imaginebetterfutures - Tumblr blog

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I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

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Cliff Rowe - Woman Looking Through a Microscope (1966)

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Did you know that there are now TWO different competitive forms of cheerleading approved by the NCAA as "emerging sports" for women? If that seems... weird, it is!

I spent a lot of last year reporting out the kind of wild drama behind the rival groups trying to make their version of cheerleading a college sport. There is drama, there are feuds, there is a court case, there is a giant corporate monopoly, but there is also an underlying question of how to foster truly equitable opportunities in sports for women.

You can listen to part one here, and part two here.

Unfortunately, Wondery doesn't seem to provide transcripts of the show (which is bad practice for accessibility, but I don't work there so I can't force them to do... anything at all), but if you'd prefer to read a transcript I can probably generate one, just send me a note.

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Lewiston Evening Journal, Maine, February 3, 1917

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In general when someone says "why is nobody covering X" it's not actually true that nobody is covering it. But also now I often want to say: "because everybody who would have covered it got laid off."

The people who didn't get laid off (yet) are struggling in newsrooms that don't want to hear any kind of questions about "objectivity." Those reporters are struggling to go to work every day at a place that won't let their reporters to say anything "political" on social media. They're trying to grapple with working for publications that think it's their journalistic duty to "just ask questions" about whether trans people should exist or not.

The people who you want covering the stuff you're talking about (and who want to do the job) have been pushed out of the industry either by force, by economics, or by a million little cuts.

There's no law of nature that guarantees that good journalism exists. For many centuries it didn't. It could simply go away. And lord knows that the private equity firms that are buying up and slowly decimating media would love that future.

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Putting these on my list of things to try and make in the future.

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Abandoned Project: Old Ink For New Ink

Last year in the midst of waiting to hear back on whether I was going to get the funding to do the project that has now consumed my every waking hour, I came up with a fun little project. I never DID the project because of the aforementioned thing that now occupies all my time. But I thought others might find the idea fun:

My friend and I called it "Old Ink For New Ink" and it was basically an Instagram/Tumblr account that reposted cool old art that we think would make for good tattoos. This kind of exists in a few places but the key thing that we wanted to do to make ours different was to actually include a bunch of information about the history of the image, where it came from, the context of the time, that kind of thing.

We also thought about offering up basically an Ask box for the blog where we could find images for people or find information about images that other people found.

I still have a whole folder of these images. And I even built out an AirTable project with a little form for us to use to fill in info as we stumbled across images. Here are a few of my favorites:

L’oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers L’INFINI (The eye, like a strange balloon, mounts toward Infinity), 1882, by Odilon Redon, part of his À Edgar Poe series. (More on this image and others here.)

An illustration from a French book of fairy tales written by Sophie Ségur, illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett, published in 1920. (More here.)

“Death blowing bubbles,” 18th century plaster on the Holy Grave Chapel in Michaelsberg Abbey, Bamberg, Germany. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks this would make for a killer tattoo. (More on the abbey here, image via Lindsey Fitzharris.)

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I am officially a cited expert on the history of vaginal anatomy studies! Look mom! I did it!

Okay so here's the story. Way back in ye olde 2014 I was commissioned by The Sweethome (now Wirecutter) to review tampons. As part of my research for that review, I stumbled across some really fascinating old research on vaginal shapes. I wrote about that research for a group blog I used to be a part of, and about the weird little obsession I developed with some long lost research.

All I could really dig up was a set of studies done in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s by a woman named Paula Pendergrass. Pendergrass published a handful of studies about the shape of the vagina, which she measured by doing plaster casts of willing women. And what she described in her work was actually a set of different vagina shapes: the conical, the parallel sides, the heart, the pumpkin seed, and the least fortunately named slug.

But the thing that surprised me most was that after this one small set of studies by Pendergrass, that's it. There was nothing more. And it's not like Pendergrass had answered the question definitively, her work is full of ideas for how to better measure these shapes, and suggestions to collect more data. Why wasn't there anything else here? Why hadn't she continued this work? Why hadn't anybody asked more questions? I needed to know! So I managed to track her down and cold call her house in Arkansas (because journalists like me have no shame) to ask her why she stopped measuring vagina shapes.

Here's what I learned:

There’s no market for this data. Companies that manufacture vaginal products are looking only to confirm that things like tampons fit inside. They don’t care much about the specifics beyond that. But the big reason she highlighted was the one that made me both sad and angry. When she was doing the work, people were grossed out by it. “It’s off-putting to a lot of people, and I’ve had trouble with it since I started,” she said. “People who were embarrassed I was doing this, They said I was a a dirty old woman doing this.” A dirty old woman. For wanting to know the shape and size of the human vagina.

I wanted to chase this story further, but I could never sell it. In part because it's unclear if it matters clinically what the shape of someone's vaginal canal is. And yet... it's just so... INTERESTING!

But I let it go, after that blog post. (Well, that's not entirely true, I actually ordered a dental casting kit and had plans to cast my own vaginal canal using her study's instructions. But I never got around to it.)

FLASH FORWARD TO TODAY. And I get an email from a friend named Perrin Ireland who is apparently helping someone with a book about vaginas. Did I know that my blog was cited in a scientific journal, she asked? No! I DID NOT!!!

But here it is! Gender Bias in the Study of Genital Evolution: Females Continue to Receive Less Attention than Males, Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 62, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 533–541. The author, Dara Orbach, writes:

When Pendergrass et al. (1996) demonstrated that human females have differently shaped vaginas, their findings were “offputting”, Pendergrass reported being called “a dirty old woman”, and gynecologists did not recognize the value of the research (Evelith, 2016). While a national research center exists in theUnited States ofAmerica for most major organ systems (e.g., National Eye Institute), female reproductive anatomy is categorized under the umbrella of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The research environment and social taboos have historically and still continue to hinder scientific inquiry in the field of female genital evolution.

Is my name spelled incorrectly? Yes! Do I care? No!

But truly it's nice to know that even though I couldn't chase this story and really report it out fully, it seems to have made some dent on at least one person who is asking questions about why we don't know more about the internal anatomy of people with vaginas.

If you like this, you'll also enjoy reading the one about how I spent weeks trying to build a replica vaginal canal in my kitchen to test menstrual cups on.

[imaginebetterfutures]

hi. go buy esims for gaza. go preorder a kufiya from hirbawi. buy insulin for palestinian diabetics who need that help. if you live in the states use this to email your reps (this takes maybe 5 seconds to do). check out this massive list of resources where you can educate yourself in a meaningful and actionable way even if you don't have the financial means right now. from the river to the sea palestine will be free. 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

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The Salina Evening Journal, Kansas, May 18, 1909

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That's so cool! And they found a few of them, and they're now growing seedlings in greenhouses for eventual replanting!

Quercus tardifolia is a relic species leftover from when the climate was much cooler and wetter in the past, and can only really live in a few high-elevation spots in Texas. It's definitely still at risk of extinction due to increasing heat and drought caused by climate change, but the discovery means this species still has a chance.

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been too immersed in the research sauce of non-plant-related topics to post much but I HAVE been getting messages asking if I saw the newest reports of lichens in space and I am SO pleased to tell you all that various lichens have been going into the vacuum of space and surviving since like 2006. so not only did they go up there once recently and survive, but you can read about them going to space multiple times through the 2000s and 2010s for as long as a year at a time and consistently coming back down and being like ‘ohhh lmaoo that winter was chilly!! haha’. haven’t read the newest lichen lore drop in question yet but they DO do that like they’re just built different theres simply no other way to say it

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Everyone gives Sherlock Holmes a hard time about being mean about Watson's writing, but honestly imagine you told your roommate "sure, you can write up an account of my work for the newspaper," thinking it would be like, about the murder, but then he publishes it and it's 90% about you, as a person, and it's a huge hit and now everyone in London knows that you hoard newspapers and do cocoaine when you're depressed. Because I think you'd be little miffed too.

[imaginebetterfutures]

One weird thing about doing narrative reporting is that you wind up spending a lot of time with your subjects, during which you talk about a lot of things that have nothing to do with the story at hand. Which means that in a lot of cases, they tell you their weird, not great opinions about politics or trans people, or media, or whatever. And in a lot of cases you just have to kind of hum and change the subject rather than fight with them about it, because it has nothing to do with the subject you're reporting on and it's not worth fighting with them constantly because you need them to cooperate for the actual story you're telling.

Someone will probably read this and interpret it in the worst possible way, so I feel compelled to add that if someone says something genuinely and dangerously fucked up I do say something. But most of the time it's just generic bad opinions that I would fight someone on if we were, say, at a party or something. But we're not at a party. I'm following this person around for a story, and the story has nothing to do with their opinions about Trump whatsoever, and so it's just not worth the effort to make a stink about it.

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2023 Wins

I am very bad at celebrating personal successes (big and small). I tend to simply think “oh well, it’s not that big of a deal, on to the next” instead of letting myself be proud. To combat that, this year I started a tab in my master work/life AirTable to document wins. Here are some of them:

Was nominated for a Daytime Emmy.

Did not check my email on vacation! (This is a big deal for me.)

Quit my WIRED gig to make space for other work (art, fiction, etc).

Joined an art studio to have more space and tools to make things.

Dropped art history class that I wasn’t loving instead of struggling through it.

Got a new book agent who I love.

Squatted 200 lbs. Deadlifted 265 lbs.

Was a Finalist for a Third Coast Award for Welcome to Vanguard Estates.

Had a really successful writing retreat.

Sent my book agent the first 50 pages of my in progress novel.

Sold a huge project I have been pitching for five years!!! (Fuck now I have to do it.)

Learned how to blow glass.

Made some art I’m genuinely proud of.

Hit my “one year of powerlifting regularly” mark.

Got rid of a bunch of old clothes that no longer fit me because now I am swole, and only felt medium bad about it.

Wrote first draft of a short story that I'm genuinely excited about.

Got a another short story optioned for TV development. (If you're a Time Traveler Club member you can read the story!)

Learned how to forage seaweed and identify lichens.

Started volunteering at Creative Growth and learning ASL.

Got really involved in my union, and helped to write our AI Platform.

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This is my Thanos moment. I must have all these rings.

obsessed with whichever ancient roman was out there walking around with a ring with a fish and shrimp on it

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I do art/pottery as a hobby and I never sell anything because I'm trying my best to resist turning a hobby into a hustle.

However, in a brief descent into madness, I am selling some pots. They are not superbly made, most of them are not food safe, and they will definitely not come by Christmas. But I think they're pretty cool? There are only 15 of them and I probably won't ever do this again!

Most importantly: all proceeds go to the IFJ Safety Fund to support journalists working in Palestine.

You can buy one here.