They're Not Booing, They're Wooing

Let me open by saying I think Moira Donegan is a very good feminist thinker willing to apply academic rigor to the concept of "feminism" that has been sadly missing for, oh, decades now. Good talk. Anyway, Moira Donegan posted this today:

The woman in the screenshot is very obviously a grifter; Donegan went on to discuss the right-wing-adjacent or blatantly right-wing influencers grabbing left-ish women with pseudo-feminist woo nonsense. obviously I agree, but I'm interested in how often feminists shy away from why women are so ripe for fash-adjacent woo. Because this is recruitment, and it's very successful!

Personally, I happen to know what the 'luteal phase' of a menstrual cycle is because awhile back I was googling why I sometimes become insane and feel bad at certain times of the month that weren't right before my period. I encountered a lot of woo. Nearly every top search engine result about the menstrual cycle's impact on mood and behavior is either outright woo or woo-adjacent, and many of those, yes, are right-wing, overtly or covertly. The information I got was enough for me (its main impact on my behavior was taking melatonin so I don't get right-before-period insomnia as badly), but it's pretty easy to see how women might get sucked into this stuff while trying to solve their own legitimate problems, in addition to the time-honored 'fucking around online' pipeline to radicalization.

A few years ago there was a big twitter dust-up among the left-ish new media crowd and Porochista Khakpour, who in 2018 published a memoir, Sick, about her experience with chronic Lyme. The contention was that chronic Lyme doesn't exist, according to science, and thus Khakpour's memoir should not be published; people who seek help for chronic Lyme are targets for grifters and snake oil salesmen, and the disease itself is not real. Case closed. But of course this ignores the most salient fact of Khakpour and others' experiences: that they are sick, and that they need help. We saw repetition of this rhetoric in the early days of COVID with regards to "long COVID", and recreation of the grifter infrastructure for patients: take these supplements! See this specialist who will treat you with homeopathy! Etc. The biggest difference between the two is that COVID was a global pandemic, and money invested in researching post-viral illness left little doubt that some subset of people who get COVID will have long-term issues.

The liberal left has a long history of insisting we trust science. This is, overall, a very good rule of thumb. The point of science is that it stands under scrutiny, that its assertions are repeatable and testable, that it is, as best as we can determine, objectively correct. It is good to believe in objectivity. But what the liberal left often ignores is that science is also a process. What is known was not always known, what is certain was not always considered possible -- and may not be considered certain in 25 or 50 years. The investigations into chronic Lyme have concluded that chronic Lyme, defined as Lyme disease that persists in the body despite the sufferer never having had Lyme or no longer testing positive for Lyme, does not exist. That is a valuable contribution to science. It does not make any "chronic Lyme" sufferer well.

We are currently living through an era of woo feminism. The most obvious symptom of this is the mass rejection of hormonal birth control. Birth control proponents are aghast at this and rightly so: the pill and its descendants have been genuinely liberatory for millions of women. In this context it is entirely true to say that rhetoric encouraging rejection of birth control methods is right-wing misogyny sneaking in under the guise of "natural" feminism. However.

Side effects from hormonal birth control legitimately suck, dude. When I was on hormonal bc I had horrific issues with acne and depression and it didn't even fix my cramps. Doctors insert IUDs without adequate pain medication. IUDs, like pill-based hormonal birth control, can make you insaneo in the braino or simply profoundly lethargic. These tradeoffs are worth it for millions of people, and God knows people who have sex with men absolutely cannot count on them wrapping it up, but it is still true that there are tradeoffs, and furthermore that the tradeoffs are often downplayed or flat-out never communicated to patients. And this, too, is misogyny.

Awhile back I read a book about climate change and environmental pollution that mentioned breast size, painful menstruation, and early puberty in girls as consequences of severe pollution issues. It was an aside, but based on further googling, a true one. Now, cis women and girls obviously are not the only people impacted by endocrine disruptors and other environmental pollutants. But I found it striking, and terrifying, how mundane this statement was, how I skipped over it initially and only came back to it a few weeks later, when I realized what I had actually read. Half the population are functioning as canaries in a coalmine, and scientific institutions know it, and there is still a blatant paucity of research into the female reproductive system and its impact on the human body. Right-wingers absolutely love to bleat about "low sperm count", but anyone who menstruates, most of them women and girls, are experiencing life-altering (and often life-derailing) symptoms that we are often not even taught to recognize or treat.

I would like to see feminists actually reckon with the ways science, particularly medical science, ignores or even suppresses medical concerns that primarily impact women. It is not liberatory to be lied to; it is not equality for your menstrual and metabolic health to be treated as a pitiful second thought. I should not have been 30 before I learned that it is common for sleep hormones to drop precipitously right before menstruation. I should not have been 20 before learning what ovulation is^[1].

If we actually want to stop grifters from radicalizing women with half-baked woo, we need to be serious about the failures of medical misogyny. We cannot prevent women from being stupid and on TikTok. We can prevent women from turning to TikTok for medical advice because actual doctors have no idea what's going on in there. Thanks!!!!!!!!!