health

There are a lot of simple ways to try and prevent toxins from being absorbed into your body. Everything from new clothes to drugstore make-up to regular deodorant carries toxins, and your skin, which happens to be the largest eliminating organ your body has, absorbs all that it comes in contact with. But fear not; much can be done to avoid these contacts (wearing organic materials or thrift clothes that have been washed numerous times, wearing natural or no make-up, using a deodorant crystal or another homemade product are a few examples). One of the simplest things you can do (if you don't already) is to stop using conventional menstruation products.

Today, new methods have replaced DeLee’s, and yet popular obstetric interventions (cesareans, amniotomies, labor-inducing drugs, episiotomies, epidurals) are still designed to transfer control from the woman to her labor assistant. 33% of births in the United States are by cesarean, a rate that has grown significantly during the previous decade, in tandem with increasing rates of maternal injury and death. Yet representations of childbirth in television and film rarely show cesareans. Which is why I was so grateful for Reagan’s recent childbirth episode on Up All Night.

To date, I’ve written 19 posts about representations of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care in the media. I’ve proffered examples from a variety of television series and films: Up All Night, The Office, True Grit, Glee, Knocked Up, Look Who’s Talking, The Rachel Zoe Project, Raising Hope, Modern Family, Parenthood, The Borgias, Dexter, Baby Boom, Life As We Know It, and Desperate Housewives. While a handful of these shows include women of color in title roles (none of the films do), only one of these women has children: Gaby Solis, a Latina character on Desperate Housewives.

This isn’t to say there aren’t any examples of pregnant/birthing/infant-caring women of color on TV, but it’s uncommon—and the scant representations that exist are usually rather limiting, to say the least.

During last week’s episode of Parenthood, Julia panicked because Zoe—the young woman carrying the baby Julia plans to adopt—is caught eating sushi. With tuna.

This commercial campaign leaves me conFUZEd. Read on for discussion of genderless fruit, fat-shaming and the marketing of rebellion.

Sexual Inadequacy refers to the poor representation of queer sexuality in the larger culture and in the media. Sexual Inadequacy is about the story straight writers and producers tell queer people about their own lives. Sexual Inadequacy is a comment on the amount of information queer students are given about their bodies and their sexuality, especially when these students are told absolutely nothing.

Here’s a reality check the next time someone wants to tell you about clean coal: They're still cleaning up the biggest fly ash spill in U.S. history that occurred in December 2008, which occurred at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant. A dam holding back tons of slurry burst in the middle of the night, dumping more than a billion gallons of coal ash slurry into Tennessee River tributaries. The sludge leveled entire communities with a four-foot-deep layer of coal ash slurry and killed off an unbelievable number of fish living in the rivers. The spill has been said to be one hundred times as large as the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.

A call for opinion and sharing from those who live vegan lifestyles.

A visit to two doctors - one female, one male - stirs up some interesting research on how women are changing the face of medicine.  Thank goodness.

One of the biggest gifts this year in the arena of 'sports/exercise' is the Wii Fit. It is billed as a game and an exercise space, only better, and it's virtually impossible to find. You can do everything from yoga to table balancing and apparently so many people are into it, a new affliction has been named for it (the Wii Knee:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/3854172/Doctors-fear-a-Wii-knee-epidemic.html).

Here is a clip of Wii Fit in its idealized form: