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ghouljams · 1 month ago

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Can you tell me more about the corset thingy like how long we can wear them or what kind of material suitable to replace the bra

Yeah I love talking about corsets.

So I will start out by saying corsets aren't for everyone, and there's a definite learning curve to them. There are also definite draw backs to corsets that I will get into briefly, but can be compensated for.

What you're looking for in a daily corset is going to be a cotton fabric, that you can wear comfortably under your clothes but over something like a tanktop. You want an "overbust" corset that's going to cup your breasts comfortably, and keep them in place. Most corsets these days are made for "slimming" but that shouldn't be your goal when corset shopping.

My personal favorite corset shops are: Timeless Trends, and Mystic City Corsets.

It's important to note that before bras, corsets were made to the individual's measurements so they were literally made to fit. These days it's all about knowing your measurements yourself, but there's still a LOT of variety in corsetry.

So the reason I advise a cotton corset is because they're more breathable, they're more comfortable against the skin, and they clean well.

For fit: you want something that feels like a tight hug. You should be able to breathe fairly normally in your corset but you'll have a little trouble bending over at first. You will NEED to season your corset. Seasoning is just breaking in the boning and making it contort to your specific body shape. This means 2-3 hours of daily wear for the first two weeks and then building up your time slowly. You want your body to be used to the corset before you start wearing it for 8 hours a day.

Corsets provide back support as well as breast support, a lot like a back brace, but this can also lead to some core weakness if you're relying on the corset to "lift" you. It should be lifting your breasts, and you shouldn't be slouching in it. It's something to keep an eye on, but isn't something to worry about. If you're taking care of your back, and using your core to stand up straight you won't have any issues.

A good corset is going to be pricey. I'm not going to sugar coat it for you, there's a reason bras became more popular. Corsets get hot, they're a lot of fabric, and if you're not used to them they can be incredibly uncomfortable, but they're also just underwear.

There's so much bad press around corsets these days, and a lot of it is so perplexing to me.

Did you know men hated corsets? Yeah. Hated them, because they were an added barrier between them and the woman they were attempting to grab.

Did you know only noble women tightlaced? Most women who wore corsets/stays wore them only as tight as they needed to keep their tits where they wanted them. Hell women worked in corsets, they couldn't afford to be out of breath like the noble ladies could.

Did you know that many corsets were tied with a single lace to make it easier for women to tie them themselves? Also corset hooks were common in a lot of ladies rooms to help them tighten the corset by themselves!

Look bras are... fine, I mean I try not to wear them when I can but I'm also part of the tiny tittie committee. They're more practical for large scale manufacturing, and they're easier to market at 1/4 the price of a corset.

If a corset isn't right for you, I highly, HIGHLY, suggest measuring yourself or getting fitted to find the right bra size for you. It changed my life and I lost a lot of the shoulder pain I was getting from wearing the wrong bra size. A Bra That Fits will do all the math for you with a few really simple measurements. No one (outside of sewing classes maybe) really teaches you how cup size is determined so most people just sort of wing it, and it can end up putting you in extremely uncomfortable bras.

Just in my personal experience with ABTF I went from an A cup to a C cup and my bras fit SO much better now. My boobs didn't get any bigger and they don't look any bigger in the bra, but the bra actually fits and holds everything the way it's supposed to. Don't be afraid to be comfortable, and don't be afraid to do right by your body.

#ghoul speaks #every time I go to buy a new bra the salesperson will try to direct me towards A cups #because I am flat as a fuckin board #and every time I gotta grab the C for myself #and every time they go “oh wow. yeah that does fit you better...”#cup size is determined by how many inches difference there is between your band measurement #and the measurement at the fullest part of your breast #not actually by how big they look

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ukrfeminism · 1 year ago

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Some period pants sold by high street retailers contain high levels of silver that could have health and environmental implications for consumers, an investigation has found.

Silver is used as an antimicrobial agent and is typically added to period pants to combat user concerns about smell and hygiene.

However, scientists have increasingly warned about the potential health effects. The US Food and Drug Administration found that nanosilver can kill lactobacillus, the healthy bacteria in the vagina that help fight off infection. This can put period pant users more at risk of harmful bacteria, potentially leading to an increased risk of bacterial infections and pregnancy complications.

Natalie Hitchins, the head of home products and services at Which?, said: “Consumers should be cautious buying period pants which contain silver as experts have concerns about the health implications.

“Which? believes brands should also clearly state which products contain silver so shoppers can make informed decisions about what they are buying and the possible risks.”

The consumer rights group worked with an Italian consumer organisation, Altroconsumo, to independently test popular brands and check if they contained any chemicals of concern. They were worried to find that some products contained significant levels of silver, and this was not always made clear on the packaging.

Intima by Bodyform and pants by Marks & Spencer in particular contained notably more silver than other brands, at 126.7mg/kg and 57.8mg/kg respectively. Other brands contained 8.3mg/kg, 7.4mg/kg, and 0.9mg/kg.

Essity, the owner of Bodyform and Modibodi, said silver copper zeolite was used to “prevent odour when wearing the pants for up to 12 hours”. It added that all of its “washable underwear is certified according to Oeko-Tex Standard 100, which means that every single component has been tested for harmful substances” and “that the underwear has been designated as harmless for human health”. An M&S Spokesperson said: “We do not use either nano silver or silver zeolite and, like many brands, use a small amount of silver chloride in the middle part of the gusset – away from the skin – which is perfectly safe, approved by the UK and EU, and designed to combat odour.”

Which? said it believed the use of silver was unnecessary and that previous testing by Altroconsumo had shown that textile items treated in this way did not have the promised antimicrobial properties.

The European Chemicals Agency says silver treatments, such as nanosilver and silver zeolite, are toxic to aquatic life with long-lasting effects.

The tests Which? carried out can detect any silver above 0.1mg/kg, and it found none in Primark, Repeat, Wuka, Lovable and Sloggi pants. Sloggi’s website says it does use a silver-based antimicrobial, and Primark says it uses Micro-Fresh, which contains silver chloride.

A Primark spokesperson said: “The nature of period pants means there is a potential for odour to develop during wear (in the same way that bacteria can cause socks and shoes to develop odours during wear) and our antimicrobial finish minimises such odours.”

Sloggi did not reply to Which? at the time of publication.

There are no legal limits in the UK about how much silver can be added to period pants. Manufacturers do not have to declare the presence of silver on their packaging or website.

#articles #Health

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justinspoliticalcorner · 6 months ago

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Tessa Stuart at Rolling Stone:

KRISTA HARDING’S DAUGHTER was eight weeks old when that police cruiser pulled behind her on the interstate and hit the lights in September 2019. She called her boss at the Little Caesars in Pinson, Alabama, where she’d just been promoted to manager: I’m going to be a little late, but I’m coming in! Don’t panic. Harding’s registration tag was expired. She figured the officer would write her a ticket and she’d be on her way, but when he came back after running her driver’s license, he had handcuffs out. There was a felony warrant out for her arrest, he said: “Chemical endangerment of a child.” Harding used her most patient customer-service tone to ask the officer if he’d please check again. But there was no mistake, the cop confirmed: He was taking her to the Etowah County Detention Center, almost an hour’s drive away. “I’m in the back of the cop car just bawling my eyes out, like, ugly-face-snot-bubbles crying,” Harding remembers. She was worried about being away from her newborn, and she was confused: Chemical endangerment of a child? “I think of somebody cooking meth with a baby on their hip,” she says.

She’s right to think that: The Alabama law, passed in 2006, was intended to target those who expose children to toxic chemicals, or worse, explosions, while manufacturing methamphetamine in ad-hoc home labs. Harding says it took at least eight hours to be booked into a cell that night, and it was more than a week before she was finally allowed to see a judge. She was still leaking breast milk, and desperately missing her two daughters. Her family wasn’t allowed to bring her clean underwear, so every day she washed her one pair, saturated with menstrual blood, in the cell sink, then hung them to dry.

Harding says she eventually learned the warrant for her arrest had been issued because of a urine test taken at a doctor’s visit early in her pregnancy. Sitting alone in her cell, she conjured a vague memory of her OB-GYN warning her local authorities had begun to crack down on weed. The comment had struck her as odd at the time: Nine years earlier, when she was pregnant with her first child, the same doctor at the same hospital had told Harding, who’d smoked both pot and cigarettes before she was pregnant, that she’d rather Harding kick the nicotine than the weed. (Studies are unequivocal about the fact that cigarettes contribute to adverse pregnancy outcomes, but the research on weed is less conclusive, with some doctors arguing it at least has therapeutic benefits, like helping with morning sickness.)

But in the years between her first child and her second, something had changed in certain parts of Alabama. In Etowah County, in 2013, the sheriff, the district attorney, and the head of the local child-welfare agency held a press conference to announce they intended to aggressively enforce that 2006 law. Instead of going after the manufacturers of meth, though, they planned to target pregnant women who used virtually any substance they deemed harmful to a developing fetus.

“If a baby is born with a controlled-substance dependency, the mother is going to jail,” then-Sheriff Todd Entrekin said at the time. Police weren’t required to establish that a child was born with a chemical dependency, though — or even that a fetus experienced any harm — a drug test, a confession, or just an accusation of substance use during pregnancy was enough to arrest women for a first offense that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. One public defender would later call these “unwinnable cases.” Over the following decade, Etowah County imprisoned hundreds of mothers — some of whom were detained, before trial, for the rest of their pregnancies, inside one of the most brutal and inhumane prisons in the country, denied access to prenatal care and adequate nutrition, they say — in the name of protecting their children from harm.

[...]

In the past two decades, Alabama has become the undisputed champion of arresting pregnant women for actions that wouldn’t be considered crimes if they weren’t pregnant: 649 arrests between 2006 and 2022, almost as many arrests as documented in all other states combined, according to advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, which collected the statistics. Across the U.S., the vast majority of women arrested on these charges were too poor to afford a lawyer, and a quarter of cases were based on the use of a legal substance, like prescription medication.

Today, Marshall is the attorney general of Alabama, and just a few months ago, the state’s Supreme Court used the same logic — that life begins at conception, therefore an embryo is legally indistinguishable from a living child — in a decision that was responsible for shutting down IVF clinics across the state. The ruling was a triumph for the fetal-personhood movement, a nationwide crusade to endow fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses with constitutional rights. Personhood has been the Holy Grail for the anti-abortion movement since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, but outlawing abortion — at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason — is just the start of what legal recognition of embryos’ rights could mean for anyone who can get pregnant. Experts have long warned that elevating an embryo’s legal status effectively strips the person whose body that embryo occupies of her own rights the moment she becomes pregnant.

Across the country, this theory has led to situations like in Texas, where a hospital kept a brain-dead woman alive for almost two months — against her own advanced directive and the wishes of her family — in deference to a state law that prevents doctors from removing a pregnant person from life support. (The hospital only relented after the woman’s husband sued for “cruel and obscene mutilation of a corpse.”) Or in New Hampshire, where a court allowed a woman who was hit by a car while seven months pregnant to be sued by her future child for negligence because she failed to use “a designated crosswalk.” Or in Washington, D.C., where a terminally ill cancer patient, 26 weeks pregnant, requested palliative care, but was instead subjected to court-ordered cesarean section. Her baby survived for just two hours; she died two days later.

Or in Alabama, where, in 2019, Marshae Jones walked into the Pleasant Grove Police Department with her six-year-old daughter expecting to be interviewed for a police investigation. Months earlier, Jones, four and a half months pregnant at the time, had been shot by her co-worker during a dispute. In the hospital after the shooting, Jones underwent an emergency C-section; her baby, whom she’d named Malaysia, did not survive. Rather than indicting the shooter, though, a grand jury indicted Jones, who they decided “intentionally” caused the death of her “unborn baby” because she allegedly picked a fight “knowing she was five months pregnant.” The charges were ultimately dismissed, but Jones’ lawyer says her record still shows the arrest, and Jones, who lost her job after the incident, struggled to find work after her case attracted national attention.

The threat this ideology poses to American women is not contained to Alabama: Recognition of fetal personhood is an explicit policy goal of the national Republican Party, and it has been since the 1980s. The GOP platform calls for amending the U.S. Constitution to recognize the rights of embryos, and representatives in Congress have introduced legislation that would recognize life begins at conception hundreds of times — as recently as this current session, when the Life at Conception Act attracted the co-sponsorship of 127 sitting Republican members of Congress.

[...]

Taking inspiration from Black Americans’ fight for equal rights, the anti-abortion movement began thinking of its own crusade as a fight for equality. “The argument that the unborn was the ultimate victim of discrimination in America was really resonant with a lot of white Americans, a lot of socially conservative Americans — and it was vague enough that people who disagreed about stuff like feminism, the welfare state, children born outside of marriage, the Civil Rights Movement” could find common ground, Ziegler says. By the time the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973, the idea that a fetus was entitled to constitutional protections was mainstream enough to be a central piece of Texas’ argument that “Jane Roe” did not have a right to get an abortion.

The justices rejected that idea. “The word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn,” Justice Harry Blackmun wrote. But he gave the movement a cause to rally behind for the next half-century by adding: “If this suggestion of personhood is established, [Roe’s] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.” Making that happen became the anti-abortion movement’s primary focus from that moment on. One week after Roe was decided, a U.S. congressman first proposed amending the Constitution to guarantee “the right to life to the unborn, the ill, the aged, or the incapacitated.” It was called the Human Life Amendment, and though it failed to make it to a floor vote that session, it would be reproposed more than 300 times in the following decades. By 1980, the idea had been fully embraced by the Republican Party: Ronald Reagan’s GOP adopted it into the party platform — where it remains to this day — and in 1983, the Republican-majority Congress voted, for the first and only time, on the idea of adding a personhood amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That vote failed.

After their 1983 defeat, activists turned their attention away from the U.S. Capitol and toward the states, where they sought to insert the idea of fetal personhood into as many state laws as possible: everything from legislation creating tax deductions for fetuses or declaring them people for census-taking purposes, to expanding child-endangerment and -neglect laws. Activists pursued this agenda everywhere, but they were most successful at advancing it in states that share certain qualities. “You could draw a Venn diagram of American slavery and see that what’s happening today is in common in those states,” says Michele Goodwin, a Georgetown University law professor and author of the book Policing the Womb. “Some would say, ‘Well, OK, how is that relevant?’ Slavery itself was explicitly about denying personal autonomy, denying the humanity of Black people. Now, clearly, these laws affect women of all ethnicities. But the point is: If you’re in a constitutional democracy and you found a way to avoid recognizing the constitutional humanity of a particular group of people, it’s something that’s not lost in the muscle memory of those who legislate and of the courts in that state.”

Rolling Stone has a solid in-depth report on the war on women and reproductive health in Alabama, going into detail the fetal personhood movement.

#Alabama #War On Women #Reproductive Health #Abortion #IVF #In Vitro Fertilization #Fetal Personhood #Pregnancy Discrimination #Pregnancy #Criminalization of Abortion #Etowah County Alabama #Marshae Jones #Human Life Amendment #Pregnancy Justice #Roe v. Wade #Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

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