Deeper and down: verbal hygiene for men via @wordspinster

Like every other feminist in recorded history, I sometimes get asked, ‘But what about the men? Why do you only write about the linguistic injustices suffered by women?’

The short answer is that we live in a world that treats men as the default humans, and that is reflected both in our use of language and in our public conversations about it. Of course men’s speech may attract negative judgments if they belong to a group that’s a perennial target for this kind of criticism (like ‘young people’ or ‘foreigners’ or ‘speakers with working-class accents’), but they are rarely targeted specifically because they’re men. We don’t, for instance, see men’s employers sending them on courses to learn to speak more like women. And when did you last read an opinion piece in a newspaper criticizing some irritating male ‘verbal tic’? …

Women diagnosed with cervical cell changes are being treated differently across the country by @SarahGraham7

No one wants to hear their smear test result has picked up abnormalities – but early detection and appropriate treatment can and does save lives by preventing cervical cancer from developing.

The latest report by the charity Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, ‘Not so simple,’ highlights the confusion and anxiety many women feel after receiving a diagnosis of cervical cell changes, and calls for greater consistency in the information and treatment pathways these women receive.

This is particularly the case when it comes to women diagnosed with CIN2 cell changes – a grey area in which there are discrepancies in the approaches used by doctors, according to Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust. …

Trauma via @LK_Pennington

I am a survivor of child sexual abuse. I was also a victim of emotional and psychological abuse as a teenager. As with many other survivors, my brain processed the trauma in the safest way it decided it could protect me. Which was the worst way possible as I developed depression and severe anxiety disorder trying to protect myself. …

Women Made Invisible Still Make Up Half Your Votes by @GappyTales

… The daughter of Labour party members, my own childhood during the 1980’s had rung with cries of Maggie Maggie Maggie! Out Out Out! Now as I put my cross in the box I had a real hope that things could be better: that a change of government might see me not having to live with the constant dread of another universal credit roll out, and that the local services for women I had seen decimated by lack of funding over the years might once again thrive. Just a few days after that election I would wake up to the devastation of Grenfell — an only too preventable disaster that hit like a thump to the gut, made, as it was, all the more deadly by an unforgivable scrimp on social housing by one of London’s richest councils. My Labour vote had never been one for Jeremy Corbyn, but for survival. …