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All five Spice Girls dancing ‘Stop’ at Victoria’s Beckham 50th Birthday Party! Iconic! 🤩

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Hormones and their Interaction with the Pain Experience (Katy Vincent and Irene Tracey, 2008)

"One of the most striking physiological differences between men and women is in sex steroid hormones, both the absolute levels and the occurrence of cyclical fluctuations in women.

These hormones are known to be responsible for the embryological development of a male or female phenotype and for successful reproductive function after puberty.

More recently, observations such as the marked differences in pain symptoms between males and females in the period between puberty and the menopause, and the cyclical variations in many clinical pain symptoms in women have suggested that they may also have a role in altering the pain experience. (…)

With the onset of regular ovulation and menstruation, it can be seen that a number of clinical pain conditions show variation in symptom severity across the menstrual cycle.

Clearly the pain of dysmenorrhoea is, by definition, associated with the menstrual cycle, however, the symptoms of temperomandibular joint (TMJ) dysfunction, fibromyalgia, Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Interstitial Cystitis (IC) and migraine can also show cyclical variation.

The greatest reports of pain symptoms appear to occur at times of low or rapidly falling estrogen levels and the use of the combined oral contraceptive pill (COCP) to give a more constant hormonal level can improve these symptoms. (…)

From puberty onwards, men have significantly higher levels of testosterone and its metabolites than women.

Testosterone appears to have an analgesic effect protecting against the development of painful conditions such as TMJ pain.

Rheumatoid arthritis patients (both male and female) have been shown to have lower androgen levels than sex-matched controls, and androgen administration improves their symptoms, whilst female workers with lower testosterone levels have more work-related neck and shoulder injuries.

However, investigation of the specific effects of testosterone are complicated by the fact that much is metabolised in vivo to estradiol by aromatase, and this is therefore an issue which needs to be addressed in future studies.

Perhaps one of the more intriguing studies to be published recently explored the effect of systemic hormone administration to both male to female (MtF) and female to male (FtM) transsexuals (n=73) during the process of sex reassignment.

They observed that approximately one third of the MtF subjects developed chronic pain during their treatment with estrogen and androgens, and even those that did not, reported a decreased tolerance to painful events and an enhanced sensitivity to thermal stimuli (both warm and cold).

Of those FtM subjects who had chronic pain before the start of treatment, more than half improved after commencing testosterone treatment, reporting reduced numbers of painful episodes and shorter lengths of those that did occur.

Clearly, psychological effects cannot be ignored in this group of subjects, however, this is the only situation where the hormonal milieu in humans can be ethically altered to that of the opposite gender and therefore gives us interesting insights. (…)

In addition to its sensory aspect, pain is an emotional experience.

It is therefore of interest that the life time patterns in pain symptoms in men and women are closely mirrored by those of mood disorders, though with the addition of a perimenopausal peak in mood disorders.

Comparing post-puberty with pre-puberty, rates of significant depression increased two-fold for boys but more than four-fold for girls.

In Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMD), there is no evidence that abnormal levels of hormones occur (unlike in depression associated with thyroid or pituitary dysfunction), rather, it appears that some women are more sensitive to the mood destabilising effects of these hormones.

It is not inconceivable therefore, that a similar situation may exist for pain."

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Ripley 1x07

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thanks to everyone who picked up a painting or print from store.jacobvanloon.com. check the store for available selections.

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The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence (Gavin de Becker, 2000)

"We all know how to respect intuition, though often not our own.

For example, people tend to invest all kinds of intuitive ability in dogs, a fact I was reminded of recently when a friend told me this story:

“Ginger had a really bad reaction to our new building contractor; she even growled at him. She seemed to sense that he isn’t trustworthy, so I’m going to get some bids from other people.”

“That must be it,” I joked with her, “the dog feels you should get another general contractor because this one’s not honest.”

“The irony,” I explained, “is that it’s far more likely Ginger is reacting to your signals than that you are reacting to hers.

Ginger is an expert at reading you, and you are the expert at reading other people. (…)

Ginger does sense and react to fear in humans because she knows instinctively that a frightened person (or animal) is more likely to be dangerous, but she has nothing you don’t have.

The problem, in fact, is that extra something you have that a dog doesn’t: it is judgment, and that’s what gets in the way of your perception and intuition.

With judgment comes the ability to disregard your own intuition unless you can explain it logically, the eagerness to judge and convict your own feelings, rather than honor them.

Ginger is not distracted by the way things could be, used to be, or should be. She perceives only what is.

Our reliance on the intuition of a dog is often a way to find permission to have an opinion we might otherwise be forced to call (God forbid) unsubstantiated."

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She is the best ♥️

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Jean-Michel Folon - Lily, Love Me (serigraph, 1974).

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saw a big bird (left) attack a little bird (right)

both were on the ground, with big bird on top of little bird, seemingly stabbing it with its beak like a Roman senator on the ides of March

murder? on a Sunday? I clapped to scare big bird away

little bird was left on the ground, not moving, but not exactly chilling either, I assumed

I walked up to see if it was dead — it wasn't but it couldn't move, clearly gravely injured

when I approached it looked me straight in the eye and made tiny noises and I was like jesus fucking christ birdy don't break my heart like that what the fuck come on now

I pondered whether I should give it the coup de grâce to stop its suffering but couldn't possibly bring myself to do that because I'm not a total fucking psycho like that big bird seemed to be

so I left it to its fate

3 minutes later I saw a cat roaming around

it looked exactly like that:

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Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity (Peggy Orenstein, 2020)

"All that said, African American boys have been found to have an easier time than girls integrating socially into largely white schools.

Both sexes are stereotyped by their peers, but the guys are admired, considered “cool,” “athletic,” “street smart”—like a hip-hop star fallen to earth—while the girls are labeled as “loud,” “aggressive,” or “ghetto.”

In Xavier’s school, white girls had been only too happy the previous year to attend prom with black male classmates, but few girls of color were asked by boys of any ethnicity.

“Which it shouldn’t be, but that just shows how everything is,” he said.

The black girls weren’t typically invited to white classmates’ parties, either, whereas hosting the guys conferred instant street cred.

“We have the coolest music, the coolest dialect,” Xavier said.

“Black culture basically is the culture, and that’s the ideal of what a lot of white males want to be. And I guess I’m the closest they’re going to get to that.” (…)

Guys like Xavier and Aidan, who grew up in some of the poorest neighborhoods of their city, are both advantaged and constrained by the image projected onto them.

“You have to be careful,” Xavier said.

“People will treat you like you’re the coolest guy in the room and everything, but they’ll also think you’re the dumbest person in the room.

So down the line, it won’t really help you unless you show a different side of yourself. You basically always have to prove yourself.”

Xavier hadn’t been to a party since his sophomore year. “The idea of drinking in a situation where there’s fifty drunk white people . . .”

He shook his head. “I don’t feel comfortable at all.” (…)

Those gender gaps play out in intermarriage rates as well: over a third of Asian American women outmarry as opposed to about a fifth of Asian American men; among African Americans, again, the reverse is true, with black men marrying people of other races at fully twice the rate of black women."

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Vampire Weekend — Connect

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St. Paul's Cathedral, London (by George Ciobra)

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every scene in this movie is like a punch in the gut bc my fucking jaw

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‘I was only a child’: Greenlandic women tell of trauma of forced contraception (Miranda Bryant, The Guardian, March 29 2024)

"Hedvig Frederiksen had been at her new school in Paamiut, Greenland, for only a couple of days when she was summoned from her dorm to the local hospital by a Danish caretaker.

She was 14 and had no idea what was going on.

“But back then [1974], when a Danish person said something, their word was law, you had to listen to them,” said Frederiksen, speaking from her home in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital.

About a dozen girls went to the hospital, some as young as 13.

One by one they went into the doctor’s room and one by one they came out crying. Frederiksen was terrified but felt compelled to stay put.

Her daughter Aviaja Fontain told the story as Frederiksen quietly wept.

“When she came in [to the doctor’s room], her memory just disappears and she thinks it’s because of the trauma, what happened in there.

Her friend from the same dorm said the doctor didn’t have a helper; he was alone putting spirals [contraceptive coils] inside girls.”

Frederiksen, now 63, is one of 143 Greenlandic women who this month announced they were suing the Danish state, demanding a collective payment of close to 43m Danish kroner (£4.9m) for what they describe as a violation of their human rights.

They accuse Danish doctors of fitting girls as young as 12 with intrauterine devices (IUDs) in an attempt to reduce the population of the former colony, now an autonomous Danish territory.

It is believed that 4,500 women and girls were affected between 1966 and 1970, with many more procedures carried out without consent in subsequent decades, but it has taken a long time for the reports to surface – and to be taken seriously. (…)

After a visit last year, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, Francisco Calí Tzay, highlighted the scandal as a particularly disturbing element of Denmark’s colonial legacy, condemning the structural and systemic racial discrimination inflicted on Greenland’s Inuit people and its ongoing repercussions.

“Despite significant progress, the Inuit people still face barriers to fully enjoying their human rights in both Denmark and Greenland,” Calí Tzay said, adding that he was “particularly appalled” by the testimonies of women forcibly fitted with IUDs.

Greenland ceased being a Danish colony in 1953, although it did not have its own government and parliament until 1979.

Healthcare and living conditions improved, life expectancy increased and the Greenlandic population grew.

It was then that the Danish authorities are believed to have staged their drastic intervention.

The programme of involuntary birth control would go on to halve the birthrate within a few years. (…)

She remembers the cold tools he used to insert the IUD, the shock she felt and “tremendous pain”.

She said he told her that the reason it was being fitted was “so I shouldn’t get pregnant”. “I was only a child,” she said.

“I was only 14. And when I was back at the dorm I cried in the evening because I couldn’t talk with my parents and I hadn’t given any consent, nor did my parents.”

Contraceptive coils are now a safe and highly effective form of birth control.

But Larsen, like many of the women who have come forward since the 60s and 70s, went on to experience serious reproductive difficulties – a consequence, they say, of being forcibly fitted, with no consent or information, with unsophisticated devices that were often too big for their young bodies, bringing with them additional risk of infection.

For Larsen, that experience felt like an assault. She was in so much pain that “afterwards I felt like I had shattered glass in my abdomen”.

Later, after she got married and tried to get pregnant, she found that she could not.

Years later when she was examined at a hospital, they found her fallopian tubes were closed because of the coil, which had caused severe bleeding and left her sterile. (…)

After being fitted with the coil, Frederiksen remembers, she was in a huge amount of pain.

All the girls walked back to their dorms crying and feeling ashamed, she said, and they started getting extremely painful periods.

The coil remained inside her for eight or nine years because the doctor did not tell her when it should be removed.

After having it taken out she became pregnant with Aviaja, but the next time she became pregnant her fallopian tube ruptured and she lost a lot of blood.

Her lawyer has said this is a common side-effect in women who were forcibly fitted with coils. Many years later, Frederiksen had two more children.

While she is happy about the legal case and the support they have received, she is filled with anger and sadness when looking back on what she endured as such a young child.

“If that had not happened to me, I wouldn’t be as shy and ashamed for many years,” she said. “And if that had not happened, my life could have been very different.”"

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Borgen 4x08

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every time my father talks about politics and shits on green and socialist policies

he has this tone and attitude that suggest that he believes me to be on his side

like he's not expecting me to disagree, he's expecting me to nod and go "yeah fuck those vegan morons"

he seems to be unaware that I'm a leftist/green myself and that I've been voting for those parties for 15 years

and so every time this happens, and it happens a lot, I think of Pablo Escobar:

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in French we have a formal you ("vous") and an informal you ("tu")

the general rule is that you say "vous" to random adults you don't know and "tu" to children and friends/family

you know where I'm going with this but I'm going to tell the story anyway

so I was at grocery store, buying groceries, with a cart, like an adult

then at the exit there was this guy dressed in orange who was giving away tiny cans of Fanta Zero for promotional purposes

so I go to him because I love a free tiny can

right ahead of me is this other client, a 60-something woman who also wants the tiny can

the orange man says to her: "vous voulez une cannette de Fanta sans sucre" and "je vous l'ouvre?" — "vous", the formal you used for random adults

then I go up to him and he says: "tu veux une cannette aussi?" and "je te l'ouvre?" — "tu", the informal you used for children

sir I am buying garbage bags and vegetables, surely I am an adult

second time this week that men call me "mademoiselle" (miss) despite being old enough to be a divorced mother of three

gen z banging at my door to beg for my skincare routine

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Alex Garland's filmography: fucked up movies with great female protagonists

....and we love that about him