I Would Choose the Bear too

I am deep in feminist rhetoric on my social feeds and right now? Everyone's fired up about Harrison what's his name of The Chiefs and his commencement speech at a conservative Catholic college.  

I'm not actually even slightly concerned about him spouting conservative ideals at a conservative college.  That's what they do. Institutions like that want to be an echo chamber of certain beliefs and they want to abhor modernity as evil.  I guess I'm more amused that people are realizing all of this is an open secret. That you are outraged at all just lets me know you didn't know it was happening and blindly believed all colleges function in a similar way of like frat parties and flagrant debauchery.  I'll call it now that he will 100% complain about the liberal woke agenda cancelling him because of his religion. When in fact he is not cancelled because short of losing his job and being exhiled my man is going to become some weird figurehead of right wing nut jobs. He'll make more money off all the jerseys no one was buying a month ago with his name on the back.  Nobody knew him and now everyone does. He won the attention economy game.  

I am a little offended he insists that women have been fed lies about promotions and how they all will aspire to be mothers.  A. Have you Mr. Kicker ever actually worked a job in the world?  Recent graduates are only worried about getting a job to start paying down their massive life crippling debt.  Dreams of being CEO are actually rather far fetched lest you already come from money and influence.  You're at a college commencement ceremony so all of them have already aspired and completed the task of graduting.  Why are you essentially downplaying 4 years of their labor as silly?  The audience for this is looking for something else from you. B. While having a family is lovely it's incredibly reductive to assume everyone wants one. Making blanket statements about how the only REAL value a woman has is in being a wife and mother actually traps women in abusive relationships.  Because if you have no money of your own, no experience, limited options available to you then you are at the the full mercy of your husband providing those things.  If he happens to be a good man great.  But if he's a dead beat and a terrible person you've resigned to essentially be a prisoner of his abuse into perpetuity.  Women who at forty dive into the work force cannot reasonably expect to get a six figure job.  She starts at zero. C. It's easy for a millionaire to espouse values of appreciation for kids but we assume he actually does anything to raise them. We actually have no proof he even likes his kids. A message from a man about a woman's experience is an misfire. We don't want to hear any more mansplaining from a 28 year old man who has not lived a life we can empathize with.  If someone wants to give a rousing speech then speak to your own experience, my man, not a pretend one you constructed of your wife's life as you speak for her.  Speak about your adversities. Speak about the challenges you faced. Speak to your own role as a father. That's why they asked you to do a speech and not your wife.   It's 2024. Can we stop mansplaining the female experience? Geez! D. What are the lies about abortion and IVF? It's not especially clear what he's exclaiming great horror about.  Just that he doesn't believe in either practice?  I'm sorry not everyone is blessed with perfect reproductive health.  I guess I feel bad for your wife or daughters if she should ever have issues. I understand people are allowed an opinion but no one wakes up and says they dream of enduring very expensive IVF treatments.  It's a thing you do when you have already explored all the other paths and you are desperate for a child.  No bright eyed bushy tailed 20 year old says yup! I love the idea of paying for a baby to be partially created within a petri dish for me.  Also no one says they love abortions.  If you need one you will seek to have one but no one ideates about how great their first abortion will be and how to best commemorate it via scrapbook.  The argument is framed in an insincere way.  

If you're a conservative person I don't actually have any personal investment in what you believe. Supposedly we all came to America for some level of religious and social freedom right? So I respectfully allow you to practice your religion because, why the heck not? Practice whatever you want. I won't be the one to break your belief structure.  I honestly don't have any moral objection to what you do in your own life and if you want to raise a dozen kids go nuts. If religion is the one reason that you aren't going on a killing rampage then good! It worked! Religion gave you structure and morals.  That's pretty much the point of it last I checked.  If you can afford kids, housing them, feeding them all and emotionally supporting your dozen kids, by all means, go for it. For your average non millionaire though?  Kids are the fastest way to change a woman's entire life trajectory.  And also? Some people cannot have kids, so when you say that you reduce their entire life down and basically tell them they are worthless.  I am not one of such people, but I am empathetic enough to know they exist and they are likely touchy about it.  If everyone tells you how great kids are and insists it's the center of your being and worth and you can't have kids? Don't want kids? Aren't in a place you can devote resources to kids? Guess what? You're pretty pissed that everyone is telling you that you're worthless to humanity for not being a baby incubator.  Men are not told their entire value boils down to children even though they are the other half of the equation.  

Can you lovingly respect the mother of your children for her unpaid labor being the backbone of why you can play a sport for a living? Sure. Do that. Say that nice stuff. Talk about how God led you on your path. Whatever fluff you want to shill, by all means, go do it. But don't tell people that your way and your life is the ONLY way because guess what? That's narrow-minded.  People like that?  Scare me because they say one thing about the great love of God but then spew some of the most specific and rather hateful rhetoric with the same breath about the abomination of Trans people.  Trans people are people.  God created the person in his likeness right? Then why did he make supposed abominations? It makes no sense that an all knowing all seeing benevolent God would torture you by giving you severe identity issues. For Mr Beardman it works for you and that's cool, but don't use a one size fits all approach for everyone else who doesn't have the resources and support system you have.  Even though he's like, a no name athlete way less interesting than his teammates, I'm sure even non-superstar salary is a LOT of money.  Your average 18 year old conservative person marrying their high school sweetheart has NONE of those things available to them and that's very breezily passed by as if it's not the key to the ease with which they can live this supposed American Dream life.  For there to be a trad wife there also needs to be a trad husband doing his part.  If you want to make bread and garden that's cool it's just that actual life costs money and for you to have the time and freedom to do that someone else needs to be the breadwinner and in this economy? That guy has to be making well over $200,000 right?  Houses are expensive. Kids are expensive. Taxes are expensive. God forbid you have medical expenses or have some physical limitations...yeah if you want the squeaky image of American Norman Rockwell idealism you basically have to be very rich and the man person of the house better be making bank to float this lifestyle.  That's just the truth of how that structure works but if I say that on a podium people will rake me over the coals for being a golddigger telling women to marry rich guys. They'll say I'm just asking for too much and women like me are the real problem. I don't even want that life but if I start explaining the logistics of a supposedly traditional family angry men come out of the woodwork complaining that they're doing their best and women shouldn't be so picky and that's why we'll all die alone with a dozen cats.  We should just be happy with whatever crumbs they are willing to throw our way and we should be grateful for the opportunity.  The speech as such was not for women it was for his core audience, which was always men anyway, and men like him want a submissive wife and traditional home. And then his core audience was supposed to pat him on the back for being so brave to admit that all he wants is a traditional life and spouse to rule over as mini-dictator over his tiny kingdom otherwise known as a household.  

I heard his mom is a successful physicist who obviously did attend college at a high level so the irony is we perceive he should be a feminist because of the example of his mother.  He should be so proud of her accomplishments, right?  But he pivoted the other way and said, f- all that prestige, as a mom you should always be at home tethered to your kids.  Can you sniff out the mother-wound on this guy?  The resentment?  It's interesting.  I guess it just proves you can always do your best and your kids will turn out messed up either way.  If physics is your passion that's amazing. It's not an easy field to get into. You don't just wander into it by chance because you wandered into the physics lab one day when you thought you'd be in a coffee shop training to be a barista.   Whoopsie daisies.  She worked very hard to be taken seriously and I'm sensing a deep anger that this man felt about being on the back burner.  

I was having fun watching people read manosphere guys to filth. You know...the Andrew Tate types that were popping up every where denigrating women and spewing a lot of nonsense about how to capture women with expensive cars and exercising to get hot.  I feel like with his arrest that whole genre has died down significantly. Probably all the sex trafficking allegations left a bad taste in people's mouths.  Funny enough I don't see why you'd ever be shocked that a man spewing such nonsense would be a sociopath that is completely ignorant of anyone else's feelings but his own.  The solution women have had to this anti...human behavior is to just ice men out?  I've seen a lot more about the 4B movement where women are just choosing abstinence.  If you're trying to trap us into toxic relationships, if you insist on taking away all of our reproductive rights, if you want us to just be baby factories with no brains then we rebel.  No anything. No dating. No marriage. No kids. No sex.  We''ll just be single abstinent people living our lives, working and going to brunch. Good luck with making babies without us.  

Honestly? Genius.  I'm married and I've pushed out two kiddos so I've already replaced myself in the next generation with my contribution to society like the good little citizen I am but hypothetically if I were a young person in the now times that totally makes sense.  Dating is a cesspool.  Guys are wildly toxic and don't EVEN pretend to be nice anymore.  I hate fake-nice guys, but at least they put in some effort to hide what terrible humans they were.  Now they just start screaming about how women are so crazy for wanting basic decency.  

I used to enjoy the sport of dating. I didn't actually like dating that much as a whole because most guys were pretty boring.  I went on a ton of first dates that went no where because he seemingly had no personality or nothing to talk about or ignorant of his own racism. We have to talk about SOMETHING on a date. I'm not the most talkative gal on the block; I'm fine with some amiable silence but why are we even on this date if we don't have anything to bring to the proverbial and literal table?  The worst was just being arm candy as a guy basically dragged me around as he had conversations with his buddies that went way over my head since I don't know any of their mutual friends or inside jokes yet.  Sigh. I should have learned after the first time that it's not worth the time.  I think at first it felt validating to be perceived as someone a man would feel that proud of but after the shiny veneer fell off it felt pretty dumb.  I'm not an airhead.  

Dating is incredibly annoying.  I am right there with you on that one. 

What do I mean by the sport of dating? I guess it's more focused on the actual pick up.  It's a funny dynamic when you don't know anything about someone else.  It's awkward. It's a little weird.  You're feeling out what to make small talk about...I think it's so oddly high stakes and yet you want to act so chill about it. It's funny. The dichotomy that you want to know someone and yet you're putting on this whole song and dance that you're so cool and chill.  I at many points treated it like a sport in so much that I challenged myself to aspire for more and handsomer and taller and...whatever. It was all arbitrary goals but I tended to keep going because it felt better to be "winning" at dating.   

The whole game of dating is to appear cool.  All the while obviously you're NOT cool because if you actually like this person at all you're freaking out.  The absurdity of it all is so interesting and probably why I liked it. I love absurdity.  I'm a little speck of a woman in a big vast world and yet I can make a man completely tongue tied by a simple earnest glance at him and a big warm smile.  It's so funny because I'm also dating the one predator on Earth with the highest likelihood of hurting me. You're scared of me and yet I'm scared of you and somehow we're supposed to fall in love?  The stakes are crazy when you think about it that way!

Back to the whole, weird commencement speech thing.  I get it. I've watched enough documentaries about fundamentalist Christian sects to know that's how they control you.  Watch Fundie Fridays on youtube if you love fundamentalist religious content with a very fun colorful queer friendly people. Get you a young impressionable gal. Convince her to marry you asap. Like 3 dates and slap a ring on it level of fast. The less she knows the better.  Get her barefoot and pregnant with no resources so she submits to the will of her husband who is master of the home until one of you dies.  Pop out babies so they can be the next generation and repeat the cycle ad nauseum. Did you ever watch The Duggars on TLC?  I admit I did for a while. I also just generally watched a lot of TLC because they had a Baby Story and a bunch of other stuff.  Once it became Duggar and Little People central it was a little...weird.  Anyway, Jim Bob is patriarch and he rules over his 18+ children who are all home schooled, none of the girls wears pants, all the boys look like him, his wife is essentially a glassy eyed baby machine and that's how he likes it.  And somehow this is...good?  It was framed like they were very wholesome but the gross parentification of the elder girls of the family pointed in a bad place.  A 10 year old should not have to feel obliged to mother over her bevy of siblings.  A 10 year old should just be allowed to be a dumb 10 year old.  Meanwhile the boys could seemingly do whatever.  So the gross imbalance between girls and boys obviously let them feel this was normal. It set the pattern for their entire lives and what they expected as adults.  And guess what? The eldest son got married right away and has like 7 kids.  He's also in prison for child abuse images on his work computer because somehow in his warped mind he could do it. He was going to be above it all and get away with it and there would be no long lasting punishment because he's never had to really be punished.  

Meanwhile he's trash so I'm glad he's in jail, but his poor wife?  She's stuck. That woman has no formal education. She has no real skills beyond being a house wife and now she's left holding the bag with all these kids while her husband molders away in prison using up federal money to do so.  So...is this what a Godly union gives you?  Because if so it seems kind of terrible.  She's trapped either in this bad situation or she completely abandons the foundation of everything she knows and leaves her toxic family and religion.  Even if she somehow dumps the kids with a kindly babysitter who does it for free and gets a job what is she getting paid? Not enough to support like 8 mouths to feed. I know Catholics are different than whatever fundamentalist Baptist thing the Duggars are, but at the core if it they abide by very similar pillars.  One of which is being wed for LIFE.  You know how you decided to date this dude when you were 17 and your frontal cortex wasn't fully formed and you didn't have any money so you were super impressed by that dude with the run down Chevy buying you some Bennigan's? Yeah, that girl is an entirely different person by the time she's 30 and the 30 year old her is still stuck with whatever douchebag she chose at 17. 

Can you imagine being married to the person you were dating at 17?  And does it make you want to toss your cookies as much as I do? 

But that's kind of the whole agenda of those religions because you as a man inevitably see this happen. You see your own parents' marriage.  You see these things happening and yet? You want it for yourself.  You feel (here's the key word) entitled to a wife.  A wife to take care of you, to keep your house, the tend to your kids and put up with whatever bull you throw her way like soliciting people on Ashley Madison, traveling all the time under the guise of work and downloading illegal images (all things Josh Duggar did).  Because if you pick her young and ignorant enough she's stuck with your terrible self and you still get to lean on her as helpmate and asset to your life.  She had no idea she could do better than you and you can present as a savior in her life that gave her everything she has.  

I know it may seem like I'm bashing on conservative lifestyles and marriage. I'm actually pretty fond of bashing both left and right plus I love being married.  It's just a lot easier to see the blatant hypocrisy with conservatives since they tend to go around with a "my shit don't stink" attitude.  Pretend to be all high and mighty if you wish, but when you're trash it's justifiable to point it out that you're trash. 

I'm a more liberal leaning person in terms of political affiliation but in terms of my actual lived behavior? I'm very uptight and rule abiding. I cross the street at cross walks. I put my carts back at the cart return thing at the grocery store. I have never in my life flashed anybody. I went to concerts where guys chanted for the girls to flash them for little more than beads. It's a common thing, at least it was in the '00s and I was the kind of person who refused because though incredibly humble my body is my own and I'm allowed to draw lines in the sand and say, no.  This is mine. Get away from me with your nonsense.  

I think the Andrea Dworkin quote is something like, right wing men see women as private property and left wing men see women as public property.  And that stuck with me.  One is not necessarily BETTER than the other despite all the fighting back and forth.  Being seen as simply some barefoot baby making factory seems pretty terrible.  Meanwhile being perceived as simply an object of sexual conquest to be used and discarded doesn't give us any warm and fuzzies either.  Sexual liberation seems like freedom but it's not when you're the one who has to deal with all the ramifications.  So I personally didn't see the point because yes I suppose I could be less uptight and more free with my body but who benefits here?  If I get stuck with STDs and a mistake baby that's on ME, not the dude I let have access to my body.  What kind of sexual freedom saddles me with 18+ years of responsibility?  A mislabeled one frankly. (Queue Ariana Grande's Bloodline.)  A stupid one especially as they keep peeling back reproductive rights.  If you FORCE people to have kids they cannot reasonably care for then guess what?  The only foolproof way of avoiding pregnancy is to not have sex.  It's literally the only lesson of abstinence based learning right? Guess we finally got the message.    

So the whole 4B movement is inevitable.  If you peel back all the things that allow women some freedom to be people with autonomy rather than property tethered to men then it's going to result in people completely pulling out of the system.  The slow movement back on reproductive rights is to trap women and create a new generation of menial laborers.  That's...dark.  Very Handmaidens Tale.  

If you live under a rock 4B is a movement centered on female abstinence. No dating, no husband, no sex, and thus no kids. Just being a person living her life and hanging with pals.   It started in Korea and that is frankly not the biggest shocker.  East Asian Men are among some of the most toxic I've ever met. I don't want to disparage my own people but...if a man is toxic he's toxic, okay? It's okay to have had bad experiences. You can't make me date him.  So all the festering machismo and entitlement I personally experienced is not a surprise and Korean woman are giving a passive aggressive big middle finger to all of those jerkwads and saying, if you can't treat us with dignity then let's just allow the future of Korean people at large to flounder.  See if we care. Get your act together, idiots. We make up half of the society, maybe this is how we get a little respect around these parts.  

I LOVE when people do what they want.  Be an Only fans gal and shake money out of dudes if you want. I'll cheer you all along the way.  I just PERSONALLY could not do it because I am built way too nervous and high strung for that. Maybe I'll get into the whys of that later. For now? Just trust me that I'm way too uptight and I don't care enough about money to deal with it.  Also for a long time I centered men as my goal and in my young mind even I noticed men say one thing and do another.  They might be the ones throwing money at strip clubs but are they also turning around and dating those girls?  More often than not no.  They might patronize her but they don't see her as a true person worthy of respect and love. She is perceived as an object and commodity that can be bought and sold.  And since all I wanted was to feel beloved it seemed like a pointless action to engender disrespect among men who seek to use you in whatever way you're willing to be used.  

Is there any perfect way to behave in a society that seems to minimize you? Not really. We are all opportunistic.  I just picked a path and hoped for the best.  If being religious works for you I know there are good people out there who don't just use it as a cloak for oppression. This specific man however?  He's confirmed what he is and as such that's just a factoid for our arsenal of information.  What you do with that factoid. It is up to you.  Personally for me? Every time someone shows you who they really are I know enough to believe them. We don't have to fix or save everyone.  

Funny enough autocorrect thought I wanted to write "bear" instead of best. 

The argument of man versus bear is funny to me. I want to clarify I love men. I am raising young men. I want to give them every opportunity to be good people that are not crushed by the blinding burden of playing at masculinity and embodying insincere tropes of what society has told them it means to be at the top of the food chain. If anything that's why I'm so passionate about feminist ideals. We are ALL crushed by patriarchy.  It's not an issue of being pro-man or anti-man.  It's saying the structure is broken and that we should strive to not be bystanders to oppression. Living in Connecticut we actually have tons of bears wandering the suburbs.  Every week I get some weird bear alert.  So yes I pick bear.  Bears just want to eat your bird feed and munch on any berries or fruit bearing trees you have.  Is it nice stepping in bear dung? No. But they're actually not fond of eating us so that seems like a obvious choice for self protection.  Men on the other hand? While I agree most men are normal law abiding and harmless that doesn't mean there aren't snakes in the grass.  Look at Brock Turner.  Dude was assaulting a passed out woman on an alley by a dumpster and when called out and brought to trial threw every privilege he had out there to save his own keister.  Even the ones that look harmless do an incredible amount of destruction in their wake.  Don't let looks fool you.  He felt entitled to take of that woman without her consent.  He felt entitled to walk free. He felt entitled to being a "good guy" who just made a mistake one time.  

See? A lot of feminist prose is on my feeds.  Probably an abnormal amount of it given I am happily married to a man who devotes a lot of time to supporting and caring for me.  

What's funny is that we used to all share the same media. We all watched Friends, we all knew who won certain games, we all knew when it was an Olympic year.  Now? I have no idea what you're consuming and thus our common threads aren't the same.  Which is good for me because I like learning about stuff. To this day I don't understand Seinfeld. I eat up a Contrapoints video essay like cake.  I also find a lot of brain candy from an FD Signifier essay.  And MuneCat has a fun erratic quality to her findings that makes me both laugh and then question things.  She has a weird angry at things energy but also randomly breaks into song and the theater kid in me loves it.  My comfort show is New Girl.  I love a little chaotic behavior.  I used to love comfort watching Gilmore Girls but the episode where they make fun of the supposed fat ballerina makes my stomach spin.  

We all consume different things so I cannot with any authority understand what you're watching nor what resonates with you.  I had to explain a pop culture reference to my husband because he doesn't know anything about that time Hilaria Baldwin pretended to be a Spanish person from Spain and was in fact born in Boston to people with no Spanish ancestral connection. Who forgets the English word for cucumber despite always knowing the English word for cucumber? 

I know some people are quick to defend Harry Thick beard.  They say he's just valuing motherhood! No he's not because that was never a social issue that needed light upon it. Last I checked there have been no burning of pro-child people at the stake. If he happens to echo your belief then great you feel validated in your life choices. Insert pat on back. He cites his wife as his only resource.  If you like what he said then you feel like he's supporting you but he's not. He's just a dude pushing an old school agenda where we give women the option to agree to their own subjugation.  Isn't it better to be oppressed by me, a man who loves you than a society who only gives you money and freedom? 

My objections come from any man telling all women he knows best and they are all dumb dumbs who cannot be trusted to understand life yet. If you want to agree with him cool but the irony is that people who are so excited about supporting this blank word document of a man were also screaming crying moaning about Colin Kapernick simply taking a silent knee.  If one football guy gets to "express his beliefs" then pray tell why does another football guy who arguably was way more talented at his ball playing game ability, get blacklisted?  

We all scream about freedom of speech up until someone says something that bothers you. Then it's a very quick road to exile.  I have empathy that it's human nature and you can't help your knee jerk reaction to something but it's also hypocritical to allow one person a podium and say the other is a dumb jock who should just play his sport and shut up.  When this happens it tends to be a specific...melanated people who are told to zip their lips.  I said what I said.  

I hate hypocrisy so that's why I am particularly irritated.   If column A is allowed an opinion then column B is also allowed an opinion and to keep his job and endorsements.  Why is one column given an outsized amount of punishment? 

What's funny is all of the white women rushing to support Beardman.  We had to know this was coming.  The siren call of a crumb of attention to the few stay at home moms in this world who are hungry for some validation that yeah! Mothering is super important!  No one since the dawn of time has argued mothers are not important.  How else does one continue the species?  It's the dumbest straw man argument. No one said anything derogatory about motherhood.  Many people are barely scraping by and living paycheck to paycheck; the notion of being able to afford kids is beyond reason. They are not having kids in part because they cannot AFFORD to have them.  If they had any money and support system they would have them. This supposed war against female bodies baffles me.  No one is taking away your right to bear a ton of kids.  They're taking away our right to make our own choices about reproductive health and all the rest of this is noise to distract you and confuse you into volunteering for your own oppression if you just happen to pick the right oppressor.   

Tell me you're affluent without telling me you're affluent, right?  Who can even afford to stay at home being mom?  That's such a big flex to make. Who are you? Nara Smith?  Yes surely there are people who lament they wish they had more time to spend at home with their kids but you know what?  People have to work to have money to pay the rent and it's very quickly brushed over that most adult people in America have to work for a living in order to keep their heads above water. It's not so much a CHOICE as a necessity in order to sustain one's self at a level of being alive.  Yeah if money was no object I'd love to sail around and travel all year long with nary a responsibility while belligerently working on my tan but in the real world people have to work and worry about melanoma.  If dinosaurs weren't extinct it would also be cool to see one at the zoo but we live in the actual world that we live in and not Jurassic Park.  Why argue about make believe situations?  

Bad faith arguments with people who just want to argue is not fun. We all have to abide by the same rules in order to have a fair conversation. If you start just jumping off and talking nonsense there's no argument to make, you just want to hear your own opinion fed back to you.  I didn't do debate, okay?  I get a little panicked in the heat of the moment when people are being too aggressive.  If you give me time to marinate over it then I can form some cohesive thoughts but in the heat of the moment people just say nonsense or cite things I cannot reasonably research in 2 seconds in order to reply and that's why all those "conservative crushes feminist" videos are so annoying. Yeah if you have a whole schitck ready and just pounce on some random person on the street who was not equally prepared as you obviously you will win. 

In 2008 there was this rash of people referring to some research where women who were on the pill chose less masculine men.  The findings seemed to say that because of the impact of the hormones from the pill which in the event you don't know, fools your body into believing you're already pregnant. If your body believes it's already pregnant it's not synced up to release an egg to be fertilized the way it normally would for your typical monthly cycle wherein you release a fresh egg to potentially create life.  This state of being already chemically knocked up supposedly led women to choose men differently than when they were au naturale and chose of fully their free will. It implied we chose more stable, less "masculine" men because we wanted to ensure finding a good caretaker for our hypothetical offspring. We're just like...mindless animals drawn to mates? We don't take into consideration oh, personality, shared beliefs, future goals or sexual preferences...nope.  Just masculinity. How does one judge masculinity? Sharpness of jawline? I don't go around staring at anyone's junk so... it's a tad subjective what masculinity means when we date with our clothes on.  It seemed like they threw some pictures of faces on a screen and asked women where they were on their cycle and thus whom they were attracted to.  That's how they actually did it. Anyway, my irritation at the details is obvious. I've heard this study referenced for ages now. Literally even as of last year I was listening to a podcast and one of the gals said she went off her birth control to "realign" her hormones. Which from all outside observation seems fine. It's her body and she can do what she wants but you know what?  That study was done later with a much larger pool of subjects and found the prior study to be completely unsubstantiated.  

Basically a DECADE of slander being told about birth control and it was all fabricated because depending on the numbers you cook up you can create any kind of outcome you wish.   If I did a study and all I did was poll 10 college kids guess what? The numbers would be skewed because of their age and demographic not being diverse enough.  And guess where most studies and surveys get done? College campuses by like grad students walking around with clipboards trying to con you into giving them ten minutes between class.  I'm an avid reader so I'm more apt to read the article than most people who listen to a snippet one time on a podcast or tiktok but I'm so aware of the bias that I take all of them with a grain of salt.  I also dated a few psych majors and so I know that's part of what they had to do for class.   Surely there are always some side effects to medicine, but you know what the side effect of unprotected sex is? Children. The most expensive side effect of all.  And that's coming from someone who likes kids and popped some out willingly.  I'm not even a kid hater!  I'm just realistic that it's not for everyone.  I want people who care about children and want to devote effort into being a parent to be parents. I don't want people who feel bullied into it to have kids out of some weird sense of obligation to humankind to propagate your DNA into the next generation.  People who don't really want to have kids who end up having kids make...you guessed it! Traumatized kids with emotional regulation issues. 

There is also rarely any acknowledgement when any article or news headline is all wrong and based on factitious data.  It's a big splashy story at first but no one follows up on you and it's really damaging.  I know everyone seems to hate Megan Markle but if the entire British tabloid sphere repeatedly wrote crazy nonsense and paid my extended family for interviews where they talked shit about me my mental health would be wrecked too. It doesn't seem like it's a big deal that stories are floating around until it's a huge deal. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.  

I have phases where I love listening to a podcast but I'm so annoyed by podcast bros like Joe Rogan and that Diary of a CEO guy and even that Indian fellow with the green eyes.  Enough, already!  I know you have to basically interview everyone on this planet if you want to put out a pod every single week on the nose, but you don't vet anybody out if you're doing that kind of frequency. You're just allowing charlatans to use your platform and spew their nonsense to your audience so they can sell some books and vitamin regimens.  Just because they're willing to talk to you doesn't mean that they're truly an expert nor that they don't have an ultimate desire to just make a quick buck on the back of people seeking answers.  We are in desperate need of more rigorous media literacy.  We think we're super smart and sharp but the snake oil salesmen have simply adopted and changed with the times.  If you cannot see other sides of the coin then you're just being stubborn.  

In hindsight it's kind of dumb we were told apple cider vinegar cured everything and people were like rubbing it on their faces and chugging it raw.  But people did it! And for all that were there any apologies made for telling you to essentially rip a hole in your stomach lining and mess up the ph of your skin barrier? No. The apple cider vinegar and coconut oil people are laughing all the way to the bank I guess so why do they care if retractions are made?  And it's not like the whole Kale, apple cider vinegar, coconut oil thing was a thousand years ago. It was like 5 years and we've fully dropped it from our brains rather than questioning why we ever believed it in the first place.  (The answer is simply that we believe that natural things are safer and cleaner than supposedly non natural things like pharmaceuticals.  Last I checked rhubarb leaves are poison and arsenic is naturally occurring but it's a bias we have that we don't actively push against.)

In the case of a perfectly normal gal's seemingly innocent decision to go off birth control I am mad because yes she's autonomous. She is a grown woman. She can make her own, even bad, decisions about her body. The problem is if you give people the wrong data and then they make unsound choices wasn't it kind of done under...duress?  Isn't that morally wrong?  If you gave her different data would she not have made other decisions? Shouldn't you have some accountability for putting erroneous data out there which can lead others to make risky choices with their health?  Yes you as an adult can do whatever you want. Buy 1,000 crystals if you want.  Take ice baths and chug celery juice. Marry your high school sweetheart who gave up her career and life dreams for you. None of that is my business but if you listen to influencers and just mindlessly consume it without critically thinking about what their long term agenda is?  That's ultimately a problem as a whole because we then have a society of people who don't know how to pick and examine what is actually sound information.  I know we live in a capitalist hellscape but I like to think we deep down care about each other as human beings rather than seeing one another as dollars and cents.