#women care hospitals

[drshilpaagrawal]

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[coochiequeens]

Doctors and nurses who are not willing to listen to their patients should be replaced

BY VICTORIA SMITH

The third time I went into labour, I was determined to avoid getting told off. With both of my previous births, I had somehow managed to get things wrong. My errors the first time: going to hospital too early, then, when I returned three hours later, “leaving it so late”. The second time: ignoring assurances that I didn’t need to come in yet, then giving birth in the car park — an event I later discovered was being used in antenatal classes as an example of women “not planning ahead”.

“My previous births have been fast,” I said, when I went into labour with my third, “so I’d like to come in now.” I was speaking to the woman at the midwife-led unit that is the only option where I live. (If you need a caesarean section, you have to be transferred to next town.) “Third babies are notoriously difficult,” was her response.

What an odd thing to say to a woman already in labour. The “notoriously” suggested it wasn’t based on any actual evidence, but rather a kind of folk wisdom. It felt as though I was being warned not to tempt fate, not to assume that this baby would just pop out. I saw myself being categorised as one of those arrogant women who presumes to know her own body, only to be taught a harsh yet much-deserved lesson. “Third babies are notoriously difficult” sounded not unlike “third-time mothers shouldn’t get above themselves”.

In fact, I have never been particularly cocky about childbirth. When I was pregnant with my first child, back in the days when the Right-wing press were still obsessed with famous women being “too posh to push”, I wondered if I might be able to get an elective caesarean myself. I did not particularly care about childbirth being a wonderful experience, or about “doing it well”. I didn’t care if the Daily Mail thought I was a joke.

What I cared about was not having a child who would face the same difficulties as my brother, who was starved of oxygen at birth. This has had serious consequences for him, and for the rest of my family. Just how serious is hard to gauge. He was born traumatised; there has never been a before to compare the after with. What there has been instead is the hazy outline of an alternative life, one that runs parallel to the one he has now. It’s a life that began with the problem being identified sooner, with him being delivered quickly, perhaps by emergency caesarean. The difference between this and his actual life comes down to something small: mere moments, mere breaths.

I was born three years after my brother, in a larger hospital, where my mother was induced and monitored carefully. There is something very strange about being the sibling who had the safe birth. It feels as though I stole it. There is a constant sense of guilt, as if my life — my independence, my choices — constitutes a form of gloating. “This is what you could have had.” Everything I do feels like something owed to my brother (do it, because he can’t) but also something taken from him (you shouldn’t have done that, because he should have done it first).

Still, my family were fortunate, insofar as my brother didn’t die. Current reports on the Nottingham maternity scandal reference 1,700 cases, with an estimated 201 mothers and babies who might have survived had they received better care. What strikes me, reading them, is the enormous gulf between the cost of a disastrous birth and the trivial, opportunistic way in which childbirth is so often politicised — with mothers themselves viewed as morally, if not practically, to blame if anything goes wrong.

As a feminist who concerns herself with how the female body is demonised, my interest in debates about birthing choices is more than personal. I have read books railing against the over-medicalisation of childbirth, aligning it with a patriarchal need to appropriate female reproductive power. I have also read books protesting the fetishisation of “natural” birth, suggesting that it infantilises women, that it implies women deserve pain. To be honest, I find both arguments persuasive and dismaying. Both are right about the way in which misogyny and professional arrogance can shift the focus away from meeting the needs of women and babies. I feel a kind of rage that we are told to pick a side.

Representations of the labouring woman are so often negative: the naïve idealist, the “birthzilla“, the birth-plan obsessive, the woman who is “too posh to push”. This latter stereotype has gone hand-in-hand with a veneration of vaginal births, and stigmatisation of caesareans, that has had sometimes disastrous consequences. Midwives at the centre of the Furness General Hospital scandal were reported to have “pursued natural birth ‘at any cost’”, referring to one another as “the musketeers”; at least 11 babies and one mother died. But their approach was sanctioned by their employer: the 2006 NHS document “Pathways to Success: a self-improvement toolkit” explicitly suggested that “maternity units applying best practice to the management of pregnancy, labour and birth will achieve a [caesarean section] rate consistently below 20% and will have aspirations to reduce that rate to 15%”. Proposed benefits to this included “a sense of pride in units”.

Responses to maternity scandals now express horror that such an anti-intervention culture ever arose — responses in the same press that denigrated women such as Victoria Beckham and Kate Winslet for not giving birth vaginally. Instead, newspapers now stoke outrage over “natural” treatments during NHS births, such as burning herbs. Women have been shamed for having caesareans, but they have also been shamed for wanting births with minimum intervention — as though they are selfish and spoilt for seeking control over such an extreme situation.

In his memoir This Is Going To Hurt, former doctor Adam Kay writes disparagingly of women who arrive at the delivery suite with birth plans:

“‘Having a birth plan’ always strikes me as akin to having a ‘what I want the weather to be’ plan or a ‘winning the lottery’ plan. Two centuries of obstetricians have found no way of predicting the course of a labour, but a certain denomination of floaty-dressed mother seems to think she can manage it easily.”

Wanting to have some control over your experience of labour — which will hurt you and could kill you or your baby — is not akin to some messianic aspiration to control the weather. And in his mockery of the woman who wants whale song and aromatherapy oils, ironically, Kay deploys the same silencing techniques that might intimidate a woman out of seeking the very interventions he so prizes. What he and others do not seem to grasp is that their arrogance is a problem, regardless of which course of action they champion. It makes women feel they can’t speak, for fear of inviting hostility at their most vulnerable moments. It’s true that none of us knows our body well enough to know how we will give birth. But, looking back, I find it utterly insane, not least given my own family history, that one of my biggest worries during labour was “please don’t let anyone get cross with me”. Then again, I don’t think that fear is unrelated to the desire to remain safe.

Birth is not a joke. It is not a place for professional dick-swinging or political one-upmanship. I cannot describe — and, as I am not my mother, cannot fully understand — the shame of feeling that you “let down” your child before they drew their first breath, that they will forever suffer because of it. You watch an entire life unfolding and that feeling is there, every single day. This is the fear of the women in labour who are characterised as either idiots mesmerised by fantasy homebirths or cold-hearted posh ladies who can’t take the pain. If things go wrong, they are the ones who will bear the consequences, reflecting every day on what might have been, if they’d only done more.

When people discuss their siblings, my mind does wander to the one I don’t have, the one who was born safely. Perhaps he would have a job he loved, or one he hated, but in any case a job. Perhaps he would have a partner. Perhaps he would have children, and I would be their aunt. Perhaps we wouldn’t get on, wouldn’t even speak, but he’d have a life of his own. I know he thinks about this too. I wonder if the professionals who presided over his birth have thought about him since.

My third labour was not, by the way, “notoriously difficult”. My third son arrived into the world safe and well. No one can say why him or me, and not my brother. Mothers may long for control over birth, for which we are mocked; but we do not have it, for which we are blamed. Politics still takes precedence over our needs, and the needs of our babies.

[gigglesandfreckles-hp]

i have managed to be supermum and avoid the germs as they've taken down each member of my family one by one, but today...i succumbed, waking up to a raging fever. and because of the little peanut growing inside me, i have to go to hospital as a precaution which is...absolutely not how i wanted to spend my most favourite day of the entire year. 🥺

[the-hilda-librarians-wife]

For @sketchbookweek Day 6 - Halloween and Day 7 - Alternative Universe

To be honest, this isn't an entry I'm very happy to be making, and that's because I'd been hoping to share a new installment of my Hospital AU for this day. Alas, a combination of lack of time, disposition, and my particular perfectionism towards this 'verse since it means soooo much to me prevented me from writing the fic I wanted to. But don't think you're safe just yet; when you least expect it, I'm taking you all back to the hospital with me 🚑🚑🚑

Oh and please don't look too hard at the goofy ass kids in the paed ward. This ain't about them

(text in the poster that Kaisa covered & ref pictures under the cut)

Did you know? Breast cancer screening should be done on trans women who have been using hormones for >5 years and are older than 50, as well as those with high genetic risk; screening also must be done on trans men who have not undergone mastectomy

[poisonousquinzel]

"a dude in Texas legally changed his name to "Literally Anyone Else" and he's attempting to run for President against Biden & Trump" [source]

okay, but putting aside the comedic aspect of this, it is concerning the amount of people who are prompted to vote for candidates just because it's funny. I'm not the biggest fan of how his policy about the boarder sounds [Site], but I do implore anyone who is able to vote in the 2024 US election to please research other candidates.

The media is only going to continue pushing the idea it's inevitably going to be Trump vs Biden 2.0 and we have no other options, that we have to vote for Biden again because of Project 2025. Is that whole thing terrifying?

Yeah, fucking absolutely.

But voting for Biden will not solidify our safety from that. Biden is exactly like the rest of them. He always has been. You can't make the lesser of two evils argument when they're both just plain evil.

You cannot say that Biden is even mildly a better choice than Trump when he is currently directly involved in a genocide. That is not some little fucking thing. That in and of itself disqualifies him as a lesser evil. Biden is just as bad as him and he will not save us because he doesn't fucking care.

Cornel West [Site] is an Independent candidate running for President in the 2024 Election. [Policies]

Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia [Site] are running for President and Vice-President as the candidates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the 2024 Election. [Policies]

There are options.

There are people trying to change the corrupt foundation our system is built on, but we have to help amplify them because the mainstream media will not.

[ex-foster]

"One 2022 study found that 91 percent of women given fentanyl in their epidurals later tested positive for the drug"

"Another woman was given morphine to ease her pain during childbirth and was reported to child welfare services after her baby's first bowel movement tested positive for opiates—even though the morphine was noted in her medical records and a drug test she took shortly before she went into labor showed no drugs in her system."

[my-life-my-stories-my-love]

So I have something called slipping rib syndrome. That means that I was born with floating rib and then suffered a chest trauma that caused my ribs to move or “slip” out of place and aggravate the surrounding nerves. This is extremely painful and relatively unheard of.

It took me 13 doctors and nurses to get diagnosed and when I finally was it was by a medical student. Everyone told me it was all in my head and I just had anxiety and needed to go to school. I was also told when pointing out a lump near my ribs (which turned out to be my slipping ribs sticking out) that I was just skinny.

I ended up missing 148 days of school due to the pain because some days I couldn’t even get out of bed let alone walk across my high school huge ass campus.

The worst part is this is normal for slipping rib syndrome in teenagers and younger children. The surgeon I saw said that my story of the multiple doctors and nurses and being told it was in my head was common and he heard that story all the time from his patients.

I don’t know what is happening to the medical field but not everything is in people’s head and it pays off to take them seriously. I cannot even begin to count the number of people I know who can say that doctors and the medical field generally suck and that they aren’t taken seriously. Especially with women and teenagers and it’s such bullshit. Everyone should be taken seriously when it comes to the physical and mental care no one knows you better than yourself. And I know some people genuinely have their medical issues come from within the head/brain but that should still be taken seriously and not brushed off.

Medical professionals please take note and take your patients seriously. And NEVER dismiss them and refuse to listen and provide options for treatment and testing.

[ymustutortureme]

God, take all of the women's pain from period cramps and and give it to IOF soldiers 🙏🏼

[drshilpaagrawal]

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women’s health, daily wellness, self-care routine, vitality, positive habits, fitness, nutrition, mindful living, self-love, empowering women]

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

The idea that it is not my business when people are dying.... I know i shouldn't blame *everything* on secularism but like can I get a pass on this one?? This one seems like it's the secularists fault

[tariah23]

[wikipediapictures]

Midwife

“Major Christine Gundel, 779th Medical Group nurse midwife, checks on Monica McCoy, Public Affairs Specialist for Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington D.C. and patient at the Maternal Child Unit at Malcolm Grow Medical Center, before her scheduled cesarean-section. (USAF photo by Tech. Sgt. Suzanne M. Day)” - via Wikimedia Commons

[shaylabrown]

The Birth Story of My Messiah

About two weeks before my scheduled due date, early morning contractions signaled to me that I was in labor with my 3rd baby boy, Messiah. This birth would be in a hospital,and besides the presence of my doula and my hospital birth team, I would endure this labor alone… By Shayla Brown WordPress FB Twitter Instagram The Genesis It had been a stressful 9 months so I wasn’t surprised when…

[bbyboybucket]

Well, I hope the pro-lifers and the U.S. gov is happy. Cause now pregnant women (who decided to keep their child) and are having pregnancy emergencies, like ectopic pregnancies, blood clots and preeclampsia, placenta complications and decay, birth/labor complications, etc. are being refused treatment to help them survive. Literally even women who are in ORGAN FAILURE are being turned away by hospitals and doctors and are being refused treatment due to abortion laws, or if not outright refused, they’re being put at the bottom of triage. These women who are dying or at risk of dying, are being denied survival for themselves and even possibly their child, because if a mother dies, it’s likely the fetus isn’t gonna have an easy time either. That’s super “pro-life” of these people. So “pro-life” that they’re okay with a woman dying because she tried to have a child and her body couldn’t keep up with the physical demands. When will these dumb fucks realize that it was never and will never just be about the “morals” of birth control. It doesn’t just involve a woman may wanna terminate an unplanned pregnancy, it’s hurting the women who do want to have children too. And if someone can’t bring themselves to agree with pregnancy termination, the least they can do is wake up and realize this is bigger than birth control. It’s literally life or death of full grown women. It’s life or death for your sisters, your mothers, your wives, or even yourself if you’re a woman who’s a pro-life. And these people are dying, literally dying. All because idiots would rather have both mother and child die, than just save the woman who has an actual life.

[coochiequeens]

“So women with access to emergency care are the ones that live,” she said. “Women that don’t, die.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/21/gaza-childbirth/

JERUSALEM — Walaa didn’t expect the birth of her fourth child to spark abject fear. But by the time her contractions started, the whole family was frantic.

There were no ambulances to be seen in the streets of Gaza’s Rafah City, she said, now so crammed with displaced families that there was barely any food left available for the 27-year-old.

When her uncle Wissam, a doctor, reached the tent where she had lived for weeks in the cold, he said, he could see they had run out of time. “I’m having the baby now,” she kept telling him. It was dark, and she was scared.

His cellphone flashlight was all they had to see by.

The humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s three-month military campaign against Hamas in Gaza counts some 52,000 pregnant women among its greatest victims. As airstrikes push 1.9 million people into an ever-smaller corner of the besieged enclave, disease is spreading, famine is looming and levels of anemia are so high that the risk of postpartum hemorrhage has soared and breastfeeding is often impossible. Forty percent of pregnancies are high-risk, CARE international estimates.

Prenatal care is almost nonexistent — what remains of Gaza’s hospital network is on its knees, at 250 percent capacity and consumed with treating mass casualties from Israeli bombing. Far more women are giving birth outside of medical facilities — in displacement camps, even in the street — than inside them.

Damage to facilities and communications blackouts — the strip lost cellphone service for a week this month — have left Gaza’s health ministry unable to compilereliable data for infant or maternal mortality during the conflict. But doctors and aid groups say miscarriage and stillbirths have spiked.

“What we know about pregnancy-related complications is that it’s hard to prevent them in any setting, but the way that we save a woman and newborn’s life is we treat the complication quickly,” said Rondi Anderson, a midwifery specialist for the Project HOPE aid group.

“So women with access to emergency care are the ones that live,” she said. “Women that don’t, die.”

The only place that Wissam could find to deliver his terrified niece’s baby was a spot of cold earth between the tents. Aid workers hung bedsheets to give the woman a modicum of privacy. No one had been able to contact Walaa’s husband, and her mother was so scared that at times she had to look away. They cut the boy’s umbilical cord with an unsterilized scalpel and they filled tin cans with hot water to keep him warm. He weighed 7 pounds and Walaa named him Ramzy.

The family spoke on the condition that only their first names be used because they feared for their safety in the event that Israeli troops entered the town.

Baby Ramzy is 5 days old. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

They fled their home in northern Gaza so abruptly that no one thought to grab clothes for the baby. This week, Ramzy was swaddled in a onesie outgrown by another child in the camp. He wailed as Walaa, still in pain from tearing during the birth, gingerly pulled herself upright.

The 16-year blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt after Hamas won control of Gaza had already made pregnancy and childbirth more difficult for expecting mothers. Before the current conflict, hospitals often lacked adequate equipment and training for neonatal staff, according to Medical Aid for Palestinians, and more than half of pregnant women were anemic.

Hamas fighters streamed out of the enclave on Oct. 7 to kill around 1,200 people in Israel and take another 240 hostage. Israel responded with a bombing campaign and ground war to eradicate Hamas, killing almost 25,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, to date.

The South African legal team that accused Israel before the International Court of Justice this month of committing genocide during the conflict argued that the obstruction of lifesaving treatment since Oct. 7 amounts to preventing births.

A lawyer for Israel called allegations that it is obstructing the delivery of food, water, fuel and other supplies critical for Gaza “tendentious and partial,” and said it was working “around-the-clock” to help scale up the volume of aid making it into the enclave.

Hanaa al-Shawa, 23, gave birth to her first child, Ayla, during the coronavirus pandemic, and the little girl, she said, brought her family a “glimmer of hope.” Shawa and her husband Mustafa, 25, were ecstatic when they learned in July that another child was on the way. The war began in October, and the future they dreamed of fell apart. “I had felt overwhelming joy,” Shawa recalled. “I did not realize that this joy would turn into great suffering.”

Nearly 20,000 babies were born in Gaza during the first 105 days of the war, UNICEF reported Friday. Delays in the delivery of lifesaving supplies, the U.N. children’s agency said, have left some hospitals performing Caesarean sections without anesthetic. Spokeswoman Tess Ingram said she met a nurse at Gaza’s Emirati maternity hospital who had helped with postmortem caesarians on six dead women.

“Seeing newborn babies suffer while some mothers bleed to death should keep us all awake at night,” Ingram told reporters Friday. “In the time it has taken to present this to you, another baby was likely born, but into what?”

“Becoming a mother should be a time of celebration,” she said. “But in Gaza it’s another child delivered into hell.”

For the five pregnant women interviewed by Washington Post reporters, fear that mother or baby might not survive suffused their waking thoughts — and made appearances in nightmares, too.

Shawa and Mustafa left their home in Gaza City’s Yarmouk Street in the second week of October. The Israel Defense Forces had ordered 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to move south for what it described as their own safety.

“I was afraid that I would miscarry because of the power of the rockets,” she said.

Displaced Palestinian families from the northern and central Gaza Strip evacuate toward southern Gaza on Oct. 13. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

Many pregnant women made the 20-mile journey from north to south on foot, their legs swollen and joints heavy as they carried their luggage, three women who made the journey told The Post.

When Ayla was born, her family had a room full of toys ready for her. The room in which Shawa’s second child, a girl, will spend her first weeks, in a friend’s home in the Tel al-Sultan area, is tainted with asbestos, she said.

“We carried Ayla here in just the clothes she was wearing, and we don’t even have anything warm for her,” Shawa said. “If I’m unable to provide for her, what will I do for my next child?”

Rising food scarcity and malnutrition can cause potentially life-threatening complications during childbirth and lead to low birth weight, wasting, failure to thrive and developmental delays.

Shawa said she had only eaten tinned food, with no access to fruit or vegetables, since she left her home three months ago. Doctors have said her iron levels are low and her blood pressure is high. Mustafa searches daily but has found no suitable medication to control it.

Saja Al-Shaer, 19, started to feel like she was too young to become a mother. Her weight had dropped below 110 pounds, she was anemic, and her husband had not managed to get her medication, either. “He spent three days knocking on the doors of pharmacies,” she said. “I do not know if I will see this child or not.”

In late December, doctors at the al-Aqsa Hospital, 11 miles to the north, received a pregnant woman whose high blood pressure caused eclampsia and bleeding to her brain, according to Deborah Harrington, a British obstetrician who volunteered at the hospital with a Medical Aid for Palestinians team.

The baby was delivered by a C-section, Harrington said. The mother was still on life support when the physician left two weeks later.

“These women are presenting it in much more extreme condition,” Harrington said. “They’re just not getting hypertensive treatment. They’re not being screened for diabetes. If they’re diabetic, they’re not getting treatment for their diabetes.

“They know that actually accessing care, as it often is for women in conflict, is really difficult and fraught with danger. At night, there is often no light, so moving around is really difficult. You can’t call an ambulance because there’s no signal. The women I saw were really frightened.”

Walaa with her uncle Wissam, who helped deliver her newborn son. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

From the corner of the damp room where Walaa was tending to Ramzy on Friday, she worried about where they would find clean water or baby formula. Her family had looked everywhere for diapers, but come up empty. In Tel al-Sultan, Shawa was fixating on rumors that Israel’s army would direct them to evacuate again. The walking, the carrying, the sense that nothing around her was hygienic — it all frightened her.

But she had made one decision that no shortage or military orders could change. She would name her daughter after her sister-in-law, killed in an Israeli airstrike weeks earlier while trying to find shelter for her own children.

The girl, she said, would be called Heba. In Arabic, it means blessing from God.

Mahfouz reported from Cairo and Harb reported from London. Loay Ayyoub in Rafah contributed to this report.

[daisyachain]

Convinced dad to accompany me to Orville Peck as a social experiment. Not an artist I’m that familiar with but hey I know a few songs and he’s a good enough performer on a technical level that it’s entertaining just to watch him and the supporting band do their thing. Kept half an ear on the lyrics out of curiosity as to how identifiably non-heterosexual they were, since it’s kind of part of the (cattle) brand and dad went in with no prior knowledge.

What was interesting is that many of them weren’t strictly clockable and many of those were intuitively clockable. Heterosexuality is so intensely mediated by gender roles that a song about a love interest who drives a rig isn’t as easy to (mis)read as m -> f as a song about a love interest who serves coffee. A song that positions the narrator as a hanger-on or a side piece reads as m -> f when the the narrator is angry or vengeful and less so when the narrator is quietly sarcastic. A love interest that provides comfort or security doesn’t read as female even when a male singer can’t possibly be referring to anything but.

Logically there would be about as many woman truck drivers as gay, but both of them are equally hard to fit into our schema of a truck driver. It’s difficult to imagine a model of heterosexuality not intensely mediated by misogyny; it’s hard to imagine a pop culture narrative or even my real life friends’ relationships position a woman as solid, smart, reliable, or protective. Like with the doctor-fishing accident puzzle, there is a push and pull between misogyny and homophobia in trying to interpret songs/stories that don’t match the societal mold.

Given the historical roots of homophobia in misogyny—homophobia as a violent reaction to relationships with no clear superior in the cases of Edward II(?) and James I, four-thousand-year-old European top/bottom discourse, the conflation of trans women, crossdressing men, drag artists, and gay men as well as the (euro/Anglo but also present elsewhere) societal fixation on that image—I love to wonder if heterosexuality exists.

One common thread through studies of specifically male gay history is that superior/inferior male relationships (distinctions of age, position, or class, cf badgays episode I thiiiiink Qutbuddin Mubarak Shah on slaves being considered boys no matter what age) exist on a different level of social acceptability compared to what we in the present day consider a gay relationship. Superior/inferior relationships aren’t enshrined as heterosexual marriage is and are marginalized as frivolity/peccadillo/improper behaviour, but these still generally have a level of acceptability or at least widespread acknowledgement. Romantic or sexual entanglement between two men of equal status, on the other hand, creates a formal uncertainty where neither is guaranteed to be the superior, where class or position is called into question, where the laws of a patriarchal society cannot apply because the prerequisite does not exist.

Following that thread, a ‘real’ gay relationship is between two men of equal standing. So it goes with the modern conception of lesbian relationships, which have not historically fallen under the same level of scrutiny wrt woman-woman power dynamics because that would require historical writers to consider women having thoughts, and the modern heterosexual relationships.

Except, historically the m/f relationship has been considered (by men) (in many but not all societies) to be a superior/inferior relationship. Many if not most men in the most gender-equal societies today consider it to be superior/inferior, a very real affection born from protectiveness/benevolence/patronage/cuteness aggression as a teacher might feel for a student or an aristocrat for a valet + that just also happens to have a sexual component for reasons of whatever biology. Again, looking at real life people who I know and their rancid dating histories, a lot of men approach dating as a Roman emperor might approach a handsome young house slave.

Following this train of logic: it’s commonly accepted today that the superior/inferior m/m model (often expressed as pederasty) is not strictly ‘gay’ in the modern sense. It’s its own form of relationship that doesn’t really exist in the current conception of love (For Good Reason) but does exist in the current conception of abuse (be it boss/employee sexual harassment or child abuse). Many m/f relationships are conceived of as superior/inferior by the participants. Many, not most, m/f relationships do exist as abusive structures and can only be conceived of as abusive.

Therefore, due to whatever misogyny, historical baggage, and social constraints, ‘real’ heterosexuality is a rare phenomenon, and we have only just recently witnessed its birth as a culturally understood idea. Only with the reform of divorce laws and property ownership in the mid-20th century in a very few countries did real heterosexuality become possible. Most men have not yet achieved it. Straight Men Are Our Smallest Minority Group.