A Quick Post About Tomorrow... When the Resistance Starts in Earnest.

A point of order for the resistance tomorrow. As people have said with old media (ie TV), the goal should not be to simply leave the TV off. While viewership might be down, overall share of the views will be drastically up. You can see how someone like He Who Shall Not Be Named would manipulate that to say how popular he is. So change the channel, put on TLC, put on that one housing and decorating channel, put on QVC, put on something that won't be showing the inauguration. Bring those numbers down. Meanwhile online, I would say, don't hashtag him. Don't mention him. Leave him as a vague pronoun. Leave him as a vague cipher so facebook or twitter's algorithms won't pick it up and say how "everyone" is talking about him. Don't fucking give him attention. Please, don't. Don't normalize him. Don't defend the fucking prick as he is far beyond the pale. Tomorrow at 12:01 PM EST the resistance starts in earnest. Stay safe, stay INFORMED, and stay TOGETHER.

Hey you Nasty Women and Bad Hombres

I wanted to make my first post just a little introduction as well as an about me.  I'm Jenny, and I'm proud to be a Nasty Woman.  I'll be trying to write every week here to give hot takes on the news of the week, perspectives from the LGBT+ community, and historical perspectives.  I am a proud member of the LGBT+ community and have done grad school for European history, specifically the Holocaust/Nazi Germany.  I find these days that that specific area of expertise might be coming in handy more and more in the coming months under Trump.  I want to briefly state that his parallels with Hitler's style as well as how he rose to power are striking and need to be commented on.  I look forward to writing for you all, and hope to hear criticism and responses.  Be safe out there, folks.  It looks like it's getting hairier and hairier out there.
Jenny

Get an IUD

I am getting really sick of seeing the words “free birth control”. Especially when it comes to birth control paid for by an insurance company. Free? Newsflash, women pay for insurance. Uninsured? Well I bet you pay taxes... the same taxes which go into funding “free” clinics (except abortion). Or maybe you have no income, and thus make no tax contribution... well gee, that seems like a really bad time to have a baby. It seems to me a woman who can't even afford to make a contribution through taxes to health clinics really shouldn't be having a child which will immediately require government welfare programs to survive. A baby which will make this poor woman much less likely to do the sort of things she needs to do to get herself out of poverty. And this sounds a lot more expensive than birth control.

Birth control isn't free. Unwanted children are not “saved”. Whether or not a woman pays a monetary cost for birth control we pay for it. Believe me.

Hormonal male birth control was abandoned because too many men dropped out of the study. Despite the fact that male birth control lacked many of the most severe side effects of female birth control... like death. One would think pussing out on birth control would at least give men a renewed respect for women bearing the brunt of responsibility in preventing pregnancy. Nope.

If you are a woman reading this I likely do not need to tell you how frustrating it can be trying to find the right hormonal birth control. You suffer through all kinds of side effects ranging from painful to humiliating. After recently switching my birth control due to the mustache I'd gotten from my progesterone only pill I found none of my clothes fit. I felt constant nausea, had terrible headaches, random bruising, constant bleeding and cramps, breast tenderness that made walking hurt on some days. My melasma mustache (I call him Federico) did not go away. I couldn't just stop taking this pill without some kind of a backup plan, not without risking a parasitic infection.... I mean pregnancy.

Thankfully I have never had to have an abortion despite being poor through my late teens and early twenties. I was lucky I became a sexually active poor person in the state of California, where state clinics are extremely cheap if not free. As a result I always had access to the pill, or plan B for the few times I had a condom break when not on the pill. I had access to important cancer screenings. I could get UTIs treated without having to starve for weeks to pay for it. When I moved back to New York City and needed birth control I went to Planed Parenthood. At the time I was unemployed. The pills still cost me over $100.

Now Republicans are working to allow insurance companies to start charging for birth control again. I am not an optimistic person, so I had a feeling this was coming. For this reason I rushed to get an IUD in December after finally deciding my fear of the big bad IUD was surpassed by my fear of the Republican's war on women.

Before the election my doctor suggested I get Mirena. I had always been a little afraid of IUDs. There are so many horror stories (most of which are based on the old fashioned IUDs) and they seemed so permanent. You can just switch pills, but you can't switch an IUD without more money and more pain. Then Trump won and Republicans took the majority in the House and Senate. So I started asking friends if they had IUDs and what they thought of them. What I found was everyone loved them. At least from my friend pool everyone was extremely happy. Most people wished they had done it sooner. Only one friend had an initially negative experience with expulsions and hormones, but after adjusting was happy she’d done it. I also found that the IUD, the most mysterious and frightening form of birth control methods had been floating around in the uteruses of A LOT of my friends and coworkers.

One thing everyone agreed on, (except my gynecologist who has some kind of magical reproductive system) was that the insertion process is a beast. I mean a BEAST! Holy crap was I unprepared. If I had to go back and do it all again I would ask my Doctor for some tramadol, which has been found to be the most effective pain medication for the insertion, and prescription ibuprofen for later. I would not, as my gyno advised, do it on my lunch break, and I would have had someone come with me to drive me to and from the office.

My friends had prepared me for a rough week. But I had heard mixed things about the early weeks of the IUD. Some people had terrible cramps for months, others days, my gynecologist was perfectly fine, because she is made of magic. For me it lasted about a week and a half, at which point I demanded some prescription ibuprofen which finally managed the pain. I didn’t have much bleeding. I have been spotting off and on since I got it at the end of December. My period was a little heavier, but nothing crazy. And in many women periods will stop all together with Mirena.

For the first week I thought I must be crazy to have allowed a stranger to shove a huge piece of plastic up my cervix. I felt bruised and raw in places I hadn't appreciated the existence of before. Was I really that afraid of the government? Yes. Yes I was, and yesterday it was confirmed that my fear was based in reality when the Republicans began their repeal of the Affordable Care Act and rejected attempts by democrats to keep coverage of female reproductive health, and preexisting conditions. Remember, being a woman in this country is considered a preexisting condition. So is being pregnant.

IUDs are 99.9% effective at keeping the GOP out of your uterus! 

I am so glad I got an IUD because it means I can focus without fear on fighting for women’s rights in an increasingly sexist country. It means I no longer have to worry about being able to afford my birth control. In some regards I now have the same reproductive freedoms as a man. I don’t have to take responsibility for a child unless I want to.

But I do not have the same freedom as a man. My darling boyfriend didn't have to suffer through the pain of the IUDs insertion. He didn't have to miss work because he was in too much pain to leave his bed. He didn't have to let a stranger ram and inch of plastic up his cervix. I don't resent my boyfriend for this, and I know he felt genuine concern and care for me while I was suffering, but it seems the majority of men in this country do not give a damn about what women go through to insure any offspring they do produce are cared for, wanted and loved. That is the message the Republicans have been sending since December when they began daily attacks on women's health and began passing legislation designed to shame and humiliate women.

Unless you are unable to get an IUD for medical reasons, or are ready to have a baby, please get one and do it now while you still can. Without insurance IUDs can easily cost over a thousand dollars.

Overall for me it was a positive experience. It made me feel much more empowered, and gave me a reason to talk about my body openly with others; something which for some reason we look down on in American culture. I wound up having conversations with friends coworkers and acquaintances about the female reproductive system in a really normal positive way as we shared advice and stories.  
We talk about this on episode 3 of our Nasty Women Report podcast, but for those of you who haven’t heard it, here’s what happens when you get an IUD:

That entire fucking thing gets rammed up your cervix!

First your gynecologist may want you to wait to order an IUD from the pharmaceutical company. Tell them your insurance is changing and you need to rush it if they do this (they might be able to get your insurance company to approve using an IUD from their stock rather than having to order one).

Once the IUD is ready to be placed you will have what starts off as a normal exam. The painful part is the device which opens your cervix. This may hurt less in women who have already had a child. Next your doctor will poke around in your uterus to measure it and figure out where to place the IUD. This part hurts a lot. Apparently being poked in the uterus causes contractions. At this point you will probably be thinking “holy shit what the fuck is wrong with me! Why am I letting someone do this to me! When will this pain ever end!” it ends in what will seem like the longest minute of your life.

Immediately after the insertion I felt fine. Some women feel dizzy or nauseous. As I checked out of the office the cramping started and only got worse as I drove home. I felt really awful for the rest of the day. It was far beyond period cramps. The next day I was able to run errands and live more normally, I even had sex. On the third day I think I was having uterine contractions. I was in so much pain I was writhing around and crying in my boyfriend’s car. He gave me some tea and buried me under a pile of blankets for the rest of the day. It was off and on like that for the first two weeks. But since then I have been alright. I have had an occasionally strange feeling that I have a tampon in, which is unsettling, but slowly going away.

I will go back to the doctor six weeks after my insertion just to make sure everything is in the right place, and then all I have to do is check on my strings for the next five years. By then I assume either America will be a smoldering pile of ruins, or some sanity will be returned to our government and I will be able to use my insurance for whatever reproductive health needs I may have. Perhaps I am being overly optimistic, but for now at least I do not have to worry about any unwanted pregnancies.

So go, my vagina touting friends! Select your IUD and spend the Trump era worrying about everything but unwanted pregnancies!

You too will be this happy in white when you no longer spontaneously bleed from the vagina!