Everyone loves to talk about Norwegian welfare as the pinnacle of social policy while conveniently forgetting that it’s a tiny country of 5.5 million people backed by a trillion dollars of oil money from the state.

Edit: I love how everyone glosses over the population size as if it has nothing to do with policy making and the politically stagnant environment of the US.

The same top doctors and scientists responsible for perpetuating systemic biases in modern medicine against women and POC?

The same top doctors and scientists responsible for diagnosing 16x more boys than girls with ADHD because of antiquated diagnostic criteria that were solely based on white teenage boys?

The same top doctors and scientists who treat every woman with abdominal pain as a drama queen while they suffer from ruptured appendices and endometriosis?

The same top doctors and scientists who treat chronically ill patients as drug seeking hypochondriacs instead as people who have been failed by a medical system that does not treat them as reliable witnesses to their own bodies?

There’s a certain kind of privilege to be able to hold such confidence in the medical system without having to worry about medical gaslighting and abuse, and then use it to ridicule people who have been subjected to mistreatment.

Make no mistake, I’m pro-vaccination and pro-science. But scientists and doctors are human with human biases, and it is reflected in the quality of care received by people who are the subject of implicit and explicit biases.

Meanwhile: girls with inattentive ADHD sitting dead at the bottom of a pool meme

AI slop. Get this shit out of here.

Chronic illness be like

We don’t have to romanticize the present either.

People still work 10-12 hours a week except they still have to buy their own groceries, cook food, clean the house, take care of their kids, and every other logistic that goes into housework. The idea that people always worked more and had less leisurely time in the past is one often used to downplay the impact of unpaid female domestic labor in the past to justify to expecting it of every person in the present.

Moreover, preindustrial workers only worked 1440 hours annually compared to the modern standard of 2080 hours. And that does not even include unpaid domestic labor.

Yes, it’s great to have all the social advances and modern comforts that we do. But humans are not machines where by indefinitely increase our quality of life we can expect an indefinite increase in hours worked. Just because we have smartphones, AC, cars, and whatever modern luxury you want to include, it doesn’t mean that suddenly we can work 12 hours a day every day and mentally stay sane.

Tell me then, where do we turn to when doctors, one of the most trusted professions in society, are silently killing us?

Where do we turn to when every woman with serious abdominal pain gets turn away because they cannot be trusted to know what their own period feels like, only to later die from endometrial cancer or peritonitis?

Girls are 16 times less likely to be diagnosed than boys. Where do we go and get an ADHD diagnosis before the suicidal thoughts set in? What the fuck are the rest of us supposed to do if doctors take one look and conclude that she ‘just wants attention’?

The idea that people before us lived worse lives is one often used to obscure the clinical nature of standards we attribute to quality of life such as lifespan, infant mortality, food security, and housing. This is because it allows corporations to trivialize the impact of doubling the workload by normalizing the 40 hour work week and housework and child care, what used to be two people’s worth of work, into one.

Are we living ‘better’ lives? On paper, sure. Are we living happier lives? That’s hard to say.

The vast majority of self-diagnosed people are women and POC because they have historically been underserved and dismissed due to standards of ADHD care being exclusively modeled on boys from decades ago and systemic inequality in modern medicine leading to poorer outcomes in non-cis white males.

The ‘everyone has ADHD these days’ sentiment comes from the gatekeeping of ADHD behaviors to male stereotypes in media. Because girls are socialized differently and given less leniency for presenting the same behaviors, they are forced to mask better by internalizing their symptoms into depression and other mental health issues later on in life.

This kind of is no more than social media backlash against women coming out speaking about their experiences with systemic inequality in medicine, only to be told that this is all a social media fad in their heads. Speaking as someone who had to needlessly suffer for 3 decades before finding a (female) doctor who gave a damn about it. When I finally got medicated, I just broke down and cried. Out of relief from finding out what living with executive function and peace on my own was like, and out of bitterness that this was withheld from me and many more women out there.

So don’t ever tell self-diagnosed people they don’t know how their own body works. I’m sick and tired of hearing this argument from people who haven’t been medically gaslit to no end by doctors who don’t treat their patients like reliable witnesses to their body. This goes so much further than ADHD. I have had other severe misdiagnoses that put my life at risk because of doctors’ egos who would rather get you killed than admit they’re wrong for dismissing your symptoms.

Girl boring guy quirky.

^Invisible disability sufferers when people say ‘but you don’t look disabled’

I’ll take a dog over a kid screeching in a store.

This says more about how women are socially pressured to wear make up, dress well, wax, and de-age themselves or risk being labeled as ‘unwomanly’ or become irrelevant.

How many men do you know feel pressured to put the same effort into their appearances as the average woman does?

And don’t tell me how working out counts. One, there are zero health benefits to putting on make up. Two, women are incessantly reminded about losing weight rather than just be healthy whether it’s from the media, advertisements, or just people using ‘fat’ as an insult especially for middle aged women.

How often do you hear old women being complimented on their appearances compared to old men? Forget about appearances, how often are they relevant in conversations? Invisible Woman Syndrome is almost like a super power.

Fun fact: women spend more time refuting casually sexist claims than men spend making them.

Make the term ‘man’ gender neutral and make ‘maleman’ the new word for male humans. Then we can have ‘mailmaleman’.

Can we not gaslight and invalidate people for asking for less cancer inducing food?

When people say ‘processed’ or ‘chemicals’ colloquially, they mean excessive nitrates and nitrites which are carcinogenic. But you already know that. You’re just being pedantic so you could kiss the ass of big ham.

It’s astounding how effective the marketing was to shrug off regulatory concerns on nitrates and nitrites into an overreaction by ‘ma’ams’ and other grocery shopping women. Just take any valid concern and pin it onto an already ridiculed demographic and voila, you’ve made it popular with the internet.

And if you make her go outside, that’s the death sentence for all three generations in your family

What is this shit meme format doing in 196

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cancer-carcinogenicity-of-the-consumption-of-red-meat-and-processed-meat

Processed meat refers to meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation. Most processed meats contain pork or beef, but processed meats may also contain other red meats, poultry, offal, or meat by-products such as blood.

Before anyone asks, no, ‘salt’ doesn’t refer to sodium chloride in this context but rather curing salt or sodium nitrite.

‘Unprocessed ham’ is just a consumer term for ‘uncured ham’, which ironically is still cured, just with sodium chloride and not sodium nitrite. But sure let’s pretend every ‘Ma’am’ asking for nitrite-free ham is just a homeopathic dunce asking for the non-existent.

Harfam is what a migraine feels like