Too Many Images Too Little Touch April 2020 exists as a haze in my mind. One of my few clear memories is looking out the window at two squirrels running and playing in the newly green yard. Even then I knew it was absurd to envy wild squirrels with as little as a one-year lifespan. Yet I felt enormous envy that, while humanity locked down, life in the wild roared back with the season.
The Challenge of Male Violence March 8 was International Women’s Day. As they say on their website, the theme this year is #ChooseToChallenge. Spoken word poet Anisa Mandaula celebrated our power to change the future in a video for the day, saying, “Choose to create history, not to be created by it.” Her poem calls on us to change the lives of all women, not only our mothers, daughters, and sisters. The body of 33-year-old Sarah Everard
Take Care of Your Rose: What Pissed-Off Grannies with Vulvas Can Do This is the third part of my series on Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause. Here are the links to Part 1 and Part 2. In 1845, Columbat de l’Isere wrote an early description of what is now called Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause, or GSM: “The postmenopausal woman’s features are stamped with the impress of age and their genital organs are sealed with the signet
Estradiol the Scam What Am. Long before I heard of estradiol, back when I was earning my MBA in the 1970s, we talked about barriers to entry, and how companies (or even countries) can, and do, exploit them to prevent competition . A barrier to entry is anything that makes it hard for someone else to produce or sell a similar item. That barrier could be resources. If you owned the only diamond mine in
GSM – Now That Trips off the Tongue When I was in my late fifties, I went to the gynecologist convinced I had a yeast infection. The burning sensation in my vulva was not responding to over-the-counter treatments. That was because I did not have an infection. Instead, I had the beginnings of what was then called vaginal atrophy, and has since been renamed Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause, or GSM. What I needed was not
The Power of Stories On tasting her first radish, the gorilla Koko signed to her human companions, “Red hurt food.” Just three words: one for the beginning, one for the middle, one for the end. That is all a story requires. Koko’s story, one of many possible stories about a radish, was complete in itself: compelling, grounded in the immediate, with character, action, resolution. The power of three is embedded in every story, and every
