Thread by @Asher_Wolf

Thinking a lot this today about how social media as a platform for enacting social change can effect the status of women, public perception of issues women face throughout their lives and gendered quality of life

Can we assume an average age and date of joining of the first generation of women on social media? A median socio-economic profile? How does that then effect the women's issues that capture public attention?

Extrapolate to the conversations and movements of recent times, based on demographics of user bases

The pushback against online abuse, #MeToo, #Repeal8th has been wonderful, lead by youthful faces coming into strength

But there is less well-heard activism around child-care, unpaid domestic work, menopause, women's health access in terms of online activism, older women's homelessness due to discriminatory economic conditions throughout their lives

I wonder to the degree that the feminist online action we hear is shaped by privilege - and the experiences that are muted occurs because of digital divide and gendered access to influence online

I want to hear the roaring voices of women facing shitty access to healthcare, lack of support for menopause, who can't afford childcare, who can't afford housing, who get paid 70 cents in the dollar, who get tossed to the scrapheap at middle age

Growing up, no one told us of the nightmares we'd face as women: bleeding each month, discrimination at work, endometriosis, period pains, mastitis, ripped perineums, PND, sexual assaults, peri-menopause, unpaid domestic work, lack of access to control over our bodies and lives

Now because of social media we're hearing part of the story, but not all of it, and I wonder if it'll take my entire generation or two screaming their realities *as they experience it*, talking for the first time about all the taboo, to spark movement and movement and movement

We've barely even begun to hear of the medical horrors inflicted on women: vaginal meshes causing atrophy, bone density loss and heart arrhythmia's due to unaddressed menopause, the gendered imbalance of effects of pain medications and anti-depressants,

Women whose PDD pain is rammed into psych diagnosis because drug companies can make a buck that way

The under-diagnosis of women with autism, ADHD, because test subjects are far too often male

The generation after generation of women who hair fell out and who woke again and again in the night wracked with pain and doctors would wrack it up to anxiety and offer SSRIs rather than treating (peri)menopause

The women with CSS, CFS, PCOS and fibromyalgia who are simply told to exercise more while they clutch at metaphoric spoons, living lives doled out in piecemeal rations

We're told not to discuss our pregnancies til 3 months in, the voices of women who wake to miscarriage after miscarriage erased

All the taboos used to gaslight women for common life experiences must be smashed

If you're a woman bouncing along, earning a great wage, no harassment or discrimination, with easy access to contraception, abortion and healthcare, superannuation funded - great. Speak up for the sake of everyone else, for your future self who may not be so lucky

The thing is, most women don't know what's coming for them, because even discussions of these issues are taboo, women who experience these issues are discriminated again, the disappear from the narrative or only appear as a warning

And we're even less likely to hear the voices of women who face the worst effects, who can't afford access to healthcare, or internet, or quality nutrition or education

We don't talk barely ever about how lack of women's healthcare specifically fucks Indigenous and remote women's lives extra hard, we don't talk enough about the impact of lack of access and cost of scans and costs of medications or common supplements not funded by the PBS

I've spent too long in huge queues for women's bathrooms because of discriminatory design to not understand access is structurally poorly facilitated for even the most basic needs of women

Oh and since I'm currently at the pharmacist, can we also talk about the cost of peri-menopause supplements? $40 p/month, not on PBS. Tell me again about the tampon tax tho?