"The Forgotten Black Woman Inventor Who Revolutionized Menstrual Pads"

"New ideas for inventions would wake her up from sleep. She occupied herself drawing up models and building them. While other children her age were drawing fanciful aeroplanes and sports cars, Kenner was making thoughtful plans for a convertible roof that would go over the folding rumble seat of a car, where back-seat passengers were usually exposed to the elements. When she saw water dripping off a closed umbrella and onto the door, she came up with a sponge tip that would go on the end and soak up the rainwater. She even drew up plans for a portable ashtray that would attach itself to a cigarette packet... 

By 1957 Kenner had saved enough money to her first ever patent: a belt for sanitary napkins. It was long before the advent of disposable pads, and women were still using cloth pads and rags during their period. Kenner proposed an adjustable belt with an inbuilt, moisture-proof napkin pocket, making it less likely that menstrual blood could leak and stain clothes.

“One day I was contacted by a company that expressed an interest in marketing my idea. I was so jubilant,” she said. “I saw houses, cars, and everything about to come my way.” A company rep drove to Kenner’s house in Washington to meet with their prospective client. “Sorry to say, when they found out I was black, their interest dropped. The representative went back to New York and informed me the company was no longer interested.”"

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mb5yap/mary-beatrice-davidson-kenner-sanitary-belt?utm_source=broadlyfbus

"What It Means When Childish Gambino Says ‘This Is America’"

"Created by guns, overflowing with guns, America had always been a sort of rhetorical weapon, its greatness a cudgel applied to recalcitrant people of color at home or abroad. What the Trump campaign and election signaled was an abolition of all alternative Americas, the permanent reduction of the nation to a weapon directed at people whose skin is not pale...

Jubilant black culture abounds not only in resistance to the lethal violence directed at its makers, but also in complicity with it: when Glover stages the murder of a black guitarist and a black church choir, it’s not a white policeman pulling the trigger, but Glover himself, and after each killing he resumes his dancing with the same livewire energy and his rapping with the same assured flow, as if nothing had happened. If black culture affirms itself, accurately, as a testament to its makers’ capacity for grace, invention, and vigor in the face of an inhuman social reality, Glover’s own affirmation contains a shadowy admission that such makers cultivate their own agony in the act of representation."

https://medium.com/vulture-magazine/what-it-means-when-childish-gambino-says-this-is-america-5721d139a171

"A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR A FAIR TRADE EMOTIONAL LABOR ECONOMY"

"your life as a working class or poor and/or sex working and/or disabled and/or Black or brown femme person has taught you that the only damn way you or anybody survives is by helping each other. No institutions exist to help us survive—we survive because of each other. Your life is maintained by a complex, non-monetary economy of shared, reciprocal care. You drop off some extra food; I listen to you when you’re freaking out. You share your car with me; I pick you up from the airport. We pass the same twenty dollars back and forth between each other, building movements and communities as we go. It’s maybe what hippies mean when they talk about the gift economy, it’s just a million times more working class, femme, Black and brown, and sick in bed...

The thing is, the working class and poor femmes, Black and brown femmes, sick and disabled femmes, parenting femmes and sex working and rural femmes I know hold it the fuck down. We organize miracles—from complex political actions to the life support work of making sure people are fed, don’t die, and don’t get evicted—on no sleep and low spoons and a quarter tank of gas. Our organizing skills in these departments are incredible, and often not respected as much as masculine leaders’, or indeed seen as skills. Far too often, the emotional labor we do isn’t seen as labor—it’s seen as air, that little thing you do on the side. Not real organizing, not real work, just talking about feelings and buying groceries. Not a real activist holding a big meeting stuff. Thanks, though! That was really helpful!"

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/modest-proposal-fair-trade-emotional-labor-economy/centered-disabled-femme-color-working

“Why Cities Boom While Towns Struggle”

“In the early stage of the information revolution, it was fashionable to argue that new technologies would eliminate distance. People could do creative work in rural Colorado and communicate their ideas anywhere on earth with the flick of a finger.

This thesis rested on an excessively individualistic understanding of creativity. In fact, remote exchanges of ideas are no substitute for the elemental human process of face-to-face communication. Innovators don’t do their work in isolation; they stimulate one another."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-cities-boom-while-towns-struggle-1520983492

"Pregnant Researchers Often Get No Lab Safety Guidance"

"Pregnant people in labs across the country get conflicting information, if they get any at all. There’s very little good research on the reproductive risks of many lab chemicals. And sometimes what individuals are advised to do could harm their career.

The problem is by no means confined to labs, of course. There is a dearth of research and data points on how all kinds of chemicals and drugs impact pregnant populations and fetuses generally. That’s in part because the ethics of experimenting on pregnant women are so fraught that it's difficult, if not impossible, to perform a large-scale controlled study on a pregnant population. This leaves tons of uncertainty about how various substances affect these people and fetal development...

First, figuring out when and how you want to disclose your pregnancy can be a struggle unto itself. The first trimester is generally thought to be the one with the highest risk—about 80 percent of miscarriages happen in the first trimester, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Hazardous chemicals are a concern throughout the pregnancy, but could have an outsized effect at the very beginning, precisely when many people don’t want to disclose that they're pregnant...

The professional risks are particularly high in labs that don’t have a culture that supports pregnancy. In fact, among the women I spoke with, the factor that most correlated with a positive experience was whether or not the head of the lab was understanding."

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evqevk/design-bias-pregnant-science-labs

FB: "The most common resource I was referred to by health and safety representatives at universities was a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health document from 1999 that cited just six things, including cancer treatment drugs and lead, in its table of “Chemical and physical agents that are reproductive hazards for women in the workplace.” Other universities link to California’s list of chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity, which comprises over a thousand entries but doesn’t indicate how much exposure is dangerous."

"The Subtle Sexism Of Your Open Plan Office"

"While some female employees felt like the new office space promoted equality, others had the opposite reaction. The researchers found that many women became hyper-aware of being constantly watched and their appearance constantly evaluated; multiple women told them that “there isn’t anywhere that you don’t feel watched.” Of the men Hirst interviewed, there was no evidence they felt similarly or changed their actions as a result of the lack of privacy... 

Some women would avoid visiting parts of the office where they weren’t expected: “You just don’t, do you? Right, this is going to sound extremely sexist but remember I do work with a lot of men,” a woman named Wendy told the researchers. “If you were a female, that would definitely get a comment from all the men because they would notice you.” For Wendy, the design of the office, despite the architects’ intention of promoting freedom of movement, actually inhibited it...

Fascinatingly, the study did not start out as an examination of gender specifically–it was meant as an examination of how workplace culture shifts when office design changes radically. It was only when Hirst, who conducted interviews on-site and spent a lot of time observing the workplace, began to feel pressure to dress in a more feminine way herself that she began to wonder about it."

https://www.fastcodesign.com/90170941/the-subtle-sexism-of-your-open-plan-office

"THE MYTH OF THE MALE GENIUS"

"genius is also an indelibly gendered currency used by men—almost always men—of means and success to purchase license. The lie of genius is inextricable from the lie of meritocracy: Culture dictates that these men have risen to fame and success because of their unstoppable genius. But now that so many geniuses stand accused of abuses of power including sexual assault and violence; and as debates about separating the art from the artist spill into every corner of media and pop culture, the aesthetic alibi that artistic genius exists unfettered by lowly considerations like morality may no longer hold up under scrutiny... 

Given that film, with its expansive casts and crews, is one of the most collaborative art forms ever to have existed, the myth of a singular genius seems exceptionally flawed to begin with. But beyond the history of directors like Terrence Malick, Woody Allen, and many more using their marketable auteur status as a “business model of reflexive adoration,” auteur worship both fosters and excuses a culture of toxic masculinity... 

Superlative women have always been encouraged to believe they are notable because of an inherent “difference” from other girls; this difference is what distinguishes them in creative fields dominated by white men"

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/myth-male-genius

FB: "It is not that passive consumers of art don’t recognize that their idols may be flawed: It’s that genius is imagined as a separate faculty that exists beyond ethics and morality. Genius is unemotional and objective, elevated beyond such paltry concerns. Of course the generous leaps of imagination and apologism offered to men of genius do not apply to women and gender-nonconforming creators, so if the latter should distinguish themselves, it is not because they are genius, but it is because they are “different.”"