Beka > Recent Status Updates

"Friends are automatically classed as 'less important' than romantic partners. I'd never questioned that. It was just the way the world was. I guess I'd always felt that friendship just couldn't compete with what a partner offered, and that I'd never really experience *real love* until I found romance."

"Instead of typical good job/good boy/girl praise, find and describe warmly what the child is doing right."

"Many women have been conditioned to fear menopause as an expiration date for relevance + as a sign of weakness -- only because that is what men thought. In fact, we have this amazing data that tells us that menopause is the opposite: a time when historically women contributed great things to society because of their knowledge + their age. Value. Agency. Voice."

"For me, the idea of Estrogen as a wonder drug needed by all women is an echo of misogynistic ideas that menopause means decay. Estrogen is a therapeutic tool; there are some specific things it can do."

Pro tip: be wary of anyone advertising salivary tests for hormone level detection. They are meaningless.

Some providers recommend blood tests for hormone levels - to diagnose menopause, etc. Just as we don't need hormone levels to diagnose puberty, we don't need them for the Menopause transition or post-menopause. Hormone levels are only indicated when women are younger than 40.

"The patriarchy has been controlling menopause for too long, demanding our silence (and when we speak they have governed the very words that we use), and we are continuing to pay the price."

"...I began to wonder how many questions haven't been asked because for so long people who experience menopause, and who are best able to say what is happening, haven't had a seat at the medical table.

Or because talking about Menopause was considered impolite or something not done -- because who wants to draw attention to the fact they are aging?"

"For women who haven't started their Menopause transition, there may be opportunities to shore up your brain's defense against depression -- such as working on sleep, quitting smoking, or forging new friendships. Friendship circles often get smaller in your 30s, for a variety of reasons."

"Black Cohosh is indigenous to eastern North America, and Indigenous North Americans originally used the roots and stems to help with labor. It made its way into the American Folk remedy lexicon in the 1800s.
Studies show no benefit with black cohosh versus placebo, and there are reports of liver damage.

One study found 25% of 35 black cohosh supplements in America didn't contain ANY black cohosh at all."

"As an aside, I sometimes wonder if the reasons stories of women appeal so much to other women isn't just a workaround of the collective public silencing that has happened for centuries.

Perhaps we are wired for collective storytelling, as this would facilitate passing on vital information about finding food + water. If women were the primary foragers, the ability to gather info this way would have been important."

"The question shouldn't be 'why does ovarian function -and consequently, fertility- have a hard stop around 50?'
Instead, the question we should consider is 'how did women become so physically successful that they began to live beyond their reproductive capacity?' This brings us right back to grandmothers...Family groups with an interested + helpful grandmother would've had a survival advantage."

"Has anyone ever, in the history of medicine, ever uttered the words 'through good sanitation and healthcare, men are now living long enough to develop erectile dysfunction'? Doubtful."

"When something feels off balance, I replace the word 'women' with 'men' to see how it sounds. If it sounds reasonable I'm more likely to consider the hypothesis worthy of evaluation, but if we would never speak about men that way then there's going to be a lot of side-eye on my part."

"...allowing women to live beyond their ovarian function; benevolent patriarchal society allowed the failings of women -- menopause -- to be uncovered.

The tenacity of this myth is testament to the impact of patriarchal dogma: erasing menopausal women from history is literally reducing women to the function of their uterus and ovaries."

"The evolutionary advantage of menopause: a sign of strength, not weakness.

There's a common fallacy that women were never *meant* to experience menopause. This assertion claims that menopause is an accidental state that resulted from longer life expectancies thanks to modern sanitation and medicine, allowing women to live beyond their ovarian function."

"The culture of silence about Menopause in our patriarchal society is something to behold.

Menopause doesn't even rate the shame that society gives to the vulva and vagina; apparently there is nothing of lower value than an aging woman's body, and many in our society treat Menopause not as a phase of life but rather as a phase of death -- sort of a pre-death."

"They did it to each other; it was a chain reaction. All the men out here perpetuated a toxic cycle, generation after generation. It was his father, + grandfather too; it was Dr Carmichael + the church elders -- they all fed both of those young boys a pack of lies about how the world worked, how power + control worked. What they deserved and how they should do anything to get it."

"For middle + upper-class white women, same-sex socialization took place in women's colleges, progressive movements, + during the Women's suffrage movement spamming the 1920s. Were all of these places marked as queer? Obviously not. But could they express same-sex love in these environments? Yes."

"...Middle-class white women were not permitted to socialize in smoky bars in the Bowery in the same way that working-class white women could.
For that matter, women who displayed their sexuality in ANY way, queer or otherwise, were frequently marked as prostitutes, as women violating social norms." 2/2

"It is not an accident that much of the textual gay material from the early 20th century US focuses on men, + that we didn't see a visible, public queer culture for women until the 1930s + WW2.
For women, it was more difficult to mark public queer space, because it was more difficult for women to be public..." 1/2