Dear people without uteri*

*I say it that way because even "male-bodied" doesn't cover it: I just learned that some intersexed "boys" don't find out about their insides until they hit puberty and start menstruating--through their penises. I recommend not thinking about it too much.

Anyway. So, here's the thing. You know how we women bitch about our periods? This is one reason why:

I was just woken up by cramps. This is far from the first time it's happened. I woke up and found myself doubling over in pain. I managed to get to the Aleeve (gyno-recommended for cramps, works better than other painkillers), and grab a heating pad. I'm now back in bed, praying for the drugs to kick in and the pad to work without also burning my stomach.

Every other period issue aside, cramps are often so mind-bogglingly painful that not only should we be allowed to complain, we should be allowed to skip work and school and leaving the bed.

What do they feel like? Like nothing else. It's tempting to say like gas, because it's the same general abdominal area, but it's not really like that. It feels like your uterus is contracting, violently, I guess. Sometimes it hurts so much it makes you feel like you're going to vomit. Sometimes you do vomit. Sometimes massive doses of painkillers and heating pads and orgasms galore (the hormones released in orgasm can help) do nothing and you're still paralyzed in the fetal position, shivering and hot both at once.

It's not always like that, of course, and some people never have a single cramp. Some, like me, get put on birth control at 12 in hopes of stabilizing it enough to make getting up and going to school an option. For some it gets better with age. For some diet changes can help. For something, not much can.

I'm not going to talk about the other side effects of menstruation--the mood swings, the bloating, the cravings, the tender (read: sore) breasts, the stained panties, the acne, the fatigue, the constipation, the diarrhea, the headaches, the vague sense that you smell like blood, that surely everyone can tell that you are bleeding, the sheer ickiness of the blood and tissue pouring out.

Right now, I just wanted you to know about the cramps, probably the single most painful thing the average woman experiences on a regular basis, so that next time you hear a woman complaining, or see her popping an alarming number of painkillers, or notice that she's having trouble focusing on anything but breathing through the pain, you won't roll your eyes, or try not to think about woman problems, or get frustrated. Because if someone were kicking you in the gut repeatedly and almost constantly for five to seven days, you wouldn't be very happy either.

Why does Jon Meacham hate me?

I hate the new Newsweek. I hate it. I've read every issue of Newsweek since sometime in 1996. It is my favorite magazine. And now it's so bad I'm actually considering ditching it.

First, there's the paper. Uh, I liked the thin paper. It didn't try to close on itself, it was easy to put in my purse, it probably killed fewer trees. Did focus groups say that they would return to old media if only it were a little more physically substantial? If so, someone please find me the members of those focus groups so I can shoot them.

Second, what is going on with that layout? The white space, the font--all I could think, the entire time, is that it looked like one giant ad. It was one thing when the ads imitated the content. Why would we want the content to imitate the ads? How am I supposed to take it seriously like this?

And the content. Oh, the content. Taking beloved features and either killing them (The Last Word) or mangling them (CW, which is so awesome we used it on my bat mitzvah invitations). Forgoing journalism in favor of little pieces by people. If I wanted to read the Huffington Post, I would read the Huffington Post.

That's the thing, of course. Yes, I read blogs. But I don't recall a lot of blogs coming out with hard-hitting investigative pieces. They're great aggregators, and do often have plenty to say, but they're generally commenting on what "old media"--NYT, WaPo--investigated and wrote.

I could write pages and pages about this, but right now I just want to say this to Newsweek:

You helped shape who I am. You taught me so much. You taught me how to read the news, and gave me the news to read. You showed me how to read between the lines and figure out someone's agenda, and that some personal stories are really boring. You challenged me. You made me think. And now you're betrying me, and betrying yourself. Come back. I have more to learn.

Review: Lelo Liv

Babeland sent me what I've always wanted--a Lelo vibe. I've heard wonderful, magical things about these, the luxury vibes.

Opening it is enchanting. A box, a real box, black and hard, nothing flimsy here. The Liv itself--herself, it seems right to say--is nestled in a little stand molded to fit her. Below that, hidden, are instructions, a charger, and a silky pouch. It's almost intimidating, how lovely it all is.

Liv is my first rechargeable vibe; she neither has batteries nor has to be attached to the wall during use. I plugged her in excitedly and waited three or four hours for the LED indicator (around the dial) to be a steady blue-white, instead of the pulsing. Then it was time to play.

And...I was underwhelmed. Liv is nice, sure. A pleasant hum, and five different vibration settings. But, disappointingly, I found more that I didn't like. The settings were too easy to accidentally hit, which can be very disruptive. The power wasn't enough, not nearly (although, for medical reasons, I like vibrators that are more like jackhammers, so it may be powerful enough for normal people). The silicone, while great in terms of sterilization, picks up everything. Even kept in its bag, it inevitably got dust and hair on it.

The curve actually fit really nicely outside, but seemed a little awkward when inserted. It's my first insertable though, so maybe I just have a weird vagina. It was a nice vibration, but more buzzy than hum-y, and had a weird, high-pitched noise when turned on. On higher speeds I couldn't tell over the vibrations, but on lower ones I was concerned a dog might come running.

Finally, the lighting. The plug has a light on it, a really bright one. Liv lights up when she's charged, and pulses while she's charging. The interface lights when you push it. The first two things are more than a little annoying if I'm charging while sleeping; the third can just be jarring.

I wanted to love Liv. I tried hard to love Liv. She's beautiful, and I'm sure that for someone more sensitive she would be great, but she's just not the vibe for me.

Liv at Babeland

$109

White plastic, silver plastic, navy blue silicone

4" x 3/4"

Silicone (disinfectable)

Rechargeable

The Need To Make Susan Boyle Less Than

As of 5:53 am, EDT, April 17th, 2009* , 18,000,000 people have seen Susan Boyle sing on Britain's Got Talent--and that's just for the original video, not the many duplicates people have felt the need to put on YouTube. If you have not heard her: go watch the video. If you don't know who she is: which rock have you recently crawled out from under?

In any case, she was on The Early Show yesterday, and I found it interesting. Take a gander: She Dreamed A Dream.

People are upset that she had been (and is being?) judged by her appearance, that the hosts of these shows have even made it brutally clear that no one thought anything of her. Valid concerns, but not what I'm most appalled by.

Susan Boyle comes off like a mildly retarded trained puppy.

I don't think that's what she is, certainly. Font of all knowledge Wikipedia notes that she "suffered oxygen deprivation during birth, resulting in learning disabilities", but that's in no way the same as mildly retarded. Or a puppy, trained or otherwise.

But that is how she looks on television. She says very little, answering direct questions, and tossing off one-liners like "Simon!"; she responds not sheepishly or shyly to the suggestion that she's a "tiger", but with simple dismissal. She doesn't quite look at the camera. Then, both on BGT and TES, she is asked to sing, squares her shoulders, stares straight ahead, and lets out a song. The same song, so far, which doesn't help matters.

Snippets of interviews I've read (here's one) don't indicate that she is stupid, or even phenomenally socially inept; she appears to have friends. People in her town like her. Kind to animals and children, etc.

Yet she was asked if she even understood how huge this is. The Silly Putty I'm playing with knows how huge this is. I'm fairly certain that Susan Boyle does, too. So why are they treating her like an idiot?

My guess is that they realize people would not react well to them mocking her physical appearance (though I'm sure her makeover will be *interesting*), but without something "off" about her, something that makes us feel superior, she has no cachet, no marketability. So she is subtly placed to seem slow, stupid, inept. She is a reserved woman, churchgoing, very religious, not the type to jump up and down and scream when they tell her Patti LuPone is on the line. They know this, so they let us watch her stand and stare. For that matter, why is she standing? Did the camera crew say she couldn't sit?

It's great that They have realized it's unacceptable to openly make fun of the way she looks, or even to snark about it behind her back. No one has yet tried to change her, and when she does get a makeover, that's kind of just part of the show (is it? does BGT do that? am I just thinking of American Idol?). But making that unacceptable means finding something else, some other way to bring Susan Boyle down a peg or two or twelve, so that her stunning voice is also "shocking".

*If you go to the video, check the current hit count and post it in the comments, just for my amusement.

Liberal and Conservative takes on the Obamas' tax returns

Today, the President released his 2008 federal income tax returns. He and the First Lady filed their income tax returns jointly and reported an adjusted gross income of $2,656,902. The vast majority of the family’s 2008 income is the proceeds from the sale of the President’s books. The Obamas paid $855,323 in federal income tax.

The President and First Lady also reported donating $172,050 – or about 6.5% of their adjusted gross income – to 37 different charities. The largest reported gifts to charity were $25,000 contributions to CARE and the United Negro College Fund.

Liberal: Wow, how great that they give so much to charity.

Conservative: THEY GAVE MONEY TO BLACK PEOPLE ZOMG!!!!!!!!!!1

Press release

Defining "womyn"

There's an annual music festival for women held in Michigan called, appropriately, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. I'm not going to go into its history; I trust that you're all capable of reading the Wikipedia article. "Michfest", known as a feminist event, is designated a "womyn-born-womyn space". Which means that if you were born with a Y chromosome, you can't set foot on the land. Literally.

Yes, well, that's all well and good, and certainly we want women (I'm going to stick with the misogynistic, patriarchal spelling) to have spaces just for themselves. But are you telling me that I can't bring my girlfriend, who has spent her life knowing she's a girl, and is actively working toward being recognized by society as one, to a festival designed to make me--born XX, with all the appropriate parts, keeping those parts, and even loving people with those parts--feel warm and cozy?

This is a deeply flawed facet of feminism. It started out for at least semi-well-off heterosexual white women. Then someone noticed that there were other colors, and I guess they had to be included, and oh wow, those are women, and they like other women, and gosh, those women are poor, but they're still women. Feminism, as any good feminist will tell you, hasn't overcome these (hopefully unintentional and subconscious) prejudices. But I think that trans acceptance is even more behind.

Skin color, who you love, and socioeconomic status are a lot different than chromosomes and genitalia. I think that in many ways a black gay rich woman has more in common with a white straight poor woman than she does with a black gay rich man. Being raised a woman, being raised with the fear of men (not all men, obviously, but that guy walking down the street alone at 9pm? definitely him), with the millennia of virtually universal oppression, with the knowledge that no matter how progressive your family might be, out in the real world you're still making 80 cents on the dollar--being raised with those things is huge, and something that I don't know that any transgender woman can every really understand.

Look, to say that a transgender woman can't attend the workshop on childhood sexual trauma, I get. There are multiple workshops, in fact, where I could see it justified. Most things relating to childhood. A lot of things relating to sex, especially sexual violence. I don't want to make anyone cry. But I think that Michfest, and other places with WBW policies, are missing the point. I think that they are relying on their own prejudices, their own gut feelings, to make choices that impact real live women.

It can be hard to overcome the instinct to say, "You're going to cut WHAT off?!" Certainly while we're all hopefully being told that color doesn't matter and class doesn't matter, and many of us told that sexual orientation doesn't, I don't really see many people growing up being told about transgender people. The media doesn't help. Even LGBT rights organizations often ignore the T's (see: HRC on ENDA. Oh come on, Wiki it yourself).

It will take a long time for people to get over those prejudices, and to accept trans people, MTF and FTM. And as with race, class, and all of the other "other" issues feminism has had to confront, realizing that there's an issue doesn't fix it. We're still navigating that, figuring out how to work with women of color, and lesbians, and disabled women needing separate spaces and with women as a whole needing to join.

Feminism isn't perfect. We have a long way to go. I have a long way to go, you have a long way to go, we have a long way to go. But exclusion does not, historically, go well. Would I ever have gone to Michfest? Probably not, no, I don't like it outside, I'm Feminist in PINK, not...whatever you wear outside. But I certainly won't consider it until they end the WBW policy [which my brief research (read: Googling) indicated they may have, but reinstated it, or not, it's all very unclear, feel free to clarify in the comments]. And I won't be giving money to any organization with that policy. And more importantly, I, and many many other feminists, am finding myself having to reject other feminists, and that is not, cannot be conducive to The Movement.

This process, the process of acknowledgement, acceptance, and change, is going to take a while. I'm not a terribly patient person, but I recognize that this is going to take a while, and that for now I can speak up, make my case, and then go cuddle with my girlfriend.

Hummingbird

Note: This is a post I thought I'd already published. But apparently not so much. However, I trust that the toy in question has not changed. Lemme just check here a second...

I don't know why I thought it would be smaller. I saw the pictures, I read the dimensions, and I was still expecting something more the size of a Pocket Rocket. But the Hummingbird, from Babeland, is actually about as long as my foot, heel to the bottom of my big toe (what? I didn't have anything else handy to measure against!). The little indentation for the clitoris is the size of my whole thumb, not just to the first knuckle, as I expected. The circumference is good for my hand, and probably bigger and smaller. The--bumps? ridges? waves?

on it are steadying when holding it. It is silver and smooth. Aesthetically, a very pretty, if odd-looking, toy.

And very nice to use, too! As already noted, it's great to hold. Smooth without being slippery (and not non-porous; use a condom for partner play!), bumps to rest your hand against, and just all around nice. The clit-cradle, as we're now calling it, doubles as a thumb rest, if you want to use it that way.

I was not a fan of the little nub. It was too pointy, and both too large (hit too much space) and too small (had to be held in the same spot carefully). I don't think it was meant for G-spot stimulation. I hope not, because it's sure not going near mine. It also killed any chance of using the 'bird with a partner in an intercourse-y sort of way (unless, I suppose, you're very creative), as someone would always be being stabbed with it.

But the other person! The clit-cradle, while certainly not what I expected, is fabulous. I generally have a pretty hard time with the gettin' off, and this works so well. I could go into much, much detail, but--it's great. It's powerful, it hits all the right places, it's just fantastic. Took me a few tries to figure it out, but now it's one of my absolute favorites.

Also, unlike the Slimline (my review), the inside is enclosed in plastic, so the batteries don't rattle. It does get a little warmer a little faster, but the no rattling is so worth it.

Overall, I'm gonna go with an A+.

Hummingbird at Babeland

$20 (great great great value)

Matte silver

7-1/4" x 1-1/4"

Hard plastic (use a condom for sharing)

2 AA batteries (which last quite a while)