Category Archives: Women’s Health

Guest Post by Katherine H., Eastern Washington University

One of the first contact points with feminism I had was through learning about wimmin’s health. I’ll refer to the topic in this way for the sake of simplicity, but I do recognize that some men menstruate and have other concerns related to having female anatomy. My main concerns were with menstruation and birth control, especially after I found the more mainstream methods of approaching those issues weren’t working for me. I was led to a lot of resources that might not have explicitly called themselves feminist, but were clearly promoting an approach that didn’t fall into the norm of “don’t touch it, don’t look at it, and definitely don’t try to understand it because the doctor always knows best.”

Feelings of frustration developed as I began noticing the ways wimmin were being deceived and pathologized by the people who were supposed to be helping them, and by society as a whole. The stories I read followed many of the same patterns, primarily wimmin who didn’t know about their bodies and were thus able to be misled in various ways or reasons, or wimmin who did know about their bodies but were discredited and disregarded by their health care providers.  Read more... (581 words, 1 image, estimated 2:19 mins reading time)