I was just linked to “A nation of wimps” over at Psychology Today and I was extremely underwhelmed. (Shocking, I know.) This wasn’t anywhere near the worst thing I’ve read on their website, but…that’s not exactly a high standard.
The author takes a real phenomenon of parental overprotectiveness that I think is worthy of some discussion and confuses it with real parental concerns and safety improvements that I applaud.
[cue scary music] The feminists are coming! We’re coming to take your children and…I dunno, exactly. Probably hug them, love them, and give them gender neutral toys 
Seriously, I’m happy to announce my participation in a new blog collective that launches today: The Feminist Hivemind. We’re a diverse group of women coming together to create a safe space for secular feminists to discuss issues of importance to us, including gender theory, atheism, class, race, sexism, parenting, dealing with religious people, and so many more things that I can’t even remember right now.
I’m super excited to get to blog with such an awesome group of women and I hope you’ll check back at frequently, as we’ll have at least one new post daily. We’re even going to have Token Male Wednesdays, where our Token Men get to have their say and ask the vital question “What about Teh Menz?”
(Note: By “women” we mean anyone who chooses to identify as a woman or as non-binary and our Token Men are anyone who chooses to identify as a man or non-binary. We really don’t care what’s in your pants, folks.)
My first post for the Hivemind will go up on 6/10 and it will be a revised and updated version of my First Amendment post from earlier this year. Then next month I’ll be writing about “How to be a Jewish (atheist) mother.” I’ll also be doing some linking to especially awesome posts that I think you shouldn’t miss.
Hope to see you soon at the Hivemind.
This morning I was pointed in the direction of a post on the Washington Times’ community pages titled “Vaccination is not immunity.” I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t realize just how bad until I started reading.
Where do I start? With the utter wrongness of 90% of what he’s actually saying? With his baseless accusations that Paul Offitt is just trying to profit from his rotavirus vaccines? (A classic deflection tactic, since it’s actually anti-vaccine standardbearer Andrew Wakefield who got into the field of lying about vaccines in order to promote his own measles vaccine.)
Or maybe I’ll just start with the way the author is not actually trying to explain anything so it can be understood by the layperson. No, he’s trying to snow you under with a lot of medical/biological jargon that makes him sound like he knows what he’s talking about, when he’s actually full of the stuff you find lying behind bulls in a field.
Any post that was actually trying to educate non-medical readers wouldn’t include the following sentence:
Pediatricians and the proponents of vaccine as a means for increasing the immune system may well be causing more of the inflammatory response beginning with the mast cell and other lymphatic cells all the way to the ventromedial hypothalamic autonomic response.
Oh yeah? Well, yo’ mama was a ventromedial hypothalamic autonomic response!
Yeah, I have no idea what he’s talking about and believe me, all the paragraphs before did nothing to help.
I was already annoyed by all the pointless jargon trying to snow the reader and then I reached this little gem:
To be clear, infants do not have a completely developed immune or nervous system.
Then my head exploded. Really? Is that so? Wow, I’d love to see how you think babies survive coming through a vagina with an immune system that isn’t completely developed.
Do we bleach our hooha during the birthing process now? I hate to tell you, but there are millions of germs on our skin and in or bodies and all that natural birthing and snuggling just means babies get even more of it. Which is fine! Because babies are capable of handling it, as long as we don’t bring anyone near them with something dangerous like measles or whooping cough.
The amount of infectious material in an immunization is so small compared to what babies are exposed to just by latching onto a breast…you’d be astonished. The point is to give their bodies a chance to learn how to fight those dangerous illnesses without actually giving them the dangerous illnesses.
But as far as I know, the infant immune response has very little to do with the fact that “If you are too warm, your hypothalamus will activate your parasympathetic nervous system to dilate blood vessels to release heat….”
o_O Sometimes I just wonder what people are thinking. Or if they’re thinking at all.
I’m having surgery on my shoulder this coming Monday. Lucky me, I’ve got a bone spur at the rotator cuff, plus calcific tendinitis. Whee.
The process of preparing for this surgery has brought up a lot of thoughts. For example, do you know what I don’t understand? (Rhetorical question: We know there are millions of things I don’t understand. Like the Kardashians. And quantum mechanics.)
I’m sure everyone with a mental illness, whether mild or severe, has dealt with some variation of the “You just need to cheer up!” admonition. Whether it’s “You just need to stop worrying” to someone with an anxiety disorder or “You just need to get organized” to someone with ADHD, this is one of the most aggravating and useless things that could ever be said. If it were that easy, everyone would do it. (In general, if the word “just” appears in the sentence, I’m going to tune out whatever you’ve just said. ::coughs::)
But…mental illnesses are complicated and there are sometimes ways in which we can affect them and help ourselves. It depends, first of all, on the origin of the illness.
One common error when it comes to social phobia is assuming it’s the same as shyness. (See: This survey from NIMH.) When I tell people I have social phobia, they often look amused, like I’ve told a joke. I can almost see their brains turning inside out as they try to reconcile their ideas about “social phobia” with me…a loud, talkative, friendly—if socially awkward—person who talks to just about anybody.
By this point, I’ve spent years reading about vaccines and vaccine opposition, so I’ve seen a great many of the arguments against childhood and adult vaccination. There are a few legitimate concerns, a great many ridiculous and irrational concerns, and a few truly INSANE concerns.
In that last category I have to place my “favorite”: “I won’t vaccinate my kids because you get better immunity from the disease.”
My hubby’s immediate reaction to that was “No, you don’t.” And y’know what? I have no idea if he’s right or not and I think it doesn’t matter. I think arguing about whether “natural” immunity is “better” misses the insanity of the statement.
Step back for a second and work with me. Why do we vaccinate? Last time I checked, we vaccinate so that we become immune and thus don’t get the disease, because being sick is bad for us. Right?
I mean, did I miss the memo that we get vaccinated because it’s fun watching small children cry? I’m pretty sure that’s not it.
So, if the point of vaccination is not getting the disease, then it doesn’t matter what kind of immunity you get from the disease because at that point you’ve already gotten it! Good for you getting fabulous immunity from influenza, but if you’ve been off work for two weeks and miserably sick in bed, I really don’t think you’re better off than me and my kids’ “unnatural” immunity.
I really really don’t understand people sometimes…
But on that note, let me take this New Year’s Eve opportunity to wish all of you a wonderful 2013. May your joy increase, you family prosper, and your enemies suffer hemorrhoids. See you on the flip side
