Great Essay & ABQ Day 1

[jesse_the_k]

Just finished a stunning essay on #metoo and the huge mismatch between women & men re painful sex.

https://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure

That's right: PubMed has almost five times as many clinical trials on male sexual pleasure as it has on female sexual pain. And why? Because we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right.
Lili Loofbourow

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Albuquerque is indeed SUNNY and WARM. (Well, 49° is plenty warm enough for me, really. It's just cool enough that hot flashes don't matter.) MyGuy and Bella have found a suitable dog park. The local co-op is lovely, a 10-minute stroll away, and its deli does right by the ingredients. We scoped out the local pool and I will report tomorrow.

Comments

[sonia]

Enjoy! Sounds like a great vacation.

Yeah, that article. I don't have words, but I'm glad other people do, about all that.

[jesse_the_k]

So far, so wonderful.

[sonia]

Yay!

[sasha_feather]

Excellent! Glad you have arrived safely.

[jesse_the_k]

<3

also Siddig's eyes are the best.

[frayadjacent]

I'm behind on reading -- have you moved to NM, or just visiting? I grew up in a small town south of Albuquerque.

That essay is great.

[jesse_the_k]

Just visit for a couple weeks. Any recommendations most welcome!

[frayadjacent]

It’s been a long time so my recs are horribly out of date, but the ABQ natural history museum is excellent.

Thanks.

[jesse_the_k]

Good to know!

[wendelah1]

I read the article. I understand the anger but "we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right"? That seems oversimplified to say the least. The writer for that article took four or five--or more--separate problems and threw them into a blender and pushed start.

"These days, a man can walk out of his doctor's office with a prescription for Viagra based on little but a self-report, but it still takes a woman, on average, 9.28 years of suffering to be diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition caused by endometrial tissue growing outside the uterus."

One of these things is not like the other?

It is true that pharmaceutical companies are making money hand over fist selling Viagra, etc. to men. That's a pretty easy study to design, plus there is a big cohort of patients ready to enroll in clinical trials. Having experienced dyspareunia first hand, I would agree wholeheartedly that more attention should be paid, but painful intercourse--regardless of the cause--is not so easy to diagnose or to treat as erectile dysfunction. And it made me angry to have the problems I and other women have suffered put into the same category as Grace and her no good very bad celebrity date. These are not the same problem and lumping them together isn't helping anyone.

Sorry. I can go on and on so I am stopping now. When I calm down maybe I'll go write in my own journal about it. I do very much appreciate the link.

[jesse_the_k]

No apologies, please. I want to hear your perspective, here or at your journal.

Lumping & Splitting

[jesse_the_k]

What appealed to me was the wide-angle perspective. I've personally experienced mysterious vulval pain and shitty dates, and they are not the same. But I'd never considered that mismatch between men and women and pain. I appreciated the writer recognized that we (women) have a lot of pain, and it's most often minimized. The dismissal of women's pain is a social construction.

That viewpoint helps me to offload anxiety, fear, doubt & other bullshit. Just like understanding disability as a social construction opens up solidarity channels in my head. Yes, impairment is still specific and there and must be acknowledged and dealt with.