going through the OB-GYN module this month and all I can think of is how beautifully Fleabag portrayed female sexuality

My inner monolog is constant and saying multiple things at the same time constantly

Somtimes I catch snippits of conversation in my own head and its. Honestly really funny.

For example, in a very confused tone

"Congrats on the menopause????"

«Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t. They have to seek it out, they invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby. We have it all going on in here inside, we have pain on a cycle for years and years and years and then just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes, the f***ing menopause comes, and it is the most wonderful f***ing thing in the world. And yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get f***ing hot and no one cares, but then you’re free, no longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person.»

— Fleabag S2, Belinda's monologue

My grandmother called me yesterday.

I'm not a phone person so I don't call family ever. It's nothing personal on them, I just don't like talking on the phone.

Talking to grandma was like talking to That Guy in that she monologued and I didn't get a chance to participate in the conversation.

She mentioned that my older aunt (she's not much older than me, really, she's my dad's younger sister but not the youngest sister, and my dad was 18 when I was born) is struggling emotionally through menopause and that got me wondering if that's why I'm getting so mean and negative, lately.

oh my god all my friends recommended fleabag to me and i was so excited to watch it and then i saw the "women are born with pain built in" thing and like. aside from my obviously unfavorable feelings about it as a trans person and the blatant bioessentialism it's just not that good of a monologue? like if it was meant to be obviously bad that's one thing but from my experience ppl genuinely seem to think it's amazing lol

yep!!!! i agree with you completely i think the whole “women are genetically born with pain and trauma …. we’re predestined for it…” is such bullshit 😭 like you said it’s such bio essentialism and how can you try to make a feminist statement while in the same breath literally saying that women are doomed from birth and our suffering is directly tied to the fact that we r women …. and it ends with the character saying that menopause like “frees women from pain” it’s just so lame in my opinion and not the deep social commentary that people praise it for being and i think it opens the door to a lot of other very harmful lines of thinking about how “women are born with xyz genetically built into their experiences and there’s no escape from it!!!!” like idk not a fan

"Welcome to the Theatre": Diary of a Broadway Baby

Encores! Once Upon a Mattress

January 27, 2024 | NYCC | Encores! Series | Evening | Musical | Concert | 2H 30M

This one's going to be a little longer than usual, but not as long as it could've been, so you're welcome. I've been listening to the Mary Rodgers memoir, and going in knowing how and why this musical was crafted the way that it was really shed some light on the process. Highly recommend listening to the audiobook (as narrated by Christine Baranski), because it's wildly entertaining at every turn. As for the musical itself? Well... It's a nostalgia piece that does well in high schools all across the country. And that's great. J. Harrison Ghee, great. Nikki Renee Daniels, great. Harriet Harris, so great she had the house screaming with laughter every moment. Worth the entire night just for her.

Sutton Foster was one referred to as "the luckiest chorus girl" and I don't disagree. Sure, she's talented in specific areas. She's a good dancer, and has the breath support to sing whilst doing it. Sing well? Mmm...no. I've never been the biggest fan of her voice, but it was especially weak in this show, and that's shocking because this is kind of a role made for her. It's big and brassy and doesn't need to be sung well, just loud. And she didn't manage to do that. "Shy" was tepid. Jackie Hoffman out-belted her when she did it eight years ago, and she's a comedy legend. Sutton can get the laughs, that's for sure, but it feels so inorganic watching her roll around on stage. Comedy is hard, and Carol Burnett is a master at it. Her schtick will make you cry laughing, and it feels effortless even if it takes so much work. Sutton makes it look like her entire internal monologue is "I'm funny, I'm being so funny right now, I'm doing comedy," on repeat the entire time. Which, fine, sure, it's a show that works with that. I don't actually care that she's too old for this part (just like she's too old for Marian the Librarian) because it's objectively hilarious that a nearly-peri-menopausal woman is going to be the princess of the kingdom and have heirs, but I do care that she's not delivering the goods.

Listen to this "Shy" and then go do yourself a favor and listen to literally anyone else sing it. She gets a semi-powerful belt in at the end, but come on. This is supposed to be her bread and butter.

Verdict: A Lovely Night

A Note on Ratings

"Women are born with pain built in. It's our physical destiny. Period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don't. They have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons and things all so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. Then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other, and when there aren't any wars they can play rugby.

And we have it all going on in here, inside. We have pain on a cycle for years and years and years. And then, just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes. The fucking menopause comes and it is the most wonderful fucking thing in the world. And yes your entire pelvic floor crumbles, and you get fucking hot, and no one cares, but then you're free. No longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You're just a person, in business."

chandra wilson still kills it every week on grey’s... what a legend

mom, haughtily before storming off & loudlymindlessly watching facebook in the kitchen: god! why can't you just be yourself? why can't you just stop trying to be different and quit looking for attention?

me, just asking if i should dye my hair:

so...i did some research and well most religions in the prehistoric era was found by philosohers, mostly men, and i just saw this monologue by a british TV series called fleabag, “Men don’t. They have to invent things like gods and demons... they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other… and we have it all going on in here. Inside, we have pain on a cycle for years.” and idk it feels kinda true

but pls don’t come for me, i just thought the menopause monologue is so gooood.

trans woman here; there’s a long monologue in Fleabag about how pain is inherent to womanhood bc it’s built into uteruses, and that’s why women are oppressed — and also, the first season of Killing Eve has a sequence where a man is murdered, his penis cut off and his body stuffed into a dress, and this is sort of meant to be portrayed as dark comedy. character limit in asks but i can dm you to elaborate if necessary

ty for clarifying! oh jeez that killing eve stuff sounds like a fucking disaster.

i just looked up the fleabag monologue and i guess i'm of two minds about it. unless the version of it that i read was abridged, it doesn't seem to say that uterus pain is why women are oppressed. and i don't think it's incorrect to talk about how some degree of pain is just an accepted part of life in a woman's body. i would just say that focusing on just period stuff is a facile way to generalize about women's experiences? physical pain for women isn't limited to cis women's period cramps; we encounter pain in all aspects of life, resulting from careless diagnoses and misprescriptions when we go to the doctor or from domestic violence or from the high heels and tight clothing we're expected to wear or from something as specific as a car accident, which women are more likely to be injured in because road tests for new cars don't require any crash test dummies that are sized to the proportion of the average women's bodies. or from transphobic hate crimes against trans women. women experience so many different kinds of pain!! like in the grand scheme of all the pain women experience, i think most women would rank period pain and menopause towards the bottom of the list. so it's sort of a boring monologue and just needlessly narrow in its focus. i don't know if that means pwb is transphobic or just careless or some combination of the two.

Act 02, Scene 02 - 01 - Grandmother Ruth

From: Looking for Normal, by Jane Anderson

Genre: Dramedy

Topic: Menopause, menstruation

Character: Female, elderly, masculine

When I turned thirteen in 1905 it was generally believed that a woman’s menstrual cycle was controlled by her circulation. If a girl was late in starting her menses it meant that too much of her blood was flowering to her brain due to excessive thinking. But if she started too early, it meant that her blood was rushing in the other direction due to inappropriate stimulation of the lower regions. To my mother’s relief, I got my period at just the right time. What she didn’t know was that I was both an avid reader and an avid masturbator and the two activities apparently canceled each other out. No one knew much about hormones back then. No one knew that you could actually bottle this magic female juice and dispense it to maturing women to ease the retreat of their menses. No one knew that it was so powerful, that if dispensed to a man, it could stop him from balding, soften his skin, flesh out his hips and encourage bosoms to grow. Personally, I had no use for estrogen. I hit menopause in 1943 and I was damned relieved. I refused to mourn the end of my so – called fertile years. Instead, I joined the French Resistance and I drank.

I’ve been trying to write this post for months.  Mind the tags.

Posting selfies always leaves me desperate to acknowledge to someone, anyone- just scream to the void, perhaps, if I have to- my lifelong issues with my body and with food.  I don’t talk about it.  I’m embarrassed to talk about it, I guess; I experience a sort of meta self-consciousness asserting that, yes, I have serious problems with my self image and taking care of my body, because, well.

I hate you.

That’s what other women have told me, when my looks come up, since I hit puberty.  You’re perfect. I hate you.  Very recently a colleague called me a bitch when I told her that, yes, my hair is naturally curly.  What am I supposed to say to that?

Thanks, sometimes I hate myself too.

My jaw is wired shut, words clawing up my throat and jamming against my teeth. 

Oh, what bitter loneliness in those moments.  I just want to say it all, just this once.

My mother started complaining about her weight when I was small.  She exercised obsessively.  She went on some godawful super low carb diet when I was about eight.  To this day I remember vividly how angry and miserable she was.  I need my orange juice.  She’s started her day with a glass of orange juice for as long as I can remember.  She can’t get going without it.  No orange juice.  A stressed out workaholic careening into menopause, her sister was sick, her kid was having problems at school, her husband was depressed, and she willfully added to her own torment.  No orange juice.  There were other restrictions, obviously, but sometimes the little things leave the biggest dents.  No orange juice.  No orange juice, because she gained too much weight while she was pregnant with me.  My brother didn’t do that to her.  Just one more curse from her second born.  She still complains about her weight, sometimes, that extra weight I gave her.  One of her best friends and colleagues has spent her academic career studying the psychology of “fat talk.”  She should know better.  And yet. 

And yet.  To this day I feel like I’m doing something terribly wrong when I drink juice.

My brother was a scrawny little dude, and he hated it.  He got into bodybuilding when he was in high school.  I worshiped my big brother.  I wanted to do everything he did.  He was the good child.  I followed his transformation avidly.  I started reading the blogs he read. The science of fitness and nutrition tickled my academic sensibilities and satisfied my need to hyperfixate.  The endless pictures of figure athletes flexing their striated glutes on stage gave me all sorts of ideas about things I could change about myself.  I could control this aspect of myself, I who so often felt out of control.  I could build my identity around this.  I started lifting weights and buying protein powder. 

Started counting carbs when I was twelve.

Never stopped.

I was thinking about writing this post while I was making dinner.  I had to laugh when I noticed I was absentmindedly checking the nutrition facts on the back of a pack of cheese.  How many calories?  Grams of protein?  Fat?  Carbs?  I still do it automatically, compulsively, despite my work to unravel this mess.  Old habits die hard.

It took me more than a decade to realize I have a problem.  See, many of my behaviors are ostensibly “good.”  My diet and exercise choices are carefully calculated to support my mental health as well as my physical health, and they’re very effective at both.  I’m strong and I eat my vegetables and I give my friends great advice about how to better take care of their bodies.  My doctor has repeatedly encouraged me to take my knowledge and passion to medical school.  I do not regret the base of knowledge I have, nor the discipline.  I, and the people I care about, have reaped many benefits from them.

And yet.  Sometimes I still feel guilty for eating fruit.  Fruit.

I regret the guilt.  I regret the internal struggle I have every time I walk into the kitchen.  I regret how gross and worthless I feel if I miss a workout.  I regret that observing myself through a mirror or a camera is more stressful than it is affirming.  I regret that, for all that I’ve received so many genetic blessings and I’ve worked so hard to care for what I have been given, it’s never enough.

I’m doing better than I was.  I fight to let myself eat the things I want to eat, I consciously hold myself back from overtraining at the gym, I try to be kinder when I talk to myself.  The ghosts of my old convictions linger, reciting their tired monologues at me while I contemplate eating ice cream for dinner, just because I can, dammit.

I’ve never wanted to get something off my chest so badly, yet every instinct is screaming at me to delete this post.  Try to say something short and funny and clever instead.  It feels like I shouldn’t be admitting any of this.  It feels inappropriate, somehow, excessive, selfish, arrogant, ridiculous, I don’t know.

You’re perfect.  I hate you. 

That’s all I can hear.

Bitch.