Morrigan 🇨🇦

[Maryam @hell_line0]

Saw a TikTok where this woman read the vows her husband wrote and he said something like "our love is work but not long commutes and long hours at a job you hate work... this love is the type of work that artists put into their creations." changed my brain chemistry

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

You’re a woman who’s having migraines and blackouts. You’re afraid, worried, and it’s taken months to get an appointment with the neurologist in whose office you’re sitting, Dr. Jeffrey “Scott” Sloka.

When Dr. Sloka comes in, the nurse leaves, which is weird, but you’re here for a neurology appointment, so you shrug it off. The doctor asks you some questions, and then he tells you he needs to do a vaginal exam and a breast exam.

You don’t understand why, and he doesn’t explain. You want to refuse, but what if you make him angry? What if he refuses to continue the appointment? This is Canada; you waited for five months for this appointment, and your symptoms are getting worse — so you consent, even though you still don’t understand why he wants to examine you in this way.

Once you’re undressed, Dr. Sloka begins the exam by telling you to remove your gown and stand completely naked with arms and legs spread. The nurse still hasn’t come back, but the doctor proceeds anyway. He says something about checking for lumps, but that doesn’t make any sense; he’s a neurologist, not an ob/gyn.

Then you notice that he isn’t wearing gloves.

During the breast exam, he touches you in ways that make you uncomfortable, and that are not a part of an ordinary breast exam. The vaginal exam is worse: the exam lasts an exceptionally long time, and the doctor inserts his ungloved fingers. The nurse still hasn’t returned.

After the appointment, you feel dirty, soiled. You know deep down that you were assaulted, so eventually you work up the courage to file a report.

It opens a floodgate.

By the time the trial starts, Dr. Sloka has already lost his license, having pled guilty in front of the licensing board. He is facing 48 separate charges for the sexual abuse of his patients.

Woman after woman testifies to this man’s inappropriate behavior. Multiple women testify that Dr. Sloka touched them inappropriately and intimately while not wearing gloves; they describe vaginal exams, rectal exams, and breast exams involving contact that had nothing to do with checking for lumps. An underage girl cries as she describes being pressured into a vaginal exam while her mother was banned from the room.

48 counts. 48 victims. 41 women and girls who took the stand to testify about the abuse they endured.

And one more woman: the Crown’s key expert, Toronto neurologist Dr. Vera Bril. She testified that vaginal, rectal, and breast exams are “far outside our standard of practice,” and “far, far outside” of what neurologists typically do. She stated that these intimate exams were “not necessary” for treating or diagnosing the neurological issues presented by the victims. When the judge retires to deliberate, a conviction seems certain.

Except that’s not what happens.

The judge - Justice Craig Perry - discounts the testimony of all 42 women. He singles out Dr. Bril’s testimony in particular as suffering from “profound frailties,” and accused her of displaying “bias.” He dismisses the victims’ testimonies as well, citing “inconsistencies,” even though none of said “inconsistencies” touched in any way on ex-Dr. Sloka’s guilt.

He accepts ex-Dr. Sloka’s claim that the assaults were medically necessary exams, even though Sloka admits to having performed many of them ungloved, and cannot explain what these exams had to do with any of his victims’ symptoms.

In the end, Justice Craig Perry acquits ex-Dr. Jeffrey “Scott” Sloka on all 48 counts, choosing to believe a (male) defendant who had already admitted his guilt in front of the licensing board over 41 (female) victims and an expert (female) neurologist.

And they say the patriarchy is dead.

[Nordic Model Now! @nordicmodelnow]

THE THREAT ‘PORN TECH’ POSES TO OUR SHARED HUMANITY

Excerpt of the transcript of Esther’s brilliant talk at our event last weekend in Sheffield.

“Porn perpetuates rape myths and is driven by sexist and racist norms and assumptions about sexuality. Online porn sites use algorithms to drive consumer preferences for content involving sexual and physical violence, dehumanisation and humiliation. AI porn and sex robots are trained on videos and images from online porn, along with related content scraped from the internet.

The public debate about AI training models used in porn seems to focus on deepfakes and “revenge porn” rather than the misogyny inherent in porn itself.

Acts like beating people, urinating on them or exposing them to faeces have been described as torture by human rights organisations when carried out against detainees by state agents or tolerated by states. But when the same acts are inflicted on women in porn and prostitution, these human rights organisations describe them as ‘work’ carried out by ‘choice’.

There’s a class bias in the public discourse that has accepted this for years and only demands action now that technological development has resulted in the circulation of misogynistic, manipulated and dehumanising images of ‘respectable’ women.

Porn directors promote the connection between sex and violence, because viewers find it more arousing. The cruelty is the point.

Camera angles rather than a woman’s pleasure determine the sexual positions featured and the acts directors prefer to film. Expressions of fear, discomfort and pain are a routine feature of their output. Injuries inflicted during filming are often edited out because it would interrupt the fantasy, just as the use of lube and condoms would.

When I was in the sex industry I was beaten, suffocated, spat on and worse, and injured by buyers many times. A British businessman who ran corporal punishment websites based in Hungary caned me 100 times as an “introduction”.

Most of the women he used in his films were recruited by his agents on the streets of Budapest and rewarded with drugs. If a cyber-brothel in Berlin is full of sex robots wearing torn clothes and covered in fake blood, it’s because there are pornographic films online involving rape and real blood. It just wasn’t cool to talk about this and what happens to the women and girls in these films.

I experienced almost every practice inflicted by the CIA at Guantanamo and elsewhere. In documents about Guantanamo, the CIA acknowledged that the forceful, sexualised torture techniques it employed, which are used by many other states against detainees and prisoners of war, were used for the purpose of behaviour control.

Men paid me to be a crash test dummy so that they could claim superior knowledge of ‘modern sexual practices’ when seeking to inflict similar punishment on their female partners. Sex robots are likely to fulfil a similar role.

Men can perform acts on sex robots that would kill or seriously harm women in real life. Strangulation? Repeated forceful sex or the insertion of objects that cause serious injury and even death? No problem. This leads to a significant risk to the women they have sex with in real life….”

Link to the full text in the next tweet.

[Mary G Lamarche @g_lamarche]

"Acts like beating people, urinating on them or exposing them to faeces have been described as torture by human rights organizations when carried out against detainees by state agents or tolerated by states. But when the same acts are inflicted on women in porn and prostitution, these human rights organizations describe them as ‘work’ carried out by ‘choice’."

[The Curious Tales @thecurioustales]

The science of fetal microchimerism should have broken the internet by now.

It hasn’t.

When I read about a research I was so curious to know what’s actually happening.

Fetal cells — carrying the child’s own DNA — cross into the mother’s bloodstream during pregnancy and never fully leave. They embed into her organs. Her heart muscle. Her brain tissue.

Researchers have found a child’s living cells inside mothers in their 90s, from pregnancies six decades old. The child left the womb. The cells didn’t.

And they don’t just sit there. They migrate toward damage. Women with heart injuries show fetal cells concentrated at the wound site. Women with thyroid disease show their children’s cells inside the affected tissue.

The body that built the child gets tended to, in return, by the child’s own cells. Nobody designed this consciously. Evolution quietly built a repair system out of the mother-child bond itself.

The brain side of this is equally staggering. Pregnancy triggers gray matter reorganization — a structural rewiring that sharpens threat detection, deepens empathy, fundamentally alters how a mother processes the world. These changes persist for years after birth.

Possibly permanently. A mother’s nervous system doesn’t return to its factory settings. It was updated by the experience of carrying another person, and that update sticks.

The part worth sitting with longest — women who experienced pregnancy loss carry fetal cells too. The cellular merging doesn’t require a birth. It doesn’t require years of raising someone. Those cells remain regardless of what happened after. A mother grieving a child she never brought home is grieving someone biologically still present inside her. The world consistently underestimates that grief. The science says we have no business doing that.

Mothers always knew the connection didn’t end at birth.

Turns out it doesn’t end at the cellular level either.

[Morrigan 🇨🇦 @Raven_Gen_X]

@FSU_Canada @preta_6 @grok Is there a mechanism to enforce that Barry pay this fine? Is there a mechanism for him to appeal?

[Morrigan 🇨🇦 @Raven_Gen_X]

@wil_da_beast630 Your posts are rather fixated on this issue of late.

[Morrigan 🇨🇦 @Raven_Gen_X]

@wil_da_beast630 It is indeed a tribute, and incognito.

[LibertyJ @LibertyJen]

Good morning.
I can’t stop thinking about this.

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

A lesson for humanity. 🙌🙏🫶👇

[Morrigan 🇨🇦 @Raven_Gen_X]

@wil_da_beast630 @grok This comparison of muder rates and abortions is nonsensical and I hope disingenuous.

[Morrigan 🇨🇦 @Raven_Gen_X]

@wil_da_beast630 @grok @grok How many spontaneous abortions, that is miscarriages, occur every year in the US?

[Morrigan 🇨🇦 @Raven_Gen_X]

@wil_da_beast630 @grok @grok How many induced abortions occur in the first trimester?

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

Orleana Hawks Puckett (1844-1939), a legendary midwife in the Appalachian Mountains of southern Virginia, delivering over 1,000 babies in the region...

She buried twenty-four babies of her own, one small grave at a time, in the rocky soil of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Born around 1844 in North Carolina, Orlean Hawks Puckett married at 16 and built a hard, isolated life near Groundhog Mountain, Virginia. In 1862 she gave birth to her first child, Julia Ann, and for 7 months she knew joy—until diphtheria took her baby. Then it happened again. And again. Some babies lived hours. Some days. Some never breathed at all. None survived long enough to call her Mama.

In an era with no answers, no medicine, and no mercy, Orlean carried a grief most people would not survive. Today we believe Rh disease caused the losses, but she could only bury her children and keep going. And then, around age fifty, when a neighbor went into labor and no one else could help, Orlean stepped forward. In that moment, she turned unimaginable loss into purpose.

For the next 50 years, she walked miles through mountains and storms, never charging a penny, delivering babies in dirt-floor cabins with only her hands, her knowledge, and fierce determination. She delivered more than one thousand babies. She never lost a single mother. She never lost a single child.

The woman who lost everything made sure no other mother had to. That is not just survival. That is transformation. That is choosing love after devastation, again and again, for a lifetime.

Today, her story is often used to exemplify the strength and resilience of Appalachian women during 1800s and early 1900s. A cabin along Blue Ridge Parkway where she lived her final years honors her legacy. 

© Women In World History

#archaeohistories

[Zov @zoverions]

This is a classic example of how accurate data can be used to construct a misleading narrative.

To understand what is happening here, we need to apply the ARENA Protocol (Apprehend, Refine, Extract, Navigate, Advance). We must strip away the culture-war framing and look at the raw mechanics of how medical research is funded and categorized.

Here is the breakdown of why this graph exists, what it actually represents, and where the argument falls apart.

1. The "Invisible Majority" (The Denominator Problem)

The graph shows a discrepancy of roughly $2.5 billion (at its peak) between "Women’s Health" and "Men’s Health." This looks massive in isolation.

However, the total NIH budget for 2023 was roughly $47.5 billion.

The chart displays approximately $4.5 billion for women and $1.8 billion for men.

That leaves roughly $41 billion (over 85% of the budget) unaccounted for in this graph.

Most medical research—cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurology—is categorized as "general" because it affects both sexes. The graph isolates only the funding specifically tagged for sex-specific offices or conditions.

2. The Legacy of the "Male Default"

The tweet asks why there is an "Office for Research on Women's Health" but not one for men. The answer lies in the history of clinical trials.

For most of the 20th century, the "universal reference human" in medicine was a 70kg male.

Clinical Exclusion: Women of childbearing age were largely excluded from early-phase clinical trials until the 1990s (due to thalidomide fears and hormonal fluctuations complicating data).

Data Gaps: This meant we had decades of excellent data on how drugs affected men, and very little on how they affected women.

Correction, not Favoritism: The Office for Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) was established not to privilege women, but to fix a scientific error: the assumption that women are just "smaller men." The funding boost is a systemic patch to close a massive historical data gap.

3. The Biological "Tax"

From a purely systems-engineering perspective (System 2), female biology requires more distinct funding categories than male biology.

Reproductive Complexity: "Women's Health" funding encompasses menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause, and complex gynecological cancers (ovarian, cervical, uterine).

Pregnancy is Expensive: Research into maternal mortality, fetal development, and placental health falls under "Women's Health." There is no biological equivalent in men that requires this scale of specialized monitoring and care infrastructure.

Men's Health Categories: The "Men's Health" category is largely dominated by prostate and testicular cancer research. While critical, the scope is biologically narrower than the entire reproductive lifecycle of women.

4. Synthesizing the Argument (The Advance)

The tweet is correct that there is a funding gap in these specific labels, but the conclusion—"no one cares about men's health"—is a logic error.

The Reality for Men: Men do face a health crisis. They have lower life expectancies, higher suicide rates, and higher rates of occupational death. These are urgent issues.

The Misinterpretation: However, trying to prove bias by pointing at this specific graph is like complaining that the "Air Force" gets more money for airplanes than the "Army," ignoring that the Army spends billions on tanks.

The Bottom Line:

The gap in this graph doesn't represent "caring"; it represents biological complexity and historical correction. Women have more sex-specific biological machinery that requires funding to understand, and we are still playing catch-up from a century where the default medical patient was a man.

Prioritizing men's health—specifically regarding mental health and cardiovascular disease—is necessary, but pitting it against the funding required for pregnancy and women's cancer research creates a false zero-sum game.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This may be one of the best jobs in the world

[Michael Shindler @MichaelShindler]

Tracking a package is almost always more thrilling than receiving it. You should be able to order packages that take years to arrive and stop at a hundred or so municipalities along the way. Every mailman ought to write you a formal letter on scented stationary confirming receipt

[#WOMENSART @womensart1]

The women of Matobo, Zimbabwe paint their dwellings with intricate designs using charcoal, ash, water and soil, an annual ritual with continually changing imagery #WomensArt