Women's Liberation Radio News

Edition 100: Women's Health & Medical Misogyny with Lola Bessis, Victoria Brown and Sekhmet SheOwl

First up, hear Lola Bessis, WLRN's newest member greet the listener introducing herself and her professor, Victoria Brown, who later on in the program will talk about advances and setbacks in women's health. Next, open your ears for WLRN's World News segment delivered by Mary O'Neill in which she highlights news from Iran and its death sentences for female activists, the Purple Saturdays movement in Afghanistan and news from the Gambia where Parliament just voted to maintain the national ban on female genital mutilation. After the news, hear Sylvia Bagge's "Release the Medicine", a song about a woman's healing journey. Thistle met Sylvia in the year 2002 in the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula at the National Rainbow Gathering. Her words and music are true medicine for the heart and soul. Then it's on to Lola's interview with Victoria Brown in which they discuss Ms. Brown's research before diving into the nitty gritty of the state of the medical establishment and women's health. Stay tuned 'til the very end for Sekhmet's sobering commentary on the misogyny inherent within the medical system that underserves, ignores and does actual harm to women and girls. She concludes her piece with encouragement for us to take charge of our personal health and to know that doing so is an act of radical feminism. As always, thank you for tuning in to WLRN's monthly handcrafted podcast put together by a team of volunteers who care deeply about the lives and matters of women. To donate to the WLRN fundraiser Jenna and April talked about in today's show, please click here: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=ULAE4ZHPARLFE&ssrt=1723204852902 Make a note that your donation is going to our FiLia Fund. Thanks for tuning in and thank you for your support!

Duration:: 52m
Broadcast on:: 09 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

WLRN edition 100, broadcasting in three, two, one. I was born woman off my knees, I will stand for my liberation. Rise and rise again I was born woman off my knees, I will stand for my liberation. Rise and rise again. Greetings and welcome to the 100th edition podcast of Women's Liberation Radio News for this Thursday, August 8th. This is Lola Bessus, the newest member of our WLRN Collective and a recent college graduate from Skimmer College. This month we are a week later than our usual drop date because Jen and Thistle were in the woods of Michigan. Stay tuned next month for a recap of all they saw, heard and did, amongst the women of Michigan, an intentional women's community that springs up in the woods every summer. This month's edition focuses on women's health and medical misogyny. People hear an excerpt of an interview I did with my professor Victoria Brown, who is a postdoctoral research fellow in women's health, with expertise in rural and maternal health outcomes to research, global political economy and social studies of science, technology and medicine. Her research interests include the social determinants of reproductive, maternal and pelvic health, as well as much more. The team at WLRN produces a monthly radio broadcast to break the sound barrier women are blocked by under the status quo rule of men. This blocking of women's discourse we see in all sectors of society be they conservative, liberal, mainstream, progressive or radical. The threat that runs through all of American politics except for separatist feminism is male dominance and entitlement in all spheres. To start off today's edition, here's Mary O'Neill with women's news from around the globe for this Thursday, August 8, 2024. Take it away, Mary. Thanks, Lola. A federal appeals court panel ruled that a Tennessee policy disallowing people from changing the sex listed on the birth certificate does not discriminate against trans-identified people. Though four trans-identified men argued that sex is determined by gender identity, Judge Geoffrey Seton wrote, "There is no fundamental right to a birth certificate recording gender identity instead of biological sex." How, it's worth asking, "Could a government keep uniform records of any sort if the disparate views of its citizens about shifting norms in society controlled the government's choices of language and of what information to collect?" He also stated that the policy predates the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. In the UK, the Labour Party has determined that the ban on puberty blockers first instituted by the Conservatives will be permanent. Helen Joyce, a women's rights activist and director of advocacy for Sex Matters, said, "West Streetings announcement that he plans to make his predecessor's ban on puberty blockers permanent is an excellent sign that Labour intends to take an evidence-based approach to child gender medicine and to prioritize child safeguarding." While their Neil Geiman, who has been very vocal against women's rights activists like Graham Linen, has been accused of sexual assault by two women, both women state that Geiman was rough and one also said that he engaged in degrading penetrative acts. Not only does Geiman deny the allegations, he goes so far as claiming that one of the women is motivated by regret and that she suffered from a condition associated with false memories. Her medical records do not support this claim. Kaxan Azizi, an Iranian Kurdish civil rights activist, has been sentenced to death by the Iranian government. A Kurdish advocacy group shared, "She has been denied access to a lawyer and family visits for several months, and her legal proceedings have been conducted in a non-transparent and unjust manner." Fatima Shomes, a women's rights activist, said, "They are exacting revenge on female activists in the most brutal manner. The repeated issuance of death sentences, long-term imprisonment, exiles, and imposition of suspicious illnesses on female prisoners, are ongoing crimes committed by the Islamic Republic against women. We must not remain silent in the face of these brutal injustices." A 17-year-old boy killed three little girls in Southport and injured several others. The girls have been participating in a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop in the teenage boy attacked them with a knife in northwest England. This act of male violence against girls came within weeks of the UK police declaring that violence against women and girls in England and Wales has reached epidemic levels. Sweden's highest court decided that the mother and the mother alone has legal say in abortion cases after a man reported his ex-girlfriend for having a late-term abortion. The public prosecutor dropped the case because the woman was determined to have been in psychological distress. However, the man continued to push the case because he claimed he was a victim as the father of the unborn child. One law professor said, "The position of the man is extremely weak. It is up to the mother alone to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy. The court ruled that the man was not a victim and thus could not lodge a complaint." After the UN met with the Taliban in Qatar, an acquiesced to the Taliban's demand to bar Afghan women from attending, Marya Maroufarvin, co-founder of the Purple Saturdays movement, spoke about her grassroots movement to liberate women from patriarchal rule. Every week her women's rights group organizes protests in Afghanistan. "We can only rely on ourselves," she said. "We are advocating for a legitimate, democratic and inclusive government, and we have to accept that. In doing so, we cannot rely on those who simply use human rights to promote themselves." The New England Journal of Medicine published Phase 3 trial data demonstrating that two shots a year of a drug currently used to treat HIV were effective at preventing HIV infection in young women and teenage girls. More than 5,000 African women and teenage girls participated in the trial and none of them acquired HIV. Members of parliament in Gambia voted to maintain a ban on female genital mutilation. The ban was introduced in 2015, but Muslim clerics supported its repeal. Nearly 75 percent of Gambian women between the ages of 15 and 49 have undergone female genital mutilation, and two-thirds of these women were cut before the age of five. While the ban's repeal was initially supported by a majority of MPs, campaigners successfully lobbied against it. Following President Joe Biden's announcement that he was leaving the U.S. presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris announced her own candidacy. In fewer than two days, her campaign raised over $100 million, and she has received endorsements from President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and other influential Democrats. If elected, not only would Harris be the first woman, but also the first person of Indian descent and the first black woman to be President of the United States. That concludes W.L.R.N.'s World News segment for Thursday, August 8, 2024. I'm Mary. Share new stories, announcements, and tips with us by emailing info@wlrnmedia.com and letting us know what's going on. Hey, sisters! Your devoted W.L.R.N. collective has been invited to 2025's Filia Conference in Great Britain, and nothing would make us happier than to be able to attend and report back to you about all the goings out at the conference. The last conference took place in 2023, and next year's promises to be just as exciting and informative with talks and workshops from current feminist minds and advocates. We're asking you for help, dear sisters, in getting to Filia in 2025. Your donation will go toward airfare and accommodations for Thistle, Jenna, and Aurora. Our press passes will get us in the door so we can give you access to the best of the weekend amongst radical feminist hearts and minds. If you'd like to help your grassroots, volunteer-powered, women's community radio station, make it to the Filia Conference in 2025, head over to wlrnmedia.com and click on the donate button. Any amount you are able to donate is graciously appreciated. We are blessed to be able to do this work for you, sisters. Thank you, as always, for listening to W.L.R.N. [Music] [Music] Lately it's a lot of, who knows, probably both, maybe neither, living in the middle of, if and when, wondering when? Well this must be the awful boat ride home. There's so many of us here, and still so many of us are alone. And I got a mental traffic jam in my brain. And just like you, I'm trying to make my exit of this game. And lately nothing really satisfies me or loosens me from this grip. And all of my old pleasures just turn into one more head trip. Stick to the heart, stay with the heart. Remember your heart. [Music] Stick to the heart, stay with the heart. Remember your heart. [Music] Stick to the heart, stay with the heart. Remember your heart. [Music] Top with big blue and with a little pin. Love needs, love needs, love releases the medicine. Release the medicine release the medicine release the medicine release the medicine. That was Sylvia Bag with her song release the medicine. Next up we'll hear excerpts of an interview Lola did with Dr. Victoria Brown about her research, advances and setbacks in women's health, feminism, and reproductive labor. So the topic of this month is women's health, specifically how certain diseases such as autoimmune diseases strike women at higher rates than men. Here at WLR and we're kind of asking why is that? I by no means am a expert of autoimmunity. That's not necessarily my contribution to the area of public health. But I certainly have a lot to say and a lot to think about in terms of how women are listened to and what the clinical encounter is between women and their providers. I just wrote a piece that was in the Journal of Urogynecology, International Journal of Urogynecology that was actually dealing with this same issue. And it looked at chronic pelvic pain, chronic pain, and women and how essentially disbelief with this issue of interstitial cystitis, which is really, you know, for any of your listeners that are familiar with this condition, it's a really, I mean, essentially imagine the feelings of a UTI that are chronic and can last for weeks, months, years. So it's a very serious condition that actually affects a surprising number of women. And, you know, a lot of women going to their clinicians, going to their providers asking, you know, what's wrong with me, help me, you know, I'm in this severe pain. That's actually being told over the course of years and years and years. This is all in your mind. This is, you know, psychosomatic. This is not real. This is not something you come to a urologist for, you know, then they'll go to a gynecologist and they'll be sent, you know, in this kind of labyrinthine, you know, health system that we have in the United States, where it's just a referral from back and forth between, you know, urogynecologist and gynecologist and, you know, an OB. The implications of it being that a lot of these women are going undiagnosed and therefore, you know, unable to gain any kind of relief. And so, you know, there's a lot of disbelief happening there, the symptoms being imagined, you know, just part of the aging process or just something you have to get through. And essentially just not listened to, which of course, you know, for your listenership is not going to be surprising. I would imagine, by any means. Do you find that there's a shift, either in kind of the discourse around believing women more or just in popular discourse about women's pain? There's more being written about it. I don't know, because I'm always interested in what the translation is between what's being written about and what actual people are listening to and reading. Right. And one way, this is one of my critiques of academia. I think that, you know, writing about things is great, publishing these, our findings in academic journals that are very prestigious are great. But what's the level at which these things are being translated to clinical application? To some degree, I think that people are, you know, clinician specifically are more sensitive to this. It just doesn't seem like it's happening very fast. So, you know, I think in some ways a lot of our work still remains in translation, bringing these questions to the public, you know, getting them out through through programs like this, right, for people to hear. I mean, and hopefully, you know, other suffers of these conditions, you know, as biology increasingly comes to be merged with business, technology is the desire to learn the secrets of the female body of reproduction. And to further study it more, are we increasingly putting those biological natural processes of reproduction and creation. Right. I mean, we lose what that, what that means, right, women reproduce the world, and therefore women create the world. Generation after generation and a generation, right, and it's women that do that. And so with the kind of ignoring of, you know, women's pain, you know, in some ways, perhaps a wild kind of secret forest that's kind of far and put away. On one hand, yes, we don't know the the inner depths of it, but on the other hand, it still remains wild. Right. But I am, I am hesitant because I am critical of, you know, the systems at play right now within not just health fields, but just generally within our economic system and within our, you know, political economic system that essentially takes all of that beautiful life and impulse to create that we have in our lives and turns it into a kind of dead labor right and what I'm talking about is capitalism. The way that our livelihood and our individual imprint every day of our lives is harnessed for production under a capitalist kind of, you know, system of production. In a sense, the goal of capitalist society is to take and transform all of this beautiful creative generative life and transform it into dead labor, turning that into a kind of object to be put under the microscope. Turn in both directions. I want to advance it to improve the health and well being of women's lives, have them live longer, healthier, more nutritious, better fed in all of its sense lives. On the other hand, I fear what putting this knowledge into the hands of our current system, and what the implications of that could be for women. Capitalism needs primitive accumulation. The phase of capitalist development has always needed it. Of course, we know Federici is I'm a big proponent of Federici. She has harnessed a lot of this idea saying women are also a colony right and looking at the female body as a kind of colony. So, you know, in that regard, you know, as I said, you know biology and technology are kind of merging into this kind of bio capital. I mean, we learned a lot of this through coven right and the astronomical profits that big pharma earned off of vaccines as we increasingly cannot no longer separate biology from business. I think we need to keep that in mind at every step of the way in women's health, and what it means to study women's health, and how we study women's health and even more important who is studying women's health, right? Is it, is it biologists that can speak with expertise on this topic? What can an anthropologist contribute to this conversation? On that note, thinking about Federici, capitalism, all these intersections, and how you as an anthropologist contribute, you want to talk a little bit about your dissertation research and maybe what inspired you to go about it, what you found and what inspired with you as you progress your career? Yes. Essentially, I'm a person of ideas. I like to move through big ideas and then translate them into very local places like like many socio cultural anthropologists do. That's what we're trying to do. We take these big ideas, you know, related to, you know, whether it be social reproduction or critiques of capital, you know, and then we translate them down into more local situations and say, you know, what's happening on the ground in real people's lives. I spent about 10 years off and on in a place called Almeria Spain, which is the largest expanse of greenhouse agriculture in the world. It's called the plastic seed. It's so, you know, you stand out on a hill and you can kind of just see for miles and miles and miles, just what they call the plastic though, because it looks like the plastic seed. One of the things that, you know, I was really interested in looking at there was how did this landscape, this entire economic enclave is being sent off to all of these other parts of Europe, United States, mostly, mostly Northern Europe. But how did this whole economic system come into being and specifically what's been the role of women and women's work. And so I took social reproduction theory, which, you know, it's a, it's a branch of feminism going back to, you know, the early 1970s. At the time, you know, we're looking at a lot of theories related to women's work and where women fit into the production process, and how we can value reproductive labors, all of the labor that is entailed in not just a city about a chariot describes it as, you know, not just a worker showing up at the door of her workplace, ready to work for a wage, but all of those processes that made her have a good breakfast, be emotionally secure, be a part of a community, all of that emotional communitarian, all of that unpaid household labor that went into the creation of that worker. And while it's not valued in our economic system. Maybe it should be. And how can we theorize the work, all of this other work that women are doing that are not necessarily earning a wage, but are contributing to making a better life to making a life worth living. A human life, shall we say, all of these aspects that keep life bearable. And I mean, again, these questions of social reproduction continue to come up as, you know, with the ebbs and flows of history where when life starts to become unbearable, you might need to rethink, you know, how are we looking at social reproduction? I mean, I don't know, right now our precarious times of women trying to balance, you know, their careers with a complete lack of childcare in this country is another time, you know, I mean, people are just at their with said, but in any case. So I took social reproductive theory that, you know, as I said, you know, it's trying to make visible all of this unpaid labor in households and take that into as a lens that I used onto the transformations in this region. And it was really fascinating. I mean, essentially, I found that, you know, there were all of these, you know, what they would call farm lives, they weren't necessarily owning, but they were working in fields right next to their husbands, having large families, and there was kind of a view of the household as a household right that was reproducing itself transferred really over the course of one single, you know, very dynamic generation where essentially women were pushed out of agricultural work. The husbands became these kinds of agro entrepreneurs that were really kind of running the farms, and then paying waged labor, you no longer had large families, you no longer had necessarily wives that were working in the symbol of that was the kind of housewife where you had these kind of, you know, well, my wife doesn't work and that's the symbol of success. And so you kind of moved into this. So in this way, women were kind of went from being kind of farmwives with all this knowledge of farming. They were dispossessed of that knowledge and were then made into either housewives. And then in a lot of the families, and that's where as they've continued, or a lot of those families were, you know, they needed a dual income. They were no longer applying that knowledge to their own homes and to their, you know, the reproduction of their own households, but they were sent into factories and now working at pittance labor for wage. And in some of the dirtiest hardest work you could ever do, and that is the vegetable cleaning and processing plants of almeria where it's just back breaking labor and women are working standing 1213 hours there's no set hours day. It's just when the work is done, the work is done. And so back breaking labor done by these, these women in this really largely unsung sector of farming of agro capitalist farming that really no one's been writing about. And no one's really looking at. So that was my dissertation. So it had all these traces of social reproduction, particularly, you know, the mark that capital leaves on the female body and kind of how capitalism use women's body. But then that kind of led to, as I, you know, continued to think about it, you know, I was drawn back to this phrase by Federici. And that is that the body for women in capitalism has been like the factory for the male waged worker. Right. And so, coming back to the female body, you know, as a source of exploitation. Feminists have been writing about our bodies and our bodily functions right our processes, the creation and our generative reproductive capacity. And with good reason right I mean so you know it's been both the source of our exploitation, but also a point of our resistance. And so, taking all of that theoretical focus on ecology, development, and the role that women play in all of these things and in farming and agriculture and rural life. And then really kind of applying it to a study of just the, you know, of women's bodies and the conditions that we face. Following that logic that's not mine it's Federici's women's bodies are like the factories. I think if we take that, you know, and we think about all of the ways that women's bodies have been used to generate capital to generate citizens, generation of workers, but also for sexuality right for men's pleasure. So in the way that women's bodies have been appropriated, I've just been really interested in kind of turning my attention towards health, and how women can begin to start freeing themselves from these extractive industries. The last point that I want to address is the newest study with tampons and finding lead and arsenic levels in it. How does that do you think relate not only to women's health being ignored or not cared for whatsoever, but also this notion or like backlash Oh, but I buy the good tampons or these are the ones you need to buy and this idea of like healing the self through consumption. You know, when this recent news came out it reminded me a lot of the toxic shock fear, not rightfully so I mean it wasn't just a fear I mean it was a big issue that came up in the 1980s related to tampons and how long you leave them in and certain amounts of chemicals that were allowed to, you know, be put and how the cotton was raised and, you know, it's not a new issue, I guess is what I'm saying. The more years you're on this earth, the more you realize it's just the same battles over and over and over again and I think in some ways our goal is just to kind of continue to reiterate. And it's it's it's not to never change that by that I do not mean that, certainly sometimes you know we're presented with a new evidence and we need to, you know, reposition and consider new perspectives but who can consume their way out of this. Again, are we talking about women or are we coming back to social class and for me the question of women, it has to be tied to social class. And that's not to say that women don't deserve to study women's issues themselves for themselves by themselves and that we can have theory that deals only with our bodies and issues that come up in our lives. So it's certainly not to say to stop writing about that by any means, but it has to be tied in some kind of way to social class because otherwise it will become this kind of consume your way out of it but who can do that. I mean, who can spend $10 for organic tampons. And by the way, they did studies on it and the organic tampons were also contaminated. So rather than the kind of liberal feminist approach, which is just I will just I myself again, getting at that individual versus social. I myself will consume organic food. I myself will buy only watering glass bottles. I myself will I myself will drive an electric vehicle point being that's not going to get us out of this. And I think with the tampon thing specifically, I mean, what are tampons. They're cotton. What is cotton. It is a plant. It is grown in the earth. Right. So again, we cannot get out of these questions without looking at ecology, looking at farming practices. And again, when we're looking at kind of the the mono crop, how agriculture has changed from a much more kind of biodiverse sustainable small scale agriculture kind of model to these kind of mono crop plantation cotton style farming practices that include pesticides, right herbicides, glyphosate. And the kind of well, right, dead labor, as I've said, right, not letting things grow as they should. But, you know, for the purpose of industry, when cotton is treated like it's not a part of our livelihood. It's not a part of our life. We have no attachment to it. When we live a life of commodity consumption, void of any kind of meaning with the materials and environment that we're interacting with every day in a very intimate way. Can it get more intimate than a tampon? Right. This is what we're going to have. Is this latest finding with all these toxicology reports on these tampons? Is it directed at women as some kind of way to take them out? I don't believe so. I think it's just part of a larger system in which women primarily are made to feel that their bodies need all of these various different products. The problems have always been big. They've always been systemic. And, you know, in response, we need a large systemic revolutionary response. We'll never consume our way out of capitalism and what it does to the female body. It is systemic. The only way we can get there is by organizing. The only way we will ever be able to organize is if we have a language to talk about these issues that we're confronting and that we're able to join together as women to fight these. The shame and the stigma that is associated with the female body is really something that it delays us in our diagnoses, you know, going back to the very beginning of our conversation. That's just a part of aging, having any kind of urinary incontinence, you know, postpartum period. That's just part of what it is to age. You know, you want to talk about a field of study for women that is looked at with, well, and true kind of dorking, like, disgust is pelvic health and urogynecology. It's unbelievable. You know, urinary incontinence, post child birth is extremely common. And the majority of women just accepted as like, this is just what happens. You know, this is the price of motherhood. And this is also just what happens as you age. And it's actually not even true. It's a very easy fix. And there are a lot of things that you can do, whether it be through, like, pelvic floor exercises and therapists. And I mean, if you want to go that route surgery, but even, you know, kind of more kind of conservative options, and it's never, ever talked about. And, you know, so the aging process, stigmatized, menstruation, stigmatized, you know, sexuality, stigmatized, you know, every aspect of the female body, you know, stigmatized and, and shrouded with this kind of shame. So goal number one, I mean, we'll take down the systems, but goal number one will never take down the systems until we start shedding these, you know, these fears of publicly discussing. Completely normal routine experiences of womanhood. I definitely see it. And even, you know, I've experienced this over the past four years with like struggles with my own period, and there was an obsession with the concern over my reproductive capacity. And don't worry. You're still fertile. And don't worry. You'll still have children. It wasn't about my overall health. It wasn't about my well being mentally. It wasn't about whether I was underweight malnourished. They never worried about that. It was all about my fertility. And whether I was one day going to be able to reproduce. And it just, it made me feel as if that's all that I'm seen for. And I'm good for whether one day I'll be able to bear a child, because that was really the only thing doctors would focus on. And then I asked my male friends, like, you know how fertile you are? None of them know. Right? That's not, especially at 2022. None of them ever check. But there's an obsession for women, because it feels as if it's our one purpose. That's so interesting, because think about just the field of women's health. When we say she's an expert in women's health, what's the first thing you think of? Reproduction. Reproduction, right? I mean, of course, we fight against that, you know, we are not just reproducing bodies. We are subjects, you know, in human lives and, you know, and, you know, but then it's interesting. I mean, when one is confronted with the end of life, when one is kind of faced with this terrifying diagnosis, how do women confront their fertility, particularly in early onset cancers, right? So women who have not yet had the ability to have a child, and how they approach treatment decision-making based on that. And what a lot of the women are saying is that they have not had any physicians, specifically oncologists, talk to them about fertility preservation methods and alcohol, you know, and how this might, you know, how chemotherapy or radiation might affect their potential to become mothers one day. And then the reason is, is because that's seen as secondary, primary is survival. Interesting where your experience was one, like, you know, with these other women that they wanted people to talk about it and no one would, and they couldn't get acknowledgement on that their desire and they were kind of, are you crazy? What's wrong with you? Why, like, you know, why are you putting that? First, we need to make sure you survive and you don't need to be thinking about motherhood right now, you need to be thinking about survival. It leads me to another project that I'm working on right now that I kind of briefly mentioned, but about body autonomy, specifically as a US-based project, and kind of the dissolution of women's decision-making around childbirth. As hospitals are closing, specifically in rural areas, but not entirely in rural areas. Women are increasingly being forced to travel further and further distances to give birth in hospital settings, all at the same time that we're experiencing closures of freestanding birth centers and, you know, the practically non-existence of midwives in the United States. You know, and why this is, and what this means for the future of birth in the United States as kind of technocratic machinery comes to kind of control birth and, you know, we're really seeing a kind of dehumanization around maternity and childbirth and it's scary. I mean, I mean, part of it, you know, again, is inviting, re-inviving life back into what is increasingly becoming an AI kind of driven, you know, humans becoming machines and machines becoming humans and this kind of inter-exchange between the two and where are we going to end up? And I see childbirth as a particularly relevant area for an intervention where in the United States we might be able to, for example, and something I'm working on right now is that, you know, is organizing the introduction of midwives into these rural areas where they've had these hospital closures and seeing what kinds of outcomes that come of these introductions where local women from their same communities are helping the same women in these communities give birth, not necessarily under the kind of authoritative knowledge of the technocratic hospital system. Women are more likely today to die in childbirth than they were 20 years ago and how is that possible in our era of scientific progress and all of these amazing breakthroughs and a country that spends more of its GDP on health care than any other country in the world. I mean, what's going on? Where's all this money going? And it's certainly not to improve health outcomes. I mean, look at the health of our country, right? And when I say, or, I mean, the United States. Is there any final comments that you have for listeners to a radical feminist audience? I suppose it would be, you know, these are very tough times for feminists. They're tough times for anyone who continues to once called themselves a person of the left. I know there's a, there's a massive reorganization of what is considered the left in the United States today where ideas that were very much ideas of the left, you know, 20, 30 years ago are now considered right talking points. I just, I think that, you know, it's, it's very important that we stay together, listen to difference. I know in this virtual world, it's very easy to be caught up in the immediacy and the virtuality of social media and the internet and to feel like our words and our acts don't really matter. But life continues, you know, outside that window and off the screen, keep having difficult conversations, allow room for dialogue without dialogue and discussion. We're never going to get anywhere. You know, and grace. There's a lot of ugliness out there, but really kind of keeping the poise and keeping the grace and continuing to do the work daily that goes into reproducing. Oh, there we go again with that reproduction social reproduction theory with reproducing feminism and making it new every day is essential to keep us moving forward individually and also as a social movement, which I very strongly and always will believe him. It is 2016 empowering women to be the media and reclaim the narrative. Your grassroots community radio station by women for women. W-L-R-N-W-L-R-N-W-L-R-N Good health is the most important thing in life. That's a hill I will personally die on. Your health, both physical and mental, overshadows money, relationships, professional success and anything else you might want. With excellent health, lacking anything else can be faced no matter how difficult. Without good health, everything else in life becomes useless or ruined. One of the biggest ramifications that living in patriarchy leaves us women with is poor health. The trauma of bad parents and toxic home environments during childhood, the trauma of rape and sexual assault, the trauma of abusive treatment at the hands of boys in school, male sexual partners and even males online, along with everything else on the list of patriarchal society's harms, leave very few women and girls unscathed in the realm of health. Mentally, how many of us have experienced depression, anxiety, PTSD, panic disorder, phobias and OCD, and how much of life and our own potential has mental illness robbed us of. These conditions are often not, as so many men want us to believe, the result of a neurochemical imbalance. They're often the result of trauma, trauma that is virtually inescapable in the female experience and that is either directly executed by males or executed by other women and girls as a result of what males did to them. Then there are all of the physical conditions and diseases that women and girls suffer, from debilitating chronic illnesses to cancer, heart disease and stroke. On the one hand, emotional and mental turmoil creates or at least fuels these physical illnesses. On the other hand, any medical condition that predominantly affects women and girls has been historically dismissed as too unimportant to cure. In fact, the medical industry is often the site of trauma for women and girls, especially in the areas most pertinent to our sexual oppression, gynecology and birth. From male gynecologists sexually violating their patients, to women and girls being forced to endure excruciating IUD insertion without any pain relief, to laboring mothers experiencing a wide range of physical and mental abuse during their hospital births, there is no shortage of medical misogyny. The stories of women being outright ignored and dismissed by medical professionals are endless, and it's a well-known fact at this point that most medical and pharmaceutical research done in the last 100 years have exclusively tested men and applied their findings to women, despite researchers knowing that the female body is different from the males in a variety of ways. If a drug tested on men exclusively doesn't work for a majority of women, the medical industry shrugs its shoulders and leaves women to deal with whatever the condition and question is. When we analyze women's health from a feminist perspective, it's clear that like so many other things in patriarchy, the outcome is also the tool, meaning while destroying women's mental and physical health is a goal of patriarchy in and of itself, it's also a political method that reinforces the system. Whether you struggle with mental illness, physical illness or both, you as a woman are neutralized politically to a great extent when you are unwell. You don't have the personal resources including the mental presence to think about sexual politics and how to fight male power. You're forced to focus on recovery or if recovery becomes impossible, the management of your illness. That's not even taking into account the ripple effect of a sick woman in the world. The way her limitations and struggle take her out of the workforce, take her away from her children, take her away from her female friends, her communities, etc. Sometimes the taking away is literal, the premature death of a woman, either by suicide if her mental anguish can't be relieved or by an incurable disease that very well may begin when it does due to that woman's personal history of trauma and stress. Sick and dead women may be of little use to the men and boys who want to fuck us and rely on our labor to sustain their quality of life. But sick and dead women are also no threat to patriarchy. A physically healthy, mentally healthy woman who can see reality clearly and who can make decisions from a place of independence and personal power is the only possible threat to any corner of the patriarchal system. Feminist consciousness is of little practical use if the woman who has it can't apply it to her actions, which is exactly the result of serious and ongoing mental or physical health issues. One of the most feminist acts you can take as an individual woman is prioritizing and taking care of your health. You being mentally and physically healthy won't cripple patriarchy, let alone end it, but it will enable you to participate in the work that can. And many of the things you have to do to promote and protect your health are themselves things that contradict patriarchal prescriptions for women. Saying no to people whenever you want to. Choosing not to please or take care of others when it will strain you, striving for physical strength and power instead of sexual appeal to men. Fully healing from your trauma and thereby stepping into a genuinely confident identity in which you know your own worth and value and don't accept less than what you deserve. So I invite you to take an honest look at your health, both physical and mental, and decide to improve it however you can. Get enough sleep, eat healthy food, exercise with an activity you enjoy, stop abusing substances, go to therapy, regulate your nervous system, explore self-help resources. If you don't feel good physically, mentally, and emotionally most of the time, that's your clue that things need to change. Take care of yourself, for yourself, not for anyone else. You deserve to be healthy, and when you're healthy, you are in the best position to fight male power. Thanks for listening to WLRN's 100th edition podcast on Women's Health. Thank you so much, Dr. Victoria Brown for speaking with me. Until next time, this is Lola signing off on another WLRN podcast. If you like what you're hearing and would like to donate to the cause of feminist community radio, please visit our WordPress site and click on the donate button. Check out our merch tab to get a nice gift in exchange for your donation. And if you are interested in joining our team, we're always looking for new volunteers to conduct interviews, write blog posts and posts to our Facebook and other social media pages, as well as do other tasks to keep us moving forward as a collective of media activist women. Thank you so much for listening. This is Aurora signing off for now. And I am Thistle. Thanks for tuning in. Next month, we'll focus our program on the summer Michigan festivals, whippy and rise on the land, what they are, what happened this year, and how groups of women can be powerful in real life circles in the woods. Our handcrafted podcasts always come out the first Thursday of the month, so look for it on Thursday, September 5th. If you'd like to receive our newsletter that notifies you when each podcast music show and interview are released, please sign up for our newsletter on the WLRN WordPress site. Stay strong in the struggle, and thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in to WLRN. This is April No, longtime member from Canada. While I myself cannot go to the feminist conference, Philia, next year in the UK, I urge you to support our team of Jenna, Aurora and Thistle. Members of WLRN will be going to both cover the conference, providing you daily snippets, photos and interviews of this gathering. That drew JK Rowling last year, and will draw over 3,000 women from around the world next year, but also so they can enjoy the company of their cohorts and sisters in the feminist movement. To support our team, just click on the donate button on our WLRNMedia.com website. Make sure to write a note that you intend your gift to go to the "Philia Fund", and in return, you will receive a special thank you. Although we are attempting to raise $1,500, any amount is greatly appreciated. Again, to donate, just go to WLRNMedia.com and click on the donate button. Thanks, sisters. This is April No, WLRN's Wild Woodland Sister, signing off for now. And this is Mary. Our monthly podcasts are always crafted with tender loving care and in solidarity with women worldwide. Thanks for your support. We would love to hear from you, so please share, like and comment widely. [MUSIC PLAYING] ♪ But how will we find our way out of this? ♪ ♪ What is the antidote for the patriarchal kiss? ♪ ♪ How will we find what needs to be shown? ♪ ♪ And then after that, where is home? ♪ ♪ Tell me where is my home? ♪ ♪ 'Cause gender hurts it all ♪