It’s often only after a drug is released do we learn women might be affected totally differently from men — as with the case for two recent major studies.

Specifically, the new research points to the role of estrogen, which naturally ebbs and flows over the course of a menstrual cycle.

Changing levels of estrogen has major impacts across the entire body under normal circumstances. Introduce medication into the mix, and it becomes a whole different ballgame.

“For too long, the menstrual cycle has been treated as background noise in health research,” said Poppy Cooper, an author of one of the recent studies. “This work is part of a growing shift in that thinking and a recognition that the menstrual cycle has impacts beyond reproductive health.”

Last week, President Donald Trump nominated anti-choice physician Heidi Overton to lead the FDA. Overton has long attacked abortion. In 2022, she lauded the overturn of Roe v. Wade as an opportunity to “choose life through a democratic process.” She also called abortion medication “dangerous to women,” despite scientific consensus that the pills are safe and effective. If confirmed, Overton would oversee the agency’s highly-criticized “review” of mifepristone’s safety that began in June under ex-FDA chief Marty Makary.

But a major driving force behind the antipathy toward Patrick appears to be that women recognize the broad contours of his alleged behavior toward his wife—and they are pissed as hell about it. This is evident when you look at the social media comments on the TikToks accusing Patrick, which are filled with harrowing stories from women whose husbands treated them insensitively while they were struggling with postpartum anxiety or depression, left them for another woman while they were at their lowest, or even emotionally or physically abused them.

(As many TikTokkers have pointed out, Rusty Yates, the husband of Andrea Yates, the woman suffering from severe postpartum psychosis who drowned her children in 2001, reportedly urged her to get pregnant again while she was in recovery from postpartum depression after her fourth pregnancy, against her psychiatrist’s advisement.)

Many right-wing (male) pundits have been inclined to dismiss these comments as the ramblings of female hysterics, who are somehow using their own terrible experiences with new motherhood as an excuse to demonize men or exonerate Lindsay. In an X post from last week, far-right pundit Matt Walsh referred to Lindsay’s defenders as “psychotic women on the internet … outright exalting or celebrating” her, attributing this sentiment to “a deep sickness in our culture.” Others have criticized those casting suspicion on Patrick as frivolous misandrists, who are too obsessed with true-crime podcasts and millennial feminism to maintain a logical perspective on the case. (An astrology meme suggesting that Patrick killed his kids because he was a Gemini is often cited as evidence of this perspective.)

Walsh’s reading is an extremely shallow one. The fact that women are empathizing with Lindsay does not suggest they are “celebrating” or “exalting” her, let alone excusing her crimes. But what it does suggest, pretty damningly, is deep structural perversity—not just with the institution of maternal health care in this country, as so many commenters have pointed out, but with the state of motherhood in the United States. Lindsay’s suffering ran so deep that ultimately she thought the only way to end it was to end her own life, and take the lives of her children. Nobody seems to be asking why so many women empathize with that.

Trigger warning: This op-ed contains firsthand descriptions of abuse.

Roughly one in six men in the United States experience sexual abuse before age 18, yet many never disclose their abuse because of stigma and rigid expectations about masculinity.

The first-of-its-kind Australian study, funded by the Office of National Intelligence, surveyed 1,122 young people aged 13-17 and 2,307 adults, to compare attitudes on women, gender equality, online influences and violent extremism. The study also surveyed more than 500 Australian school teachers about their experiences of misogyny and extremism in classrooms.

Study author Dr Sara Meger, from the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Arts, said the findings were concerning.

“These attitudes were far more prevalent among the young people surveyed, and of everything we measured, these hostile views were the single strongest predictor of support for violent extremism,” Dr Meger said.

Among boys aged 13-17 the study found:

• 31.8 per cent believed that attempts to give equal opportunities to women in Australia have gone too far
• 30.1 per cent believed men have more of a right to a job than women when jobs are scarce
• 24.7 per cent believed feminism is damaging to our society and should be resisted with violence if necessary.

On several measures, teenage girls shared similar views to adult men surveyed. Gen Z women were twice as likely as Millennial women, and four times as likely as Gen X women, to agree that marriage entitles a husband to sex with his wife, even if she does not want to.

The study found these attitudes were associated with the online content young people were consuming.

“Engagement with ‘manosphere' content, pornography and online dating showed the strongest links to misogynistic views,” Dr Meger, said.

We measure menstrual health almost entirely in missed school days — a real cost, and a small fraction of the actual one. Period poverty compounds across a woman’s life.

No product, or an unsafe one, leads to reproductive tract infection. Left untreated, that can progress to pelvic inflammatory disease, and in some cases infertility — an unaffordable pad becomes a fertility diagnosis a decade later. Improvised products can cause toxic shock syndrome, sometimes ending in emergency hysterectomy; the alternative is death from sepsis.

Two-thirds of low-income women struggle to access products and a place to wash; unhoused women often make pads from rags and toilet paper. Only 24 states guarantee incarcerated women free products.

None of this appears in the statistics we cite as “period poverty.” It is filed as a school absence, a prison record, a shelter intake note, an emergency room chart — four separate problems instead of one continuous one.

Economists and other social scientists have long recognized that mothers spend more time than fathers on child care, even when both parents work full time. And even though men have assumed more caretaking responsibilities over the past several decades, women still spend more time caring for their children and homes.

This gap matters, because the way childcare is divvied up shapes much more than parents’ work schedules. It can contribute to chronic stress and burnout and influence how couples perceive fairness within their relationships.

During the Asia-Pacific War, the Imperial Japanese military systematically abducted and raped women and underage girls from Japanese colonies and occupied territories. It is estimated around 200,000 people were forced into the ‘comfort women’ system. To date, the Japanese government has neglected to acknowledge its responsibility for the war crime or to offer official apologies and victim-centred reparation plans.

A key player in the anti-abortion movement is preparing to unveil a new strategy to curtail access to medication abortion now that Attorney General Todd Blanche has been sworn in to lead the Department of Justice.

In a July 22 webinar on “Stopping Black Market Abortion Drugs” hosted by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the nonprofit research arm of SBA Pro-Life America, scholar and attorney Mary Harned said she would use a forthcoming research paper to detail how the Justice Department could use an annual global law enforcement campaign known as Operation Pangea to disrupt the domestic distribution of mifepristone, one of two drugs most commonly used for medication abortions.

There have always been divisions between women who are apparently working towards shared liberation. Divisions between suffragists and suffragettes, between colonisers and the colonised, between working-class and middle-class women, between those against and those in favour of pornography. But recently divisions among women have become bitterly depleting and many have confided in me how exhausting they find this. One Black woman in her 60s who co-founded an organisation for migrant female survivors of violence said to me recently about the women’s movement in Britain: “We’ve lost our way. There used to be a vision that brought women together. It wasn’t just about personal advancement or separate communities. I don’t know if that still exists.”

...

Social media takes so much of the blame for these widening divisions. It’s true that feminists, just like everyone else, find that anger is rewarded online. Intransigence results in more attention, more clicks, more followers. Debates around the place of transgender women in feminism became particularly wounding and destructive due to the outrage spiral of social media. And once women have sparred in that polarised online world, it becomes harder and harder to come together to campaign, even for the most important goals.

But while divisions online are obvious, offline, women are still building alliances, brick by brick. These alliances may not be as immediately visible to outside observers, but I believe that they are quietly growing.

...

This work to improve ordinary women’s lives has taken on new urgency due to the rise of the far right, which is capitalising on women’s sense of insecurity to drive forward ever more divisive politics. In Belfast, Elaine Crory at the Women’s Resource and Development Agency has been working for many years to support women in the face of male violence. She now sees the rise of the far right as the “single biggest issue making things worse for women. It is distracting people from fighting the patriarchy and making the situation less safe for women.”

Russell Samora, 38, of western Massachusetts was reading a children’s book with his daughter when the thought crossed his mind: Why are the bears always boys?

He remembered thinking, “Wait a minute, there’s a bear and a rabbit in the story, but there’s absolutely no reason for the bear to be referred to as a boy.”

That’s when Samora started noticing a trend. Most of the animals in the books he read to his daughter were male. “It was something I couldn’t unsee,” he said.

He became curious why animal characters are usually boys. A data journalist himself, Samora teamed up with experts, including Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor of informatics at the University of Washington, to determine which genders were assigned most often to animal characters in children’s books.

Now, Walsh and doctoral students Imani Finkley and Yuanxi Li have taken those questions one step further by exploring what happens when artificial intelligence gets involved. Out of the 300 books Samora and his colleagues looked at in their original study published last year, researchers found he/him pronouns were used twice as often as she/her pronouns. Their research included 30 popular books from each decade since the 1950s, plus one category for books released before then.

They found certain animals were more likely to be described as male or female. While bears were mostly male, cats, on the other hand, were more likely to be female.

The expanding surveillance and criminalization of mutual aid, self-managed care, and bodily autonomy, and the growing attempts to criminalize pregnant people, parents, and health care providers have far-reaching ramifications beyond abortion criminalization that require us to join together to collectively resist!

Hundreds of restrictive bills have been proposed, many passed, including the Texas law (SB8) that not only bans abortion after six weeks, but deputizes civilians to police each other’s reproductive decisions. Such laws are just the latest examples in a long history of criminalizing bodily autonomy, especially for Black, Indigenous, migrant, disabled, queer, and trans people, and people with low incomes who will experience the harshest impacts of anti-abortion legislation.

This brief offers an analysis of how our movements are connected, and how to push back against a widening web of criminalization.

This is an older document with references to a history of legal rights being stripped long preceeding the current Trump administration. However, the information is still valuable and can be applied to other countries as well.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/64920457

My day begins at four in the morning. After waking, I pray and read the Qur’an until the sky begins to brighten. Then I pick up empty water containers and walk to the nearby spring to collect fresh water.

I have breakfast with my son – tea, sugar and tandoori bread. We live in a remote village in Day Kundi province, but unlike many other villagers, our table is not filled with eggs or cheeses. My name is Sediqa*. I am 41 years old, and I have been teaching at my village’s girls’ school for 18 years. I studied at this same school. After the fall of the previous Taliban regime, when Hamid Karzai came to power in 2002 and girls’ schools reopened, I was among the first to return – although I was over 20 years old at the time, I started my education from first grade. Eventually, I became a teacher.

I married a man who promised to support my work and education, because I hoped to build an independent life. But after my son was born, he failed to support me, did not allow me to study at university and opposed my going to work. Then, when the government collapsed and the Taliban took power, my husband left Afghanistan. My son and I were displaced, moving from one person’s home to another. The house I built through years of hardship and with the money I earned from teaching was taken away from me by his family. We eventually settled in a mud house near the school.

In the morning, I prepare dough and go to an area among the trees near my house to gather firewood. I light the clay oven and bake our bread, then leave for school with my son. We each take separate mountain paths and walk to our schools alone. My son walks an hour on foot while my journey takes 45 minutes.

Eighteen years ago, many girls and I gathered at this school under a single tent. There were no professional teachers, our school had no building and the tent was unbearable in the heat and cold – yet we gathered beneath that roof with great enthusiasm and a deep desire to learn.

Today, our school has a building, and classrooms with desks and chairs. But our girls can no longer study beyond sixth grade. The school uniform has been replaced with large black prayer garments, chador namaz, which education officials come to inspect. The youngest girls are just six years old. Despite their age and the long distances they travel, they must carry these heavy garments through the difficult journey, enduring the heat and cold.

For many years now, a dark question has haunted parents, teachers, the internet, and media institutions: What’s wrong with young men?

Why, people ask, are boys so politically extreme, spouting misogynist rhetoric, and increasingly drawn into risky crypto schemes and online gambling? How did they become so lonely, with their depression symptoms often overlooked? The male youth vote broke for Trump in the 2024 election following a GOP campaign built on naked appeals to meathead machismo. Yet there are signs that his second term in office has done little to stem the anger of Gen Z men, whose support for the president is now plummeting.

The most common explanation of these interrelated phenomena is that younger men have banded together online under the umbrella of something known as the “manosphere,” usually conceived as an organic right-wing rebellion driving the culture wars. A new study, however, suggests that this is entirely backward: The digital ecosystem that produces red-pilled men is less of a movement than it is a pyramid scheme.

In 2026, at Bard High School Early College — a top-rated public school in New York City — global studies teacher Dr. Melissa Turoff was startled to recognize the increasing popularity of “bonesmashing” in her classroom. Bonesmashing is an act of hammering your jaw and cheekbones (with a literal hammer, in most cases) until they break, in hopes of the bones growing back stronger and sharper. Dr. Turoff told the FBomb that she was worried “to see [bonesmashing] being embraced by young men at a competitive high school.”

But Bard High School is hardly the only school that has this problem. Many young boys are obsessed with bonesmashing as part of a larger ideology called “looksmaxxing,” a highly intensive rating system for evaluating physical attractiveness. Looksmaxxing is based on a formula for attractiveness that was developed on incel forums, but now has its own website, looksmaxxing.com. Your body fat percentage, inter-pupillary distance, and canthal tilt (measure of slant of your eyes) are, among other body parts, measured and compiled to form a zero to 10 overall rating. Looksmaxxers go through all sorts of physical pain to achieve as high a rating as possible.

In the manosphere, everyone loses. Misogyny and gender inequality are harmful to men, as well as women. In a collection of global data, Equimundo found that men with restrictive gender attitudes are more likely to engage in harmful behaviours, like risk-taking and substance abuse. They are also more prone to depression and suicidal thoughts.

It’s almost comical how quickly conversations about gender inequality are derailed by “whataboutism.” Women are talking about the right to bodily autonomy? Someone has to remind them that men also face pressures. Women are speaking out about harassment? Well, men get harassed too.

It’s like watching someone run onto the scene of a house fire, waving a burnt piece of toast, screaming, “See? We all suffer!”

The irony is that many of the struggles men do face — mental health stigma, rigid gender roles, toxic masculinity — are products of the same patriarchal system feminists are trying to dismantle.

But instead of joining the fight against systemic oppression, some men would rather spend their time insisting that misandry is just as bad as misogyny.

At the end of the day, we need to be able to call things what they are. Yes, men experience hardship. Yes, some women say mean things about men. But one of those things is a personal grievance, and the other is a global, institutionalized system that has stripped women of rights, freedoms, and even their lives.

When we pretend these two things are equal, we don’t just miss the point, we actively make it harder to solve the real problem.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that people recommended lower salaries for the exact same occupation when it was presented as being made up of mostly women rather than mostly men.

"Women still earn 85 cents for every dollar men earn," said Catherine Taylor, an associate professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara and lead author of the study. While some of that gap is linked to women working in lower-paying occupations, Taylor said her team's research asked a different question: Are some occupations paid less because women are in them?

Attorneys for Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman on trial for strangling her three young children in 2023, argued before a jury Tuesday that Clancy should not be held criminally responsible for their deaths. The 35-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, they said, had been experiencing postpartum psychosis, a rare and dangerous medical condition that alters a person’s perception of reality after childbirth.