Feminist Friday 3.6

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~TIAW on Tumblr, Pinterest and Facebook.
~SOAM on Twitter and Facebook.
~Participate here on SOAM.

Around the Web:
~41 Awesome Euphemisms for Vagina. Because it’s important to know the correct anatomy, but it’s nice to be comfortable enough with your ladyjunk that you have a less formal relationship with them. (Speaking of anatomy – if you want a good guide to all your various bits – collectively known as a vulva, not a vagina – this is a great diagram.)
~This is cool. Kinda. I mean, on the one hand I think it’s awesome that people are realizing that gray hair is just as lovely as any other kind of hair – it helps end the stigma of growing older. But in reality I’m sure this is a passing trend so this article is also a very good reminder that different styles (and ages!) of the female body go in and out of fashion and that’s just stupid. A body is a body. All are lovely, none can go out of style in my opinion.
~8 Hijab-Wearing Women Cooler than Abercrombie and Fitch. I love this so hard.
~Kelly Clarkson is gorgeous. End of story.

See something that belongs in the Feminist Fridays? send it to me either at my email address (theshapeofamother@gmail.com) or over on the Facebook page.

Feminist Friday 2.27

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~TIAW on Tumblr, Pinterest and Facebook.
~SOAM on Twitter and Facebook.
~Participate here on SOAM.

Around the Web:

~An important post about health and size from the fat acceptance movement’s point of view.
~Great post on what not to wear after age 50. Frankly, I’d like to apply this to all women who have an age – every age.
~Eight things some asshole will bring up in every fight about sexism. But you know what else? This is also a really, really good list of ways any manipulator will try to trick you into believing them or at the very least, shutting the fuck up. Check out this old post on gaslighting over at TIAW for more on that. It’s important to women, it’s important to humanity.

See something that belongs in the Feminist Fridays? send it to me either at my email address (theshapeofamother@gmail.com) or over on the Facebook page.

Possible Issue with Submissions – Have you shared your story?

It’s come to my attention that some submissions are not getting through my email and I don’t know how often this is happening. Any time you submit a story, you should ALWAYS get an automatic response telling you that it was received. If you don’t get this, that means I haven’t gotten your email. And I post nearly every story I receive (only stories that are wildly inappropriate don’t get posted and I think I’ve had like two or three ever) so don’t assume that I’ve decided not to post yours. I firmly believe that every woman should be able to share her experience.

So I’m asking here, have you submitted your story and not hear back at all? Let me know here so I can try to sort this out if, in fact, it is a bigger issue.

The page with more info on participating in SOAM is here and to the right in the sidebar.

Where can you find SOAM online?

A quick roundup of the social networks SOAM and it’s sister-site (the now defunct, yet still active on social networks) TIAW. Come join us!

The Shape of a Mother on Twitter.
The Shape of a Mother on Instagram.
The Shape of a Mother on Facebook.
This is a Woman on Facebook.
This is a Woman on Pinterest.
This is a Woman on Tumblr.
This is a Woman content on my personal blog, Zebrabelly.

SOAM is, obviously, a site aimed at mothers. Because the focus is body image, which is a feminist issue, the sites (and their various presences online) sometimes overlap in their content. So while you might see some images of postpartum moms on my TIAW Tumblr, you might also find links to feminist news stores and blog posts on SOAM’s Twitter.

I have *just* started an Instagram for SOAM and I’m not at all sure how that will go. But I figured I’d give it a shot! Tag your pics with #theshapeofamother and I might share them on Instagram, here at SOAM, or one of the web spaces listed above!

Hope to see you guys around the web!

Net Neutrality

This is really important, you guys. Net Neutrality (meaning, if you don’t know, the freedom of the internet to be available to all people at no extra cost) is back in the news this week. And no one really seems to be talking about that. Which is extremely upsetting. We’ve been fighting to keep the internet neutral for years and years – maybe since it really became a big enough deal that the big companies wanted to regulate it. But now they technically can. Your internet service provider can block certain websites or charge more for others. They can charge the people who run websites extra to make their websites run as fast as they could, as they currently do. This means, among other things, that small websites like this one could die. I don’t want to see SOAM die. I’ve seen it do too much good in the world.

Right now, you can go sign a petition at The White House’s website. Here it is. Tell the government that information shouldn’t cost anything. Tell them to end this and keep net neutrality safe. And then pass this on to everyone you know, okay?

Your Mission This Year, if You Should Choose to Accept It

It’s the time of the year where I usually try to write a post encouraging you to commit to loving your body this year. And I do want you to commit to that this year. Make 2014 be the year you find peace in beauty in who you are inside and out. Because you are beautiful.

But the thing I want to focus on this New Year post is listening and speaking mindfully here at SOAM and in your whole lives.

SOAM has always been a website that elicits emotion and sometimes controversy. Most of these debates are nothing new to SOAM, but I feel like the deeper issue is how we respond to thoughts and entries. This is true in all of womanhood, actually, not just pregnancy and birth, but also in motherhood, and in our careers, and in our friendships.

For example, (and I use this example not to pick on any one kind of entry but because this is the sort of entry that causes the quickest and hottest debates) every so often an entry will come around which is written by a mother whose body did not dramatically change, and whose body is conventionally beautiful. She will explain what she did to “get her body back” and she will encourage women to keep working hard with the probably-unintentional suggestion that hard work is all it takes. And I want to make it clear here that I think these women are awesome not only for their hard work, but also for their honest desire to inspire their fellow women. Those are both admirable and beautiful things.

The problem is not either of those things, but the act of forgetting that every woman is different and has a different life. Some women do all of the same suggested actions during their pregnancies and after and their bodies respond differently. To these women, reading that “just working hard” should give them a conventionally beautiful body erases their legitimate reality that it actually has not done so for them. Because there is so much that goes into how our bodies function. A complex combination of genetics and environmental factors that even scientists do not fully understand yet come together to create what we look like and who we are. We cannot forget that each of us are vastly different from each other.

And then there are the women who physically can’t do the same things due to health or physical limitations. Or due to time constraints or lack of support in general. And there are women who have other priorities. And there are women who just don’t want to try to have a particular body shape. And all of these women’s stories are just as valid and important. And all of these women deserve to be treated like a human, and all of these women are beautiful no matter what.

Those entries which are intended to be inspirational, but which wind up causing controversy instead, usually do so because we forget to listen to each other and we forget to speak carefully. You may notice that I am very careful in how I word things. I use phrases like “conventionally beautiful” because I know that many types of bodies are beautiful, not just the kinds we see most often in magazines. I never imply that a woman’s goal is to get her body “back” because bodies change all through life and motherhood is but one of those times. I try to avoid phrases that make people feel sensitive. And then I listen to what they have to say without feeling defensive about it. Honestly, it’s that kind of listening that has caused more personal growth in me than any one other thing.

The vast majority of SOAM is without a doubt very clearly supportive. We are an amazing community and a really unique one for lack of trolls in an online environment. I mean, I do approve every comment to help keep this place as loving as it is, but I so rarely have to delete any that most of that honor is on you guys just for being super awesome in general. And I love you guys for that. The only thing that I think could make SOAM a better place is if we all work hard to listen to each other and take care to find the right words when we are communicating.

Let’s make this a year where we focus on communication here at SOAM and in our lives. I may be biased, but I honestly thing the people here at SOAM are some of the best people online and I think it could be a beautiful thing to make this community even stronger by listening with open hearts.

Happy New Year you beautiful mamas!

Update

For those of you who don’t follow me at zebrabelly.com, you might not know I’ve gone back to school. For reasons that are complicated and boring to you, I wound up taking a pretty intense second half of my semester. During that time I’ve also been dealing with a crapton of stuff that life keeps throwing at me. Long story short I’ve not been posting here as much as I should have been. But the semester is over and I have a nice long break which I hope to use to reorganize my life (whoa that sounds more intense than I meant it, heh). So I’m back here posting entries beginning today. EXCEPT that I seem to have run out of space for hosting more photos so while I get that sorted with my web host there will be another little delay. But I’ll be back again very soon with more entries from moms. Have you submitted yet? Here’s the link if you are interested!