Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 31
Mar. 8th, 2022 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
The corporate media, demonstrating once again that it has the attention span and cognitive capacity of a hyperactive squirrel on bad acid, has now pivoted away from Covid and is finding a new set of temporary obsessions. Despite this, the semi-open posts I've hosted here on the Covid-19 narrative, the inadequately tested experimental drugs for it, and the whole cascading mess surrounding them have continued to field a steady stream of comments, so I'm opening yet another space for discussion. The rules are the same as before: 1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.
2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.
4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.
With that said, as government officials scramble around like a cat trying to bury its droppings on a vinyl floor, and the unvaccinated wonder why so many vaccinated people have oddly puffy faces these days, the floor is open for discussion.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-03-09 09:15 pm (UTC)"Perimenopause varies greatly from one woman to the next. The average duration is three to four years, although it can last just a few months or extend as long as a decade. Some women feel buffeted by hot flashes and wiped out by heavy periods; many have no bothersome symptoms. Periods may end more or less abruptly for some, while others may menstruate erratically for years. Fortunately, as knowledge about reproductive aging has grown, so have the options for treating some of its more distressing features."
A lot of women also have mood changes, sleep disturbances and cognitive issues.
I find perimenopause to be the weirdest of the female health magical secret words that no one knows. Several years ago I had to break it to a whole bunch of middle-aged moms at the preschool that it existed, because they all thought it was just business-as-usual, then one day you were like, 50 and menopause and then old, but no... this very simple thing that happened to literally every woman explained the "problems" happening to a couple of them, and then the rest had to gather around like children finding their first girly-magazine in the ditch to hear the forbidden knowledge. (Though the nearly insta-menopause variety happens in my family, reportedly, which simply kemmers - I prefer Grandmother Ursula's term, slightly out of context: it's the beards ;-)- early sometime between the ages of 39-45. It's just another one of the services they offer.)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-03-10 01:32 pm (UTC)I have been treating fertility issues for many years, and I find that, even with 30-45 year old women the lack of knowledge of how their cycles work, and of how to detect signs of what is going on within them at times of the month other than the actual period, is staggering. I normally have to spend a session doing a little "how your body works" lesson, which I really wish I was teaching to young teenagers, because a little knowledge and understanding can help with preventing conception as much as it can help with promoting conception and help give you genuine ownership of the body you live in.
Somehow all the focus on "sex ed" has led to greater ignorance, and I've never been sure what to make of this.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-03-10 07:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-03-11 10:36 am (UTC)And to the poster:
If I were you, I‘d read up on a certain method of tracking the female cycle. In German, it‘s called „Natural Family Planning“ NFP, but when I just looked that up in English, I got loads of results all over the place, so you will have to sift a bit until you find the right kind of info.
What you are looking for is a method which uses a daily thermometer reading (in the mornings before getting up), and then one other data point (either the consistency of the mucus in the vagina, or the openness and position of the cervix).
If you read up on this method, it will explain the female cycle, its symptoms and how it expresses itself in the body.
(And don‘t be put off by religious stuff, or by info telling you that you can‘t have sex, or only on fertile days, or whatnot - what‘s important is the actual tracking method, not the worldview of the people who explain it… ;-) )
Note that your daughters will NOT have to perform any of this - this is purely information for you, and for them if/when they are old enough, to understand what is going on.
Also, this is strictly a bodily method, nothing spiritual. But imo understanding this stuff is key to understanding what is going on in your body or that of your partner/daughters.
I came to this method pretty late in life, but it was a real eye opener - so many things about my body and cycle make more sense now. And while I still use the thermometer, as recommended, I‘m fairly confident I could do without and still be pretty spot on. E.g. with a little bit of attention, it‘s not that hard to notice the time of ovulation.
Once your daughters know their bodies that well, they will have learned to pay attention to their own subtle symptoms etc, and this will serve them well in other areas of life.
Milkyway
(no subject)
Date: 2022-03-11 10:55 am (UTC)1) cultivating awareness and attention is something that you can simply encourage by having conversations with them from time to time about different "signals" that come from their bodies - hunger, thirst, sleepiness, need to pee, along with various discomforts from time to time. These are not just experiences, but communications, which can be two-way if we choose. We do not have to heed every single such signal, but we should not cut off awareness of them entirely because that shuts down the possibility we might notice something that needs attended to.
2) the features of the cycle (to my mind) do not need to be fully understood before puberty, but certainly through the years of puberty it can be useful to understand that each cycle is a full set of seasons. The period itself is spring - spring cleaning, and new budding of a new egg. The post-period interval is summer - all about growing the egg to full bloom. Ovulation is autumn - the gathering/harvest of the egg, now sent on its way to the uterus. The post-ovulation interval is winter - the storage qualities of the uterus are what is important. At this point there can be a new period - a new spring, or, if a pregnancy occurred, the winter storage becomes extended, and the pregnancy itself becomes a slower four seasons. If one is "tuned" in to the energies of each of these four phases one can become healthier overall, and also one can modulate the experiences of the cycle to prevent them from being painful or difficult. (My own acupuncture treatments consist almost entirely of this kind of "tuning").
3) if one wants a better handle on matters of conception/contraception (ie - once one is old enough to be sexually active) one needs to know how to spot the signs of ovulation, as well as the period (usually hard to miss). These signs are, in particular, what is not taught, and what I find myself teaching over and over to very mature women. They are 1) learning the types and feel of fertile mucous which appears in the days prior to ovulation - this can generally be spotted with a quick inspection of the toilet paper whenever visiting the loo 2) the movement up and down of the position of the cervix within the vagina at different times of the cycle - this requires having a feel inside oneself from time to time, not everyone is into trying this, and it might be a better lesson to receive from a woman, in any case. 3) individual signs and symptoms that range from subtle to obvious - some women have ovulation pains, whereas others only experience more subtle changes apparent only when paying attention. 4) Basal body temperature charts (probably a good bit of info online about this). These are essential when trying to diagnose a functional fertility problem, but may be too much trouble for most women to keep otherwise. However, for someone who wants to be sure that they are detecting their ovulation properly, so as to use a non-medical approach to contraception, charting for 3-4 months will help you confirm this and feel secure in your timings and options. The important thing to know here is that one cannot become pregnant from about a day or two after ovulation has occurred. (But you need to know for certain that it HAS occurred, and a calendar won't tell you this). You can then use a combination of barrier methods (condoms, diaphragms) during the fertile times and nothing at all during the non fertile times. Whereas, if you want to become pregnant, the key is to make sure that you engage in unprotected sex often - daily or no more than 36 hours apart - between the end of the period and when you know ovulation has occurred. This way, you are unlikely to miss the "window" which is roughly the 1-2 days prior to ovulation during which unprotected sex is most likely to lead to a pregnancy.
This, hopefully is more an introduction to where to go looking for more information. There is a lot more. And I could probably go on and on... maybe I should write that book... ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-03-11 09:29 pm (UTC)I only ever read The Naked Ape, but based on that I'm confident anything else is good. He has a whole series on the human body (also cats!)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-03-10 09:55 pm (UTC)yeah, it is like... the over-focus on bodies being used for sex forgets that they do other things like 99% of the time. And even the fact we focus a lot on preventing conception, you're right, focuses enormously on commercial prophylactics, and at this point we've nearly reverted back to people thinking women can get pregnant from a stiff wind if there are men nearby able to see their ankles and the woman wasn't on the pill or wearing an IUD and he wasn't also wearing a condom. Maybe a dental dam just for funsies.
I remember reading about the battling "concealed ovulation" hypotheses - why human women don't have obvious heat like other mammals. I think it was in Jared Diamond's 'Why is Sex Fun'; and all but one hypothesis focused on why women evolved to conceal ovulation from men (to be able to cuck their husbands, to be able to be more choosy about mates, etc.) but only one theory was developed by a woman (actually a man and woman team), and that one, notably, focused on the fact that what is more interesting is that human ovulation is largely concealed from women, and that all the other hypotheses utterly depend on this not being the case and so are obviously poor hypotheses. The women-centric hypothesis was that it evolved to prevent women from being able to prevent conception entirely out of their acquired human-consciousness fear of death; the rhythm method works, but not perfectly. Women who could be tricked by their own bodies were more likely to have more babies, and take over the gene pool.
Naturally, this one makes way more sense to me - to be able to control our fertility can be literally a matter of life and death, and has been seen we stood upright, at least. At the very least, to be able to prevent having babies we'd know we'd have to leave out to die because there wasn't enough food this year means it would have been the power to prevent our suffering over infant mortality, too.
Women who can relearn how to control their fertility better increase the odds of survival for each surviving infant, may reduce the number of dead infants they will have, and decrease their own odds of dying. It's awfully odd knowledge to hide from us, isn't it.
It's also bizarre that we spend a lot of time focusing on commercial tests or doctor-mediated torturing animals to tell us we're pregnant. A simple light would show that quite early, even if the woman couldn't tell herself before quickening - the shocking lavender shade of a pregnant woman's cervix is unmistakable, even to a complete layperson (yes, my midwives asked if I wanted to see). Again... it is awfully odd knowledge to have been disappeared, er... I mean never discovered until just now.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-03-11 10:24 am (UTC)In my personal experience, this is actually quite easy to figure out (once you know what to look out for), so maybe the issue is rather that women (or people in general, for that matter) in our Western culture are simply not attuned to their bodies anymore?
Add decades of propaganda that „only your doctor knows your body and knows what’s best for it“, and voila… here we are.
Milkyway
(no subject)
Date: 2022-03-11 11:16 am (UTC)I do think much of this knowledge has been kept, at various times and places, by the older women, who, no doubt passed it on when needed. It is well known that most modern hunter gatherer women space their births very effectively, and it seems likely that women may have known how to do this in a great many cultures. Farming women, for their part, mostly have not spaced their births. (Whether they simply lost the necessary knowledge, or decided it was more useful to aim for a larger number of children, so the knowledge could be dispensed with, is an interesting question we may never be able to answer).
But ultimately, yes, what we learn about sex and conception nowadays is geared mainly around the sale of products, and encouraging learned helplessness and self-ignorance, in exchange for "convenience".