don’t notice half the things going on around us. We don’t call out the misogynists on the things they should be called out on.

Hollywood is a great example of this fact. A lot of female actors in Hollywood are considered by the industry and indeed some of the public, to be little more than highly paid, well dressed prostitutes. More often that not they are treated as trophies, arm candy for their less attractive male counterparts. If female actors want to make money and succeed in their career field, the most important thing they have to do (besides scotch tape their flimsy dresses to their breasts and simulate sex on camera) is TO BE THIN. When female actors ‘let themselves go’ – in other words become fat – they become a joke. They don’t get work. As the recessions hits many areas of the Western World this ideal becomes more marked and apparent. As the amount of film roles goes down and the amount of competing female actors goes up, the average size of the female actors goes down. The more you need work, the thinner you need to be, to the point of looking emaciated and ill.

What this shows us is that in this society, if you are not a thin beautiful woman, you have nothing to offer. At first glance we’re quite fucked because you KNOW, you just know, that saying ‘fuck you, I’ll eat what I want and let myself get fat’ isn’t going to effect massive changes overnight. Being fat and not bothering with the beauty faff won’t make men suddenly take us seriously or treat us as people. If we are not thin, we have no worth to men, we will simply disappear off the radar. If men don’t consider us attractive enough to want to have sex with, we cease to be noticed by them.

The most insidious thing about the fat phobic society in which we live is that it is self perpetuated. Women know that if they are not thin and beautiful, they will simply be dismissed and ignored by men. Ergo, women become this way on PURPOSE to get male attention, just so they can get by. Being in a patriarchal society doesn’t just mean we are almost constantly surrounded by misogynistic assholes. It means that every aspect of our lives are controlled by men. Therefore to do something that completely removes you from the equation can really make it difficult to survive in any real sense. If you are female and fat, a few men will take you seriously.

It’s not women that are the problem though, you can’t blame men. Most of the time, we are victims of circumstance, of the shitty lot we have thrust upon us. I won’t attack women for exposing their breasts for a living, it takes advantage of a fundamental male weakness and capitulates on their disgust for us and their need to keep us under the thumb. To do all that and earn money seems like a good days work to me. I strongly believe that the women who do this job are unfortunately seldom doing it for that exact reason – but that’s a WHOLE OTHER rant.

My basic approach to the injustice of beauty and fat fear that I see evidence of daily, is threefold.

Firstly, I think we should radically alter the way we are socialising our children from birth. How many times have you heard somebody exclaim over a bassinet/crib/stroller/pram ‘AWW ISN’T HE/SHE SO CUTE!’ This aggravates me intensely and sets my teeth on edge. I think most people deeper than a shallow puddle understand and agree that with adults, it’s generally not a good idea to rate people solely based on their attractiveness. So why is it acceptable to do it to our children? Many progressive thinkers and feminists find it abhorrent to treat women this way, but when we do it to children, both male and female, we are ensuring the cycle continues.

We are teaching them from birth that our physical attractiveness is thing that gets us noticed, the most important thing. We are, in a nutshell, teaching them to only value their bodies and ensuring that our daughters end up struggling in the same way that we do. I don’t think that in decades time, we really want our daughters to be putting up with sizeist men. Ironically enough we often consider fatness in our babies to make them attractive. I wonder what it is that so radically changes as a child ages? What suddenly makes us so afraid of the fat?

My incredibly simplistic suggestion is this: STOP IT. I want to praise children when they smile and giggle and burp and walk and talk. I don’t want my children to be indoctrinated into the cult of beauty. I don’t want to punish male children by inadvertently forcing them to uphold this standard. I tell my son regularly (daily, constantly) how wonderful I think he is, how intelligent, how funny, how sociable. I think he’s gorgeous (probably because I carried him in my body for 42 weeks and birthed him) but I certainly don’t act like this is the only thing about him that is important. I don’t want him to be programmed from infancy to hate being fat or only want his female consorts to be slim.

Secondly, start using the word fat for what it is. Not a sin, not a crime, a descriptor. Words like curvy and voluptuous might seem more flattering, but they just don’t cut it. If you’re fat, you’re fat. It’s just an adjective. Meditate for a while and ponder the question, independently of other people, of whether you are even fat at all. Locate the bits of you that are fat and learn to love them.

You know how we stand in the mirror, sucking in our stomachs and cheeks, poking our midriffs, and plotting ways to be less fat? Do we really want our children to be doing that in the years to come?

If you’re thin because you’ve dieted, LET YOURSELF GO. Radically evaluate why you are the way you are. Do you want to be happy or slim? Can you be both? Is it possible to be fat and happy? (It is – I’m happy to say that I am.)

Lastly, activism. Read Joy’s Nashs fat rants (dear Goddess she is gorgeous). Join websites/fora such as fatshionista. Let women and men know that lots of different types of people are attractive, including the fat ones. You can be fat, happy and gorgeous.

Fat is just a word. It’s subjective. It will mean whatever you let it mean.

I hope one day we learn to live with our fat and love it, not only for us and the sake of our physical and mental health. Also for our children and my desperate hope for a better, happier, healthier more equal future.

Also, I’m a relative newbie to the language of radical feminism. The concepts aren’t new to me, I’ve been living them for a while However, only recently have I started mixing in entirely feminist circles and immersing myself in the culture and the language. My apologies if I’m not down with the radfem lingo.

I’ve been thinking a great deal in the last few weeks about the victim complex that seems to be prevalent in our society, especially amongst women. To start off with, I want to point that I accept that in many ways, women ARE victims. Victims of deep set misogyny in almost every aspect of their existence. Patriarchy decides what colour/style our hair should be, what size/shape our eyes should be, the colour of our eyelashes, the shape/pout/fullness of our lips, how thin we should be, what our breasts and buttocks should look like, what clothes we wear and how we should act.

I’ve never bought into the victim thing. Despite suffering from mental health problems and often feeling like I’m a spectator of my own life, I’ve spent every waking second of the last few years trying to assert control over myself and my surroundings. I’ve refused to let things ‘be done’ to me, so I can blame things on other people. I’ve tried desperately to put myself in control of my own life, do the things that I want so I only I can be blamed for the repercussions. I’ve never wanted to accept that I’m a victim, so I’ve tried to refuse to be a victim of our male dominated and exceptionally sexist society.

I’ve cut my hair off for practicality, I’ve grown out my body hair, I’ve eaten what I wanted and exercised when I wanted, I’ve called people out on sexism whenever I have the chance. However, I’ve met a surprising amount of women calling themselves feminists who don’t do these things. I’m not saying I should have the right to dictate what people call themselves or what they do. But when feminists dress sexy, manipulate men through sex, indulge in a patriarchal defined beauty regime and let society dictate how they should look and act, how are they different from women that aren’t feminists? How are they any different to women that embrace the patriarchy?

Feminism at it’s most basic is the belief in equality of women. In my experience though, it is only radical feminists who have had the courage to assert this belief. A belief is wonderful, a belief is a good thing. In my humble opinion however, a belief is nothing without expressive actions to back it up. Sorry to fall back on an old cliche, but what I’m thinking is:

Don’t talk the talk if you can walk the walk.

Stand up and express yourself. Live your life the way you want to and SHOW society where they can go when they tell you how to dress, what to look like and how to act. If you hate how damaged your hair is because of constant chemical treatments, shave it all off. Stop straightening it and perming it and colouring it. If you want to feel the softness of your natural hair, don’t let the male dominated companies get their products anywhere near you. Brush off the advertising. Embrace your natural looks. Become a fatty, wear the same t-shirt for a week. Sweat when you dance, live life. For the sake of the Goddess, realise that cosmetics, feminine clothes and the aspiration to thinness are oppressing you.

The question that originally inspired this post is:

Why do so many women call themselves feminists and not act any differently to non feminists? Why do so many feminists embrace the patriarchal dictatorship?

My answers to this questions are divided into two schools of thought.

To call yourself a feminist is empowering. It makes you feel stronger. You feel like you are reclaiming yourself as a woman and not a doll when you call yourself a feminist. You’re saying it’s not okay for men to act the way they do and for society to be the way it is. Women want this prestigious label so they can feel somehow better. Like I said though, calling yourself a feminist is all well and good, but act it out. A label is only a descriptive term, by itself it is nothing.

The second school of thought is that when women call themselves feminist and don’t do anything to assert a feminist standpoint in their every day lives, they can continue to keep themselves as victims. This insulates them from the harsh realities of the world, it keeps them in ignorant bliss. You can get the best of both worlds, adoration and desire of men, and sometimes the respect of women. When you call yourself a feminist, there’s a possibility that you might get treated better. But when you are still immersing yourself in misogyny by slathering yourself in synthetic products created by various kinds of cruelty to animals, you are not actively being a feminist. When you do this, you might be still calling yourself a feminist but you are still allowing yourself to be a victim. You are still coming at this issue from a place of comfort. You are still a victim. And when you are still a victim, it’s okay for you to not make any effort. You can gain comfort from your oppression because it keeps life from difficult. It means you aren’t rocking the boat.

If you want to improve quality of life and respect for women, get out there and rock the damn boat as hard as you can. Kick it. Get your feminists friends to stand outside the boat and rip it to pieces. It takes an enormous amount of strength to separate yourself from every form of patriarchy and misogyny, and it’s probably not even possible. The struggle, however, is important.

Go to marches and protests. Burp and fart and itch your tits in public. Don’t be demure, don’t be polite. Don’t do any of the things that women are supposed to do, but men don’t do. Buy from female run companies, read female written literature, listen to female composed music. Dress in a way that is comfortable to you. Don’t give a fuck about your clothes being flattering or expensive, how many men do you know that make that the focal point of their lives? Instead of letting every day be overrun by unimportant mundane things like clothes and makeup, get of bed, throw a sweatsuit on and start living.

Don’t be a victim. You are woman and you are strong.

Chances are that you will be a victim of misogyny at some point in your life. It’s so deeply ingrained in our society it’s probably impossible not to be. But the struggle is important, both for yourself and for women everywhere. The women stand up and fight, the less trapped we will become. Who knows, maybe in a few decades time what I’ve written here might be old news. I hope that when it is time for me to leave this world, I’ll be leaving it as a full person, not someone pigeonholed as a dirty man hating radical feminist.

The conversation began about TV, then moved on to serial killers, then prostitution. The case of Aileen Wuornos sprang to mind.

It gave me something very interesting to think about on the way home. It certainly was better than being plugged into the same old boring iTunes playlist.

When pondering this issue, several things are important to define. First, what is sexual assault? There are several schools of thought on this subject, but I’m only going to explore my own.

That being that any unwanted sexual contact is assault. The best way to negotiate this hurdle is to a: know the person you are going to be intimate with and b: make sure you’re clear on what is acceptable before any bedroom type situations occur.

Clearly there are a few situations that would preclude this from happening. One night stands and the selling of sex would be two prime examples of this.

Obviously a prostitute can make it clear before any giving of services, just what she will and will not do. This is a prudent step but by no means a guarantee that anyone buying services from her will pay any attention to what she said.

The principal issue here is the differentiation between a legal standpoint and a moral one. In a utopian society, laws would be based on ethical/moral standpoints. Or better still there would be no need for prohibitive laws, as people would be taught philosophy and critical thinking and would develop generally an attitude that would stop them from screwing people over.

That obviously hasn’t happened yet. What we have is the dichotomy of moral and legal (patriachy at one it’s highest forms) thinking.

Legally, prostitution seems to negate a womans right to protection. Where I live in the U.K, solicitation of sex is illegal and kerb crawling for prostitutes is also. Prostitution (being paid for sex) is itself not illegal.

With the exception of the Ipswich murders, there has been little evidence of the legal system benefiting women who work in the sex industry. The media obsession with the aforementioned case speak volumes more about the public obsession with murderers and death than it does about it does about any effort to protect women working on the streets of cities in a desperate attempt to earn money.

Women in general are not taken very seriously by the legal system, the police specifically. A man once exposed himself to myself and a female relative when we were walking. We weren’t sure whether to report it or not, as we knew almost instantly that indecent exposure, despite being a form of sexual assault in this case, was not likely to be taken seriously. As a stance more than any actual expectation of outcome, we reported it anyway. We were greeted by laughter and barely concealed mocking contempt. Needless to say, we received the lowest level of care possible without us being able to say they disregarded their duties. All we received in due course of our report was a brusque letter saying (to paraphrase) that nothing was going to be done about it.

Despite being demanded to be sexual objects through media brainwashing such as adverts and magazines, women that control their own sexual destiny are feared. The independent control over any aspect of your life as a woman is a fearful thing to a man, and when you throw sex into the mix, that makes a very formidable character. And someone like that must be quashed at all costs because SHE IS A THREAT. The more women get control of their lives, the better an example they can lead, and the less men will be able to control our destinies. We may not be their slaves in the kitchen anymore (at least not to the same degree as in previous decades) but we’re still their slaves in the bedroom, in the workplace and in the reproductive sense. And women choose sex more often than not for what I believe is two principal reasons. One; women are taught from puberty or maybe even birth to only value themselves sexually. Secondly, it’s an area where women have the opportunity and talent to exploit male weakness. Maybe it’s a tit for tat mentality? Maybe women are so sick of being exploited for their weaknesses that they are trying to get their own back? Or maybe women sense that this incredible flaw (the obsession with the phallus) is one that can give women the upper hand if tactics are correctly applied?

Forgive me for being too general, but women don’t seem to be ruled by their libido in the same way that men are. We seek out intimacy, conversation, lovemaking, common interests and companionship. Sure there are women who do the casual sex thing. I’ve done it and found it to be quite liberating. However through my extensive conversations with a large group of diverse women, casual, promiscuous damaging sex never seems to be done as constantly and pathologically as men do it.

So maybe prostitution seems like a golden opportunity? Money, sexual liberation, control over the penis instead of it controlling you?

When you reveal the flip side of the sex industry though, you’re revealing a dark cavern which people seldom dare to venture into.

The truth is, despite the surface appearance, prostitution is just another way of exploiting women. It exploits our fundamental weaknesses, it manipulates us through our brainwashed conditioning, it lets us THINK WE ARE IN CONTROL whilst they carry on controlling us.

With less sexism/more equality, teaching of women to see themselves as valid people, less encouraging us to force ourselves into maternal roles, there would be no need for us to prostitute ourselves in this fashion. We would not have to take the penises of men often have no attraction or even respect for into our vaginae. Without drug dealers targeting vulnerable women, prostitution would go down. If women weren’t forced, for a whole kaleidoscope of reasons (the umbrella term being male incompetence), to raise families by themselves with only paltry sham offerings of help, there would be less worn down women around for the pimps to force into prostitution. If women were taught to value their intelligence AND their bodies as much men do, there would be less women vainly seeking self esteem by letting strangers take perverse liberties with their bodies. If women didn’t see their sexuality, their bodies as the only tool they have at their disposal, we would see a marked reduction in prostitution rates.

Basically, the only impetus to not harm prostitutes is moral/ethical. When you factor in that a large majority of men are unyieldingly incapable of moral thinking when it concerns their penis AND add to that the common and SOCIALLY ENFORCED concept that prostitutes are whores, are subhuman…well it really doesn’t bode well does it?

To think of prostitution as simply the exchange of money for sexual services makes us realise that in some ways, we are ALL PROSTITUTES. When you dress sexy in a little short skirt and low lying blouse for a job interview you are prostituting yourself. You are getting money for giving your interviewer a boner. So when you think about the despicable treatment of prostitutes and then realise that you ARE a prostitute, that sorts of puts a different slant on things doesn’t?

I loathe expression ‘sex positive’ I am very sex positive, I adore sex. I strongly do not believe that pornography, prostitution and other forms of sex work are not a type of sex that I should feel positive about. If that makes me sex negative, then so be it.

Some might say that when I say PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF THE GODDESS DO NOT PROSTITUTE YOURSELVES, that I’m removing female autonomy and privilege. You can call the ability to prostitute yourself autonomy and privilege if you want, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. If you think prostitution is a privilege, you need to open your eyes and take a LONG HARD look around you and realise, to start off with, that we don’t live in a fucking bubble. You may be happy to do it, but as long as there are women HAPPY TO DO IT, we are betraying to ones who suffer through it. For every prostitute who loves her job, there are probably twenty, fifty, a hundred or maybe more who would give EVERYTHING they have to escape it.

My suggested solution is this: all women need to stop whoring themselves out and start living their lives under their own redefined terms.

Sexual assault of prostitutes won’t be stopped overnight. It’ll only reduce when we do a few simple things.

1. Exercise whenever possible our right to deny sex to men.

2. Competently, concertedly, actively and consistently take issue with the objectification of women. We are not sex dolls, we are people.

3. Dress comfortably, burp, fart, swear, kick people, be ambitious, bossy, be caring, be ourselves and not our masks. Be anything to achieve at least a vague lingering concept that our sex/gender does not make us less valuable and try to bring about the realisation that we deserve respect.

4. Stop bitching and criticising the whores out there. What you’re really thinking, unless you’ve made a detailed and concerted effort, is thank god it’s not me. Thank god I don’t have to do that. Prostitutes are a victim of male misogyny and patriachy, and you are a victim too. You’re no better than them. Deny it all you want but it’s true. Start making the effort, living your life as YOURSELF, call out male bullshit, stop accepting the sex industry as a valuable form of work and kick the arse out of the people who make their living out of exploiting women.

5. Complain when you see a rape/assault scene in a fiction. Don’t let prostitution and pimp culture work their way into the mainstream.

6. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that a heavily regulated prostitution industry will stop the harm of these groups of women, don’t be dumb enought to think that these regulatory bodies aren’t exploiting women as well.

7. Next time you wake up, don’t straighten or curl or lacquer or hairspray or mousse or gel or blow dry your hair. Hell, if you can run a comb through it, you’re doing well honey. Put on a comfortable pair of pants and socks, none of that tights/pantyhose/thongs/stockings bullshit. Wear comfortable shoes, no bra and a sweatshirt. If you go to work in an office, wear a trouser suit. Don’t let men stare at your breasts. Find out how much the men you work with get paid and create havoc if you get paid less. Shop in local female run business. Punch a guy on the street if he wolf whistles at you. You might love it but for every woman like you there’s probably a hundred more…can you sense where this is going? Enjoy your first day not being a corporate whore/prostitute.

Most prostitutes are women.

Most women are prostitutes in some form, whether they give head to their boss or give blow jobs to punters in back alleys. Whether they have sex so they can a big house and jewels or whether they have sex so they can buy drugs.

Prostitutes issues are our issues. Realise this and and just maybe, some time before I die, my friend and I can finally stop having this conversation.

If I had any hair to tear out, I’d be doing it right now.  As it is, I’m banging my head repeatedly on the desk.  An article that manages to be both ineducated, ignorant, subjective, WRONG, insulting to men and insulting to women should just be burned.  This kind of crap is not journalism, it’s just CRAP.

More to come later when I have time