Which is why The Patriarchy does not want us to have them

Mr T and I were on a trip. As usual, we were sharing one suitcase. I took my shower (ha that makes it sound like I shower daily, which is not true except when I am staying in someone else’s house – I love the freedom of not having to go to a job) and got dressed, grabbing the jeans that lay across the top of the suitcase.

When we were downtown, I put my hand in my pocket – and my hand was not stopped three inches in.

I pushed further – and my hand still had space to move.

Further.

Until my hand was BURIED in my pocket.

I ran another test.

I put my phone.

In my front pocket.

And

It

Fit.

That’s when I knew something weird was happening.

And indeed, I had accidentally put on Mr T’s pants.

For those few moments, I knew what it was like to have power.

And I liked it.

---

Mr T, alas, would not let me keep those jeans.

But I am not without skills, so I simply transplanted a pocket from a pair of his old jeans that I used for parts to a pair of my jeans.

And it worked.

However, it was a pain in the neck and I am lazy and don’t want to do all that work and indeed I should not have to.

So I wrote to Levi’s to ask them to GIVE US POCKETS.

I had to transplant a pocket from my husband’s jeans to mine because men’s jeans have pockets deep enough to hold a phone and women’s jeans have pockets deep enough to hold a quarter. What the hell? Why can’t you give us the same pockets you give men?

Texan in Exile who is tired of worrying about losing her phone in the ladies’ room at the ballpark where she is not allowed to carry a purse

They wrote back.

Apparently, I alerted them to an issue that THEY HAD NO IDEA EXISTED.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share this with us. We completely understand why it feels disappointing. Pockets are a real, everyday need, and it’s upsetting when something so simple becomes a limitation.
 
Your feedback is really important to us, and we want you to know that we take it seriously. We truly appreciate you expressing your concerns so openly, and we will make sure your comments are shared with our team. Hearing directly from customers helps us understand where we need to improve, and your message highlights an issue that deserves attention.
 
If there’s anything more you’d like to share or anything we can do to make your experience better, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
 
If you need anything else, just reply to this email or chat with us. Texan —we’re always happy to help!
 
Samantha from Levi’s

So you may all thank me – Levi’s is ON IT. They JUST DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE.

Also it’s about time people started using the M Word in public

The NaNaz are punk band of menopausal women. One of their songs is about menopause. In a story about the band, the female reporter, who is a Woman of a Certain Age, writes, “Symons has since written her first song, Harness the Darkness, which is surprisingly upbeat given that it’s about the unreasonable anger one can suffer during menopause.”

Unreasonable anger.

Unreasonable.

Oh honey.

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I have never heard my mother talk about menopause. Not once. I don’t know when hers started. I don’t know if she ever had a hot flash. I don’t know when my grandmothers went through menopause.

All of this would maybe have been useful information to me as I boiled my way through hours of trying to sleep. Or not. I don’t know.

But at the least, it should have been a topic that was freely discussed. After all, it affects just HALF OF THE ENTIRE POPULATION.

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One time, when I told Mr T I was having a hot flash, he laid his hand on my forehead.

“You’re HOT!” he exclaimed.

“Well yes,” I answered. “That’s why it’s called a hot flash.”

“I thought it was something you felt,” he said, “but I thought it was like phantom pain, not that your body actually changed temperature.”

---

We are hot.

We are miserable.

And yes we are angry.

But it’s not the hormones – it’s the awareness.

It’s the awareness that first of all, medical science knows almost nothing about menopause. Why is that, you ask? Oh because women’s health is consistently de-prioritized so we can have not just viagra but chewable viagra for men who want to get it up but whose jaws aren’t strong enough for regular viagra.

It’s the horrified awareness that we have been right all along – that the things that happen to our bodies just don’t matter to the white men who allocate the research money.

It’s the awareness that our suffering isn’t important enough for men to care about it and do something about it.

That makes us angry. Not unreasonably angry but justifiably angry.

And because with heat comes DGAF, we are speaking up. We are demanding that something be done, not just for us but for all women at all stages of life. We want pregnant women to get the healthcare they need. We want Black women not to die in childbirth at a higher rate than white women. (We don’t want any women to die in childbirth.) We want women to have power over what happens to their own bodies. We want endometriosis cured. We want what we deserve.

We are angry. As we should be.

How long must they suffer?

What should we do? What should we do in a world where white men are being treated so badly? So unfairly?

I mean – look at the data.

They have no representation in the halls of power. Where are the men in Congress? In the White House? In the CEO seats?

Look how many laws restrict what men can do with their own bodies. Look at how public facilities are closed to them. Look how they are de-prioritized in medical research.

Oh wait.

That’s women.

That’s people of color.

What is the suffering that white men are enduring?

It must be something. In my college’s alumni page on facebook, people were talking about where their children are going to college. One White Guy said his kid is going to Texas A&M, which is kind of the opposite of Rice, where I went to college. That is, A&M has a military corps. It’s known as the right-wing school and my college is known as the pinko school.

He is not sad that his kid is not going to Rice. At Rice, I guess, his white male child would face challenges for being a white male.

White guy: Mine is going to A&M.

(Reply) I’m sorry. It’s still a good school though.

White guy: As Rice used to be. Before the woke Kool Aid took over. My father and grandfather were Aggies. I was born in BCS. So it was a bit of a shock when I went to Rice, but at least it wasn’t TU!! Rice was perfect for me in 1979. Quirky, intellectually curious, open-minded. Lots of smart people having fun and working hard. My offspring has the added challenge of being a white male. Since that seems to automatically make him a PNG at Rice these days, and since he wants to pursue a military career, I encouraged him to consider A&M, where humans like him are still valued. Along with all other human variants.

What are those White Male Challenges, you ask?

Let’s see.

Maybe it’s something as tragic as not being called on first in class.

“That’s ‘DOCTOR Uppity Woman’ to you”

The insurance company nurse – let’s call her Betty – came for our home visit last week. I don’t mind because we get $150 each for letting someone come to the house, take our blood pressure, write down our medications, and tell us we need a hand rail in the shower.

Betty was great. It only took a few minutes of conversation – with me being very nosy – to learn that she teaches at the local community college.

And that she has a doctorate.

I told her that I tell the female dental students at the dental college to make people call them “doctor” once they have earned the title.

I don’t worry about that, Betty said. I want people to feel comfortable with me. As long as the students are professional with me, I am fine. And it keeps me humble not to be called doctor.

OH GIRL THE WORLD ALREADY KEEPS WOMEN HUMBLE AND WOMEN OF COLOR EVEN MORE SO.

I called her “Dr Betty” from then on. (I would have used her last name but I did not know her last name.)

(I do not know the etiquette of calling a nurse practitioner with a doctorate “doctor” when I am her patient, but I do know that a college student should call a teacher with a doctorate “doctor.”)

(And if I have to err, I would rather err on the side of being overly formal and calling a woman by her title rather than by her first name.)

---

Do men worry about staying humble so much that they don’t ask people to use their titles in a professional relationship?

Hahahaha NO THEY DO NOT.

Men own their power. They demand it.

---

Of course the dilemma that – as we women know – any time a woman does own her power, she is accused of being a bitch.

Uppity.

Too direct.

Too outspoken.

Too everything.

I completely understand why Dr Betty might want to avoid all this crap. She is a Woman of a Certain Age, with beautiful gray braids cascading down her back. She has seen things. She has experienced things. She has felt the wrath of a sexist, racist society and probably just wants to focus on her immediate mission of educating nurses. And just having a woman like her in that position is a fight and a clear message to the sexists and the racists that they are not going to win.

(Charlie Kirk would have been horrified if she had shown up to his house. Would he have let her in? Or would he have surrendered the $150 just to keep his racist, sexist principles?)

---

The good news is that young women are standing on the shoulders of the women before them and taking the next step. I saw this post this morning, after I drafted the first part of this piece yesterday (and honestly I was wondering how I would end this piece). This is from a young woman I know who just graduated with her DNP yesterday.

I graduated with my Doctorate of Nursing Practice to be a psychiatric Nurse Practitioner!!

Passionate passionate passionate about mental health.

That’s DR. MIDLEVEL to you!!

The only good part-time lawyer is a male part-time lawyer

When I was in the corporate world and my friends and co-workers were having babies, they begged their bosses for some kind of part-time professional track. They wanted to keep working but working full time, with long hours and travel, just wasn’t an option. Who would take care of their children?

The bosses said nope.

So they quit.

Many of them were married to men who made decent salaries, I suppose. If the money situation were desperate, they would have cobbled together something suboptimal.

But the ones I knew quit.

Women with five to ten years of experience, good experience, who knew what they were doing and were ready to move up the career ladder suddenly gone.

But also – experienced employees whose institutional knowledge was suddenly gone.

---

After yet another co-worker quit after having her baby, I asked a male HR VP about this. Why couldn’t we have part-time professional positions?

He looked puzzled. How would the company handle benefits? Office space?

The company chose to lose someone they had had for ten years rather than get creative.

The only women in executive roles at that company – a Fortune 100 company with over 100,000 employees – either had no children or, if they had children, had stay at home husbands. How do I know this? Because there were barely any woman in executive positions and I knew who they were.

---

A friend at another F100 company in town did go part time.

“They just cut everything in half,” she told me. Half the pay, half the contribution to her benefits. The office problem did not seem to sway them.

Twenty years later, with her kids finally out of the house, and she is still there, doing her awesome work, back to full time.

Another friend went part time when her baby was born, but her company’s part time was that she worked only four days a week. Officially, she worked 32 hours a week.

Only her male boss would schedule meetings on her off day.

And call her on her off day.

And give her deadlines that required her working on her off day.

She still only got paid for 32 hours, though.

---

A friend in Texas – one of the friends who wanted to work part-time after her first baby was born – heard about a guy running for office by her. He’s a lawyer at a major law firm, only a few years out of law school. Married, three kids.

How is he going to campaign, and even more critically, serve, if he is an associate at a law firm? Those people work horrible hours.

Oh look his firm is letting him work part time?

I thought part-time professional work just wasn’t possible.

I was wrong. It just wasn’t possible unless you have a penis.

You’ve had power forever and look where we are

An older white liberal man, during a heated political discussion, asked if I thought white men should even run for office anymore.

It took me only a second to think about it and answer “No.”

---

We were talking about a Democratic primary that involves one white male candidate and one white female candidate.

The male candidate looks good on paper: Stanford undergrad, Yale grad school. He has had some impressive jobs. People will look at that background and think he is smart and hard working, which I am sure he is. He is also probably a nice guy and is completely sincere in his desire to serve the community. I have nothing bad to say about this guy. Who he is personally is not the issue.

The female candidate does not have a fancy school on her resume. She has not worked at impressive companies. But she has been participating in the community at the local level, serving on boards and commissions and projects that probably don’t impress people but do work that needs to be done, like making sure that the local park is inclusive and accessible, both in the play equipment and in the restrooms. (The fact that there are restrooms at all is important to some of us. I sure haven’t seen men fighting for public restrooms. Indeed, they have argued against them.)

Our current legislator, who is a woman, also did not go to a fancy school. She has not had impressive internships or jobs.

But since she was elected eight years ago, she has done so much for our community and for women and children specifically.

In her first race, two of her major issues were maternal mortality and human trafficking, things I had not even thought about in our district. But she was right – they were problems in my own middle-class suburb.

Since then, she and the other Democratic women have proposed and passed legislation about insurance coverage for follow-up mammograms (which had been considered diagnostic and not preventive, so you ended up paying hundreds of dollars to make sure you don’t have breast cancer) and postpartum Medicaid coverage. She has proposed legislation about menopause research and other women’s health issues. Her focus is not exclusively women but it is something she cares about and acts on.

---

I’m not saying men don’t support solving these problems.

But I don’t see them pushing for legislation to solve these problems.

I don’t see them campaigning on solving these problems.

I don’t see women’s issues being brought to the forefront until female (usually Dem) politicians address them.

---

My question to all white male candidates – no matter how liberal they are – is, “What do you bring to the conversation that has not been brought up, discussed, and acted on a million times already?”

I’m waiting for the answer.

But not enough to make sure we have research and treatment and insurance coverage for them

At a panel discussion, a county judge said that one of her biggest challenges when she had her first baby was finding a place to pump in the courthouse. There’s only one pumping station, she said. In the entire courthouse.

Her husband had asked her what previous pregnant judges had done and she laughed.

“Previous pregnant judges?” she laughed. “Previous pregnant judges?”

Another panelist, an older white man who is a professor at the law school and who describes himself as very left, looked shocked when the judge talked about the lack of lactation space, not just for her but for other women using the courthouse. It had never occurred to him that this might be a thing.

A couple of issues here:

1. It’s rare for the needs of women in public spaces to be taken into account
2. It’s rare for the needs of women anywhere to be taken into account
3. Even the most liberal of men don’t see these needs

QED We need more women in office.

---

I talked about mammogram followups in a previous post. That is, if you have breast tissue that a regular mammogram won’t read (that is, the machine is not doing its job), you will often need a followup mammogram for more investigation.

In many cases, the followup mammogram is considered diagnostic. The first one is preventive and the law requires it be fully covered at no cost to the patient.

But when a procedure is coded diagnostic?

Hahahahahaha you’re paying hundreds of dollars for that out of your pocket.

In Wisconsin, a group of female legislators got a bill passed into law requiring insurance companies to cover the followup mammogram in these cases as preventive.

That is, as a procedure that insurance covers fully.

Female legislators. Women. Women led the charge on this. Because we are the ones who feel the pain. (Not that it should be that way, but damn it seems to be the only way.)

Men did not do this. Men did not say, “You know what we need? We need to make it easier to diagnose breast cancer!” Nope. Male Republican legislators are too busy trying to cut taxes for their rich friends or get rid of environmental protections or reducing the age of consent.

---

When I first learned about the Temperance Movement, I thought it was silly. Mean women who didn’t want their husbands to have a beer after work.

Then I learned that the tavern leagues had gotten legislation passed that allowed a tavern to garnish a man’s wages for his bar tab. The bar got paid before the children got fed.

Why did men even pass such a law in the first place? Was there not one man who voted for such legislation who wondered how workers would keep a roof over their children’s heads? Was there not one man who wondered why bar owners should get a break?

---

When I was canvassing last month, I talked to a 30ish woman with small children in the room behind her. I told her about the mammogram law that women had just gotten passed in our state.

She told me that she had skipped her mammogram this year because she always has to have the followup and she is so tired of the cost and the hassle.

I asked her to schedule a test, telling her that we need her around.

Women save women. We can’t count on anyone else to do it.

(Make sure all the like-minded women you know are registered to vote and know about the next election where you are.)

But also give me some of that government health care while I tread on other people who aren’t affecting me in any way at all

Do you want to know what hypocrisy looks like?

I saw a cousin last week. This guy, who is white, is a huge trump supporter. When he comments on my political facebook posts, it’s always to argue and point out how I am wrong and Dems are bad and blah blah blah. His whole attitude is that he got where he is just fine so why shouldn’t everyone else?

(As in, when he was on his town’s school board, he dismissed parents’ requests for all-day kindergarten and for Pre-K. “They just don’t want to pay for daycare,” he said. Which may have been true but also is not unreasonable, especially in an environment where the only way to keep the lights on is to have both parents working for money.)

BTW, “where he is” is that he bought his father’s business, the business our grandfather started, the business that was already a strong, steady brand. He sold it a few years ago and retired early.

When I asked him about health insurance, he said he is on ACA.

A.

C.

A.

Not a trump thing.

“You mean Obamacare?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“OBAMACARE,” I said again, waiting for him to recognize the contradictions between what he writes online about the Democrats and how he conducts his own life.

Reader, he did not appear to recognize the contradictions.

---

I have another trumper cousin.

(If you don’t have any trumpers in your family, it’s because your family just isn’t big enough.)

She is consistent in her rage about Dems and her acceptance of the cult. She refuses to get a covid vaccine because she says it will change her DNA. (Yes she has heart problems and is medically vulnerable why do you ask?)

Yet she divorced her husband when he needed multiple organ transplants so that he would qualify for Medicaid.

That is, when it was to her financial benefit, she decided that using a resource that the government provides was a perfectly fine thing to do.

---

What do you even say to someone who can’t see? Who won’t see? How do you even get through to someone when the answer is right in front of their face and they are looking at The Answer while they swear that The Answer is bad?

I really am asking you for a script. How do we get them to see? Even a tiny bit?

Men who won’t retire because they worry about having nothing to fill their time also because they won’t be important anymore

An acquaintance who retired a few months ago sighed that he’s not important anymore.

He was a professor at a local college. Published. Respected, I am sure.

Now he is retired.

And in his mind, he no longer matters.

---

A VP at a former job worried he would have nothing to do when he retired.

A dear friend in a very high-level, high-status position is worried about filling his time when he retires and keeps delaying his retirement.

The women I know who are retired? Did it years ago and have not looked back.

---

There are at least two things going on here, I think.

The first is the perceived – well probably real – loss of status from other men from leaving a prestigious job.

Maybe it’s because I was not important even when I was working that I am not bothered by not being important now.

It’s not that I didn’t want to be important in my job – it’s that apparently, I was incapable of climbing the corporate ladder. Even looking back now, I don’t see what I could have done differently. Well, except maybe keep my mouth shut. Honesty is not valued in a corporate environment.

(But even with that – I asked my male bosses what I needed to do to be promoted and they either could not or would not tell me.)

(And yet there are women who make it to the top and I was not one of them so clearly this is also very much a me issue.)

(What is the big secret that everyone but me knows about how to get promoted?)

I guess power and status are intoxicating and hard to leave. I wouldn’t know.

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The other thing is the lament of “But what will I ever DO?”

Again, I am wondering if this is a Man Thing, because my women friends have absolutely no trouble filling their time. We are reading. We are registering voters. We are knocking on doors and writing postcards for candidates who will protect our rights and make the lives of our daughters and granddaughters better. We are going for walks with our friends. We are protesting. We are traveling. We are making jam and sourdough bread and trying all those time-consuming recipes we always wanted to try. We are getting rid of junk that is cluttering our lives. We are gardening. We are binge-watching shows we missed. We are having people over for dinner.

How does someone with power reach retirement age without one hobby? Or without any ideas of what to do when he and yes I mean “he” is not at work?

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(For the record, my acquaintance who doesn’t feel important anymore is a wonderful man who is finding very important ways to fill his time – among other things, he is the excellent chief inspector at the polling place where I volunteer, which is absolutely essential for a functioning democracy but just doesn’t get the social validation it deserves.)

Maybe we will finally hear from this long-ignored group

You what we are really missing in this country? You know what is a huge mystery to us all? You know what is completely lacking from the public discourse?

The views and opinions – the needs, the wants – of the white middle-class male.

We don’t know what men want. We muddle along blindly, focusing only on our own needs – can we get that second mammogram when the first one is inconclusive covered as preventive and not as diagnostic? Can we get free tampons in school restrooms? Can we protect our basic rights as women?

We think about all these things while ignoring the chasm of lost men.

And that is why I am so, so delighted that even though there is a highly-qualified woman running for the State Assembly seat being vacated by a woman who has indeed gotten that mammogram coverage passed into law, there are now also two white men – both lawyers – running in the Democratic primary for that seat as well.

I for one am so grateful that at last, we will have this long-underrepresented segment of society represented in our government. I am so happy that not one but two men saw this gap, said to themselves “You know what we really need? We need to have someone who speaks for WHITE MEN!” and have courageously stepped up to serve the community by selflessly dedicating their time and resources to running for and possibly serving in office.

If one of them is elected instead of the woman, perhaps we can finally give the issues that middle-class white male lawyers face the attention they deserve. It’s been a long time coming.

(Can I tell you how pissed off I am that I might have to spend my summer campaigning for the woman when I thought I would get to take off before the primary? I just spent a month knocking on doors for a Supreme Court candidate. I wanted a break. But DAMN.)