"[H]er husband forgot her 50th birthday.... said Ruchi, who asked to use only her first name because she is in the process of negotiating her divorce."

"'You’ve put all these things aside because you’re a mom and you’re taking care of a family,' she said.... 'Then you think: Is that all I am good for? When did I stop being a person?' Menopause lent a kind of fury to Ruchi’s midlife turmoil. 'I actually thought I was crazy, because I was irritated at everything,' she said.... 'There was a time when I was like, "Oh my gosh. How are we going to do this? How is this going to work? What is my family going to say?"... I am a strong person. I am a capable person. My family is very, very, very important to me, but I am more than my kids and my husband. I think I kind of forgot that.'"

From "Older Adults Are No Longer Staying in ‘Empty Shell’ Marriages/Rates of gray divorce have risen sharply over the past few decades — and experts have a few theories as to why" (NYT). That's a gift link because there are so many interesting comments over there.

1. When her husband forgot her birthday, the wife remembered that she had forgotten that she was a person.

2. Do you get much anonymity by limiting the NYT to using only your first name when your first name is as unusual as Ruchi? (I did look it up, and I can see that in India, it is a very common name.)

3. From the anecdotes in the article, I get the impression that when these long-term marriages dissolve, the man finds another woman (to take care of him?) and the woman embraces independence. 

4. From the comments over there: "This article contains the second reference I’ve seen recently to menopause as the cause of women becoming intolerant. I feel like that’s a slippery slope. I offer for consideration the fact that many, many women in our society are expected to carry loads that are unreasonable. I think that might contribute to 'intolerance' more than any hormonal shifts. And I believe such intolerance is valid."

2 words I didn't expect to read in a biography of John Quincy Adams.

It took me literally a year to read James Traub's "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" (commission earned), but I have finally come to the end. Speaking of the end, JQA's famous last words were "This is the end of earth."

JQA:MS is not the only book I read in the past year, but it is the one I spaced out the most.

Anyway, here are 2 passages each with a surprising word that I will render in boldface:

Consider "D.C.’s 'first activist hotel,' the Eaton, which features a 'Radical Library' in its lobby and has hosted protest song performances in its rooftop bar."

"And the city’s feminist-inflected Hotel Zena, where you will encounter a huge portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg made of tampons."

I'm reading "The world’s coolest hotels want to tell you a story/The latest design-driven hotels aim to immerse guests in a story or social movement, or transport them to another time" (WaPo).

That link on "feminist-inflected" goes to a 2020 Architectural Digest article about the hotel, where it says, "The larger-than-life homage to Justice Ginsburg has been constructed using 20,000 hand-painted tampons, arranged on a pegboard to create a pointillist portrait (complete with the justice’s signature lace collar and her 'Notorious' moniker). A 20-foot-long curving wall in the hotel’s restaurant evokes a glittering gown, adorned with 12,000 protest buttons from decades of feminist marches and events.... And a hanging installation of painted folding chairs honors Chisholm’s famous advice: 'If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.'"

I looked at Hotel Zena's website. It costs about $400 a night to stay there. I was sad to see that some of the rooms had a "king" bed. That's so wrong. I want to be drenched in activism when battling insomnia at the feminist hotel. They need to curate every detail or it's insufficiently immersive. Also what's with bringing your own folding chair? I thought we were kicking the fucking door down?

"Noting that forty-five per cent of British women cannot find the vagina on an unmarked diagram, while fifty-nine per cent of American women cannot find the uterus..."

"... a shocking fact that Nuttall blames in part on the hard-to-remember Latinate words—she laments the loss of terms such as 'wings,' 'gates,' and 'ports' that once described female anatomy. She dislikes 'period' as a word for menstruation: much better is 'the fluidity' of the long-lost 'overflownis.' In place of the Latinate 'deliver,' which to Nuttall sounds 'as if the baby’s just handed to us out of the tinfoiled crib of a takeaway food courier,' she suggests the sturdy Middle English of 'barnish' or 'bearn.' As a word campaigner, Nuttall is blithely decisive when it doesn’t matter, and cagey when it does. She is happy to advocate for words that have no chance of taking off, or to judge a word for a history that is no longer expressed in its meaning. But on subjects that she has identified as politically contentious—exactly where etymological expertise, wisely or not, is most sought—she is anxiously neutral. 'Queer,' she writes, has been reclaimed 'by some'; 'for others,' it 'remains an irredeemable slur.' Phrases like 'pregnant people' and 'people with a uterus' are 'for some,' helpful, precise, and inclusive; 'for others,' this language 'obscures social reality' or is 'dehumanising.'... 'Taking into account patriarchy’s habit of urging women to be quiet and of caricaturing those women who do speak up or out as gossipy, frivolous, hysterical, dull or bitchy, it seems regressive to stifle women’s words, however progressive the motivation. Each woman must have the terms of her own choosing.'"

From "How Much Do Words Matter? A scholar of medieval literature believes that words used in the past can empower women in the present" (The New Yorker), discussing the book "Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words," by Jenni Nuttall. My excerpt leans toward quoting Nuttall. The article itself is by S.C. Cornell, and this is this author's first New Yorker article.

"At Wimbledon earlier this summer, Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan and Shelby Rogers of the United States were among the first competitors to wear dark shorts under their tennis whites..."

"... as the All England Club finally relaxed its all-white rules in recognition of female menstrual reality. At the EuroHockey Championship later this month, shorts will be an option for every participant as well as the traditional skorts, and the decision about what to wear will be left up to each individual player. And some track and field competitors have swapped their bikini-like 'buns' for shorts and leggings in competition."

From "From the Women’s World Cup to Wimbledon, a Victory Everyone Can Share/Across sports, female athletes are fighting a battle over what they put on their bodies and how much of those bodies they display" (NYT).

We're prompted to ask: Wait, why are we doing things this way:

A vogue word, rejected.

You don't need to care about the NYT crossword to be interested in what follows — it discusses a current buzzword — but it does reveal a couple answers. 

From Rex Parker's write-up of today's puzzle:

"The practice of planning workouts around the menstrual cycle to optimize fitness results, known as 'cycle syncing,' has permeated mainstream fitness...."

"Some women have shared that they’ve even shaped their work schedules around their cycles — by saying no to deadlines during low-energy phases, for example. But the evidence on whether this training regimen works at enhancing fitness, let alone whether it helps in other parts of life, is too inconsistent to be convincing, experts said. At most, studies have confirmed what many women know instinctively: that the menstrual cycle corresponds with shifts in energy, mood and stress.... The bits of scientific and anecdotal evidence showing fluctuations in performance or energy throughout the menstrual cycle also don’t prove that syncing workouts to the cycle will optimize fitness.... 'And the added stress of needing to know exactly what week of your cycle you are in and what that means about working out' can be counterproductive....'... 'Now women are understanding that hey, I might be feeling this specific symptom during this time for this specific reason, so I’m going to be tender with myself.... That part is really lovely.'"

From "Cycle Syncing Is Trendy. Does It Work? Professional athletes and fitness influencers say that timing workouts around their menstrual cycles has big benefits. Experts are less certain" (NYT).

Clearly, some mixed feelings about these... mixed feelings. Maybe the idea is for individual women to use whatever there is here that actually helps them individually but for no one to use this against any woman for any reason. 

"So if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in fifth grade or fourth grade, will that prohibit conversations from them since they are in the grade lower than sixth grade?"

"It would."

From "Florida bill would ban young girls from discussing periods in school" (WaPo).

The GOP lawmaker representing Ocala, Fla., later clarified that it “would not be the intent” of the bill to punish girls if they came to teachers with questions or concerns about their menstrual cycle, adding that he’d be “amenable” to amendments if they were to come up. 

The bill ended up passing, 13-5, on Wednesday in a party-line vote....

“I thought it was pretty remarkable that the beginning of a little girl’s menstrual cycle was not contemplated as they drafted this bill,” [said state Rep. Ashley Gantt (D)].

🆘

Watch Florida State Rep. @StanMcClain tell Rep. @Gantt4Florida that his bill prohibits young people from talking about their period….

WHAT?!?! pic.twitter.com/PoEgRm4sK0

— Florida Planned Parenthood Action (@PPactionFL) March 15, 2023

I wasn't going to contribute to viral marketing, but now that there's a #boycottTampax trend, I need to call your attention to this.

#boycottTampax a women's period products company is getting off on the idea of their products being inserted in girls and women - getting there first - while men are chatting them up hoping for sex. Overtones of rape, paedophilia, misogyny - what a hat-trick https://t.co/bgkmOGpRvm

— A Twatter on Tw*tter (@A44955679) November 22, 2022

"In the past, of course, Thiel has personally expressed some attention-grabbing thoughts about both women and health technology."

"In a 2009 essay, he famously expressed the opinion that giving women the right to vote made the country less libertarian and thus worse. And as Inc. magazine reported in 2016, Thiel reportedly expressed an interest in having young people’s blood transfused into his own body as a potential fountain of youth; a year later, people connected with Thiel Capital began making the rounds to deny that story, not very convincingly. (Disclosure: Thiel also funded a lawsuit against Gawker Media, the company where I used to work, that successfully bankrupted the company.) That—and Thiel’s traditional interest in panopticon technology—makes Thiel Capital a curiously appropriate choice...." 

From "Peter Thiel’s Investment Firm Is Backing a Menstrual Cycle-Focused ‘Femtech’ Company/Evie Magazine is COVID-skeptical, transphobic, and obsessed with traditional womanhood. Now, with Thiel Capital’s help, they’re launching a 'wellness' company based on menstrual cycles" (Vice).

"The profile of the patients changed significantly, too. Many were adolescent girls who had never exhibited signs of gender dysphoria."

"Often, their feelings of wanting to be a boy developed along with their breasts, or when they got their period. They were horrified by their bodies, and they wanted control over the changes taking place in them."

From "How Tavistock Came Tumbling Down/I was a nurse working on a team that recklessly prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to kids. I blew the whistle in 2005. Now the government is finally listening" (Common Sense).

The author, Sue Evans, talks about how in the early days of these treatments, the patients were mostly "younger boys who believed themselves to be girls from an early age and a few teenagers who felt like they were trapped in the wrong bodies." More recently, there are many more girls, and, as Evans puts it, instead of a longstanding belief that they are in the wrong body, they reject the changes of puberty. 

"The womb is the only organ in a woman’s body that serves no specific purpose to her life or well-being.... It is truly a sanctuary."

Wrote Montana state Rep. Brad Tschida (R), "a former Montana House majority leader who is running for the state Senate," quoted in "GOP lawmaker: Womb has ‘no specific purpose’ to a woman’s ‘life or well-being'" (WaPo).

If you have a womb, it's not about you. It's just inside your body, but it's the sovereign domain of somebody else — kind of like the Vatican and Italy.

Tschida, criticized, defended his position: “I’m not going to apologize for saying that. I think that’s exactly what it’s there for. It welcomes in a new life and that’s what it’s there to do, to nurture and sustain that life.”

Well, there are too many apologies these days. But is he right? "The womb is the only organ in a woman’s body that serves no specific purpose to her life or well-being." What about the appendix?

"Stardust, an astrology-focused menstrual tracking app that launched on the App Store last year... one of Apple’s top three most-downloaded free apps right now... [had] put in writing that it will voluntarily..."

"... without even being legally required to—comply with law enforcement if it’s asked to share user data.... A widely-shared concern is that law enforcement can use personal data created in apps against people who’ve sought or gotten abortions illegally."

That went up at Vice yesterday, but there's an update saying that "Stardust changed its privacy policy to omit the phrase about cooperating with law enforcement 'whether or not legally required.'" 

 You can attempt to comprehend a TikTok from Stardust, which I'll put after the jump. It's pretty complicated — includes the phrase: "We're not an evil corporation...."

Is it paranoid to imagine that the government would aim to keep track of women's menstrual cycles for the purpose of detecting abortions? We're often chided for not caring enough about how much privacy we sacrifice by using apps, and this one is really intrusive, and it's luring in young women who have the gullibility to want to connect their period to astrology. 

"Tampons, a necessity for many, are becoming harder and harder to find. People who menstruate are saying it's hard to find tampons on store shelves across the U.S. right now...."

Tweeted NPR, quoted in "NPR mocked for tweet warning tampon shortage a problem for 'people who menstruate' Twitter users blasted NPR for avoiding use of the word 'women' in the tweet" (Fox News).

NPR followed up with a tweet that leaned into the problematic concept "women":

It's yet another supply chain problem where women are bearing the brunt of the cost, as mothers struggle to feed their babies during the baby formula shortage.https://t.co/p5mAPlSwPM

— NPR (@NPR) June 13, 2022

In November 2019, they all laughed at Dennis Prager for saying what, in 2022, they all get mad at you for not saying.

Dennis Prager is mocked on Bill Maher when he describes the now mainstream leftist belief that “men can menstruate”

This is from Nov 2019.

Queer Theory and Critical Race theory ideology are so radical and incoherent, one risks looking crazy pointing them out. @wesyang pic.twitter.com/89cgalW9fD

— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) April 6, 2022

Are the anti-vaxxers rightwing?!

I'm wondering as I slog through a NYT article titled "A New Front in the Anti-Vaccine Fight Emerges in California/For months, far-right activists have rallied against masks and lockdowns imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. Now some protesters have shifted their focus to the Covid-19 vaccine." 

I see "far-right activists," but they are tied to other issues — masks and lockdowns. But "some protesters have shifted their focus" — that implies that some of the far-right activists have shifted from protesting masks and lockdowns to protesting vaccines. 

The article mentions the right but not the left:

For months, far-right activists across the country have been rallying against mask-wearing rules, business lockdowns, curfews and local public health officials, casting the government’s response to the virus as an intrusion on individual liberties. But as masks and lockdowns become an increasingly routine part of American life, some protesters have shifted the focus of their antigovernment anger to the Covid-19 vaccines. Last week at Dodger Stadium, the same small but vocal band of demonstrators who previously staged anti-mask and anti-lockdown protests in the Los Angeles area disrupted a mass vaccination site that gives an average of 6,120 shots daily. ...

So there are "far-right activists across the country" but also a "small but vocal band of demonstrators" in LA. Was the "small but vocal band" far right? Or did a sleight of hand take place there?

Another example of what I am suspecting is sleight of hand:

In the Covid-19 era in California, vaccine opponents have found themselves increasingly in alignment with pro-Trump, working-class people sometimes eager to embrace extreme tactics to express their beliefs....

I think what's barely getting acknowledged there is that vaccine opponents are left-wing, and they happen to be aligning to some extent with right-wingers. It's easy to understand "pro-Trump, working-class people" as right wing. But there's no cue at all with regard to the vaccine opponents. I'm guessing they are not working class.

Menopause stories,

Weird WaPo headline catches my eye: "Kamala Harris knows things no vice president has ever known."

I have not read this piece yet. I'm just trying to observe my understanding as it dawns on me. My first thought was: What kind of fawning bullshit is this? I was just complaining that the mainstream media hasn't subjected Kamala Harris to any serious testing, and now here's this ludicrous headline ascribing special powers of knowing to her. 

I see it's in the "Style" pages, which is what we have in the newspaper today instead of what used to be called the "Women's" pages. So now I'm thinking of the old concept "Women's Ways of Knowing." Have you heard of these 5 "ways of knowing" — something about "women's cognitive development, dependent on conceptions of self (self), relationship with others (voice) and understanding of the origins and identity of authority, truth and knowledge (mind)"? 

Is that what this WaPo thing is onto? Harris "knows things no vice president has ever known" because no vice president has ever been a woman? And extend that to no vice president has ever been black.

The piece is by Monica Hesse. 

I keep thinking about how, at some point in Kamala Harris’s life, she has painstakingly reviewed her office wardrobe with the understanding that the difference between “slut” and “feminazi” is a few inches of worsted-wool hemline. At some point, she has approached a stranger in a public bathroom because the Tampax machine is broken again, and she has said, I’m so sorry, but do you have — and then she didn’t have to finish the question because women in bathrooms know that there is only one end to that question.

You know, I went through an entire life's worth of menstruating and never once asked as stranger in a public bathroom for a tampon. It's not something that just has to happen to every woman. Nor did I ever even consider whether clothes I wore to the office needed to get between “slut” and “feminazi.” I don't even know now which one is shorter, but why would it matter, since neither message is office-appropriate? Wouldn't you just be picking your length and deciding how much you cared about being appropriate? 

I'm not buying Hesse's portrayal of the necessary experience of a woman, but in any case, who cares whether vice presidents know these things, and didn't Hesse already go through this collection of thoughts when she contemplated a first woman president 4 years ago?

Bleeders.

The term” female” is outdated and disrespectful.

From now on, I demand to be referred to as a bleeder. https://t.co/7jUwBVjPNk

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) October 24, 2020

"JK Rowling faces backlash for comments on the phrase ‘people who menstruate.'"

"... Rowling said she believed that the headline should refer to women instead. Her comment was seen as transphobic, as transgender men can still menstruate."

Twitter reports on a Twitter trend that started here:

‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate https://t.co/cVpZxG7gaA

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 6, 2020

She followed up with: