#1
Pregnancy/postpartum hormones range from nonexistent to 180* personality change. Much like with teenage hormones you don’t get to pick where you fall on that spectrum and you don’t even know it’s happened to you.
And pregnancy has lasting effects. Your rib cage, hips and feet may all get bigger. No amount of weight loss will change the size of your new bone spread.
Your ligaments may never be right again. They may stay loose permanently, which means acid reflux, urinary incontinence or inability to fully empty your bladder, your abs may never get back together leaving you with a permanent pooch and all the ligaments in your joints may stay loose so that joint injuries are more common and make it much more difficult to work out.
Your period may not be the same as before pregnancy. Your response to medication, specifically birth control, may not be the same.
You may develop incurable insomnia or at the very least the inability to sleep more than 5 consecutive hours at a time.
And my personal favorite. Your [privates] might fall out. That’s right guys, as many as one in five women have a prolapse due to childbirth.
Oh. And women aren’t born knowing how to parent. We learn on the job. We’re no better than you are so get out of bed and change some dirty diapers or comfort your crying child.
#2
While some people are naturally more social, attuned to other people’s wants and needs, and better at reading and perceiving emotions, your emotional intelligence can be improved with practice. In other words, with enough practice, you can learn to be more empathetic.
However, you can’t fake authentic concern for long. You genuinely have to care about other people and their problems, not just creating the appearance that you do.
In a nutshell, empathetic people are compassionate, good communicators, sensitive, great at reading others, have strong intuition, and you’d probably describe them as warm-hearted.
On the flip side, non-empathetic individuals have low emotional intelligence, are awful communicators, are insensitive, struggle to understand others, and have poor intuition. You’d likely call these people cold-hearted (though probably not to their faces).
#4
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#6
Imagine if you lived in a world where 50% of the population could physically subdue you and not by some thin margin either.
Add that to the predatory nature of a small percentage of that population.
Most won't be like that, of course, but you have to be HYPER aware of any hint or warning sign because your chances of survival could depend on it.
Knowing that within this population there are literally remorseless [criminals] who betray only very nuanced hints that they are as dangerous as they really are- your brain becomes hardwired for pattern recognition and you have to be consistently on the lookout.
Yea guys get mugged. Yes they get beat up and worse. I am not minimizing that experience.
But there is something so supremely vile about the knowledge that within the Male population there are literally people who HATE the fact that you are the sex that you are and see you as a lesser being and something to be controlled, punished and consumed.
You won’t become a highly emotionally intelligent and empathetic person overnight. Real behavioral change takes weeks, months, and years. But it’s worth it in the end. After all, you’ll have to interact with other human beings for the rest of your life. So, you might as well get good at fundamentally human behaviors like communication and reading others’ motivations, body language, emotions, etc.
If you think your empathy skills could use some work, there are a few specific things that you can do to improve. Verywell Mind suggests that you start by paying more attention to people’s nonverbal cues and body language. These details can give you a ton of information about how someone is feeling and what they might be thinking.
#7
However, toxic masculinity does not mean all men are toxic - both genders (or just all people) are flawed in different ways. Toxic masculinity is not a personal flaw but a systemic and cultural one.
#8
LesTroisChats:
I used to have cramps that were so painful I’d have to stop walking when they hit and breathe through them like labour pains. I’d be bed-bound 1-2 days per month with pain meds and my heating pad. My bleeding was so bad that my haemoglobin and hematocrits levels were half of what they should’ve been. I finally got a hysterectomy last year and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
#9
Another thing that you can do to ‘level up’ your empathy is to practice active listening. This is an area where many people could stand to improve! To put it bluntly, if all you’re doing in a conversation is waiting for your turn to talk about what matters to you, there’s room for improvement.
“Active listening involves fully focusing on what the other person is saying verbally and nonverbally. When actively listening, you should be trying to understand what the person is saying and how they feel, rather than just waiting for your turn to speak,” Verywell Mind explains.
Other behaviors to embrace for the sake of better empathy are things like actively trying to understand the other person’s perspective, motivations, and feelings. This means setting your ego and assumptions aside so that your biases don’t shape how you view the other person.
On top of that, it’s helpful if you express that you understand how the other person feels. That being said, don’t dismiss their experiences by instantly comparing their situation to what you or someone else has been through.
#11
#12
What are the biggest challenges that women face every day that you wish everyone knew about?
Realistically, what could be done to improve self-awareness and empathy, and reduce people’s knowledge blind spots, no matter their gender?
What are the biggest daily problems you have to deal with that you’d like everyone to know about?
Share your insights in the comments.
#14
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#16
Listen, acknowledge. We’re not making it up. We live this every day.
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#19
That nothing all that exciting is going on in the women's [bathroom]. Nobody is flashing their genitalia. Nobody is summoning demons in a magic circle. There are private stalls. People wash their hands, maybe touch up their makeup and hair, and [get out]. No one wants to be in there any longer than they have to.
The reason it seems like we take forever in there is that architects don't build enough women's stalls and because we have to remove more clothing. That's it.
#20
Some have light and easy periods without pain, other ones have to change their tampons every thirty minutes or otherwise they would spread an amount of blood every slaughterhouse would envy.
Some getting a lot of help from hormonal birthcontrol, others could be driven right into depression and absurd physical Problems,too.
Never EVER talk your girlfriends Problems down because "but my ex/sister/whoever never had that problem".