In her introduction to Poems from the Women’s Movement, Honor Moore recollects a friend saying, “The women’s movement was poetry.” The women’s movement was–and is–many things, and poetry was–and is–a necessary part of it. During the 1970s, poetry provided a way for women to find their voices and validate their experiences. Poetry enabled feminists to […]
Search Results for: vagina
Whose Vagina Is It, Anyway?
Q: I’m a 32-year-old woman being driven up the wall by my fiancé always saying that he can tell I’m playing with my toys when he’s at work because I’m loose that day. I swear to him up and down that I haven’t, and even tell him the last time that I have done something […]
No Comment: Summer’s Eve Gives Your Vagina A New Monologue
Summer’s Eve has launched its “Hail to the V” campaign, a new series of print, online and television ads telling women to spend more time taking care of their “wunder down under.” According to Summer’s Eve marketing director Angela Bryant, the campaign is “all about empowerment.” You be the judge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RosLrkIwZA Let me admit that […]
The Vagina Dialogues, Circa 1970
Before there was The Vagina Monologues, there were the pelvic instructors. These women, from Boston’s Women’s Community Health Center, were radical in not only instructing medical students in female sexual anatomy but in also using their own bodies as models. Their short-lived yet highly symbolic program took place from 1975 to 1976 at Harvard Medical […]
Guerilla Vulvas Take on Vaginal Rejuvenators
Vulva-activism is alive and well–and on its way to Las Vegas. The latest protests stem from concern about the growing number of practitioners performing female genital cosmetic surgery. The surgeries take many forms. A labiaplasty reduces the size of the labia (while often performed to correct damage to the labia during childbirth or to alleviate […]
It Wasn’t Your Resume, It Was Your Vagina
The laundry list of interview do’s and don’t’s for women job-seekers is lengthy and often contradictory. Forbes tells women to be personable on the interview–but not too chatty. Cosmo warns against looking “hot,” but features images of gorgeous women sporting leopard-print stilettos and full lips. The “pantsuit vs. skirt” question remains unanswered. The Internet and […]
A Texas Woman Died After the Hospital Said It Would Be a ‘Crime’ to Intervene in Her Miscarriage
Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy. The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection.
But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria. Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.
‘The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam’: Larry Nassar and the National Nightmare
An excerpt from Exposed: The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam:
“Tasha Schwikert unwittingly entered the ranch at one of its most intense times. ‘We were all so broken down and injured,’ remembered Jeannette Antolin, who was a member of the U.S. national team from 1995 to 2000. ‘No one was taking care of their bodies. We were all malnutritioned. Most of us had eating disorders at the time. Most of us were being abused by Larry and not knowing it.'”
Project 2025, ‘Tampon Tim,’ and the GOP’s Commitment to Cervical Mucus
Project 2025’s endorsement of fertility awareness-based methods—which are less effective than other birth control methods—would require nothing short of a national campaign in menstrual and cervical mucus literacy.
With Birth Control Under Attack, Enshrining It in Law Is Essential
We are the experts on our bodies, lives and needs—not politicians. Enshrining birth control in law would be a huge step toward recognizing our reproductive rights.