Hey,
Women are constantly being told two opposite things.
When we don’t know our bodies well, we are blamed for being careless.
And, when we try to know more about our bodies, the information is hidden, censored, or politicized until it becomes useless.
And somewhere between the doctor’s room, the government office, the Instagram algorithm, the fertility app, the family WhatsApp group, and the mother-in-law’s opinion – a woman is still trying to ask:
What is actually happening inside me?
What choices do I really have?
And who benefits when I don’t know?
Inside this edition:
👉 Reproductive Autonomy and more…
📚 What she’s reading, watching, listening
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her
Take what you need. Leave what you don’t.
👉 Why is a woman’s body still treated like public property, medical mystery, political battleground, and content violation – all at once?
There is a timeline all women are handed very early in life…
And, when your body should stop being a subject of conversation and become a private inconvenience.
But the body does not actually follow a calendar it is given.
This week, I came across two very different stories that somehow felt like they were speaking to each other.
One was about PCOS being framed as a condition that makes the body unreliable, for years. But this new insight complicates that fear. Some women with PCOS may enter perimenopause later and may find fertility changing in their 40s.
It doesn’t change the fact that PCOS is still difficult, painful, metabolic, hormonal, and emotionally exhausting for many women. But the point is that women’s bodies are more complex than the one-line fear scripts we are handed.
The other was about… wherein science is slowly revealing more complexity about women’s bodies, Meta platforms are allegedly restricting the very accounts trying to talk about women’s health, abortion, sexuality, and reproductive information.
One story says: the female body is more complex than we were told.
The other says: even when we try to talk about that complexity, the conversation can be pushed out of sight.
Today, or this week, or anytime you get the courage to,
try asking yourself these questions…
that we should have been taught to ask our bodies, but we weren’t.
What do I actually know about my cycle beyond whether it is “regular” or “irregular”?
Have I ever been told the difference between fertility, ovulation, hormones, and menopause in a way that made sense?
Do I know where to find safe, non-judgmental information about contraception, abortion, PCOS, pregnancy, and perimenopause?
Have I inherited fear about my body from family, culture, religion, doctors, or the internet?
And, before you do that, hear me out…
All of this is not just about motherhood, but about the right to know what is happening inside us. It is about whether women can access the information that makes choice possible at all. It is about the right to know your body without shame, fear, censorship, or someone else editing the truth before it reaches you.
The fight is not only for women to make choices about their bodies. It is also for women to receive the full, uncensored, unashamed information they need before making those choices.
🔍 Currently, Her
💬 Ideas to tune into when the world’s too loud.
🎧 Listen: The Retrievals — Serial Productions
An investigative podcast about women at a fertility clinic whose pain was dismissed while they were undergoing egg retrievals → Listen when you want to understand why women are still asked to prove pain, fear, instinct, and bodily truth before they are believed?
📚 Read: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou
A memoir about voice, dignity, survival, and the long shadow silence can leave on a life. In a world that keeps editing the truth, Maya Angelou’s story feels like required reading, because it understands what it means to reclaim language after being denied it → Read when you want to remember that voice is not just expression. Sometimes, it is survival.
🎨 Learn: Snird Surrealism Oil Painting Course by Amber Skye Alcock
This course teaches you to build your own “Snird,” a strange, tender creature brought to life through layering, glazing, colour, texture, and instinct. Her work’s a lot about odd bodies, fragile beings, softness as resistance, and care in a world that keeps looking away → Learn when you want to stop explaining yourself and start making something strange and entirely yours.
✨ For the week when softness grows teeth, and silence starts making art.
🗞 Her World, This Week
🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.
⚖️ Pill Access Remains Unchanged For Now: Supreme Court has temporarily kept access to mifepristone unchanged. For now, the abortion pill can still be obtained through pharmacies or by mail, while the court reviews whether new restrictions should take effect.
🚨 Three Women Arrested After Serious Fight in Buxton: A thursday fight in Buxton left one woman seriously injured and three women arrested. Police are investigating and appealing for witnesses.
🗣️ The Men We Need: As women name their rapists online and trust in justice keeps collapsing, another horrifying abuse network shows how deep the rot runs. But this moment needs more than outrage. If it’s truly “not all men,” then the good ones need to become louder than the dangerous ones.
🌱 She Kept the Game Grounded: After 20 years at Camden Yards, Nicole Sherry, only the second woman to lead groundskeeping for an MLB team, is taking her final bow. From baseball’s most-watched grass to Maryland agriculture, she leaves behind a powerful legacy.
🫀 The Heart Math Goes Global: Two major heart risk tools, PREVENT and SCORE2 were tested across millions worldwide and mostly passed. Hence, doctors may catch CVD risk earlier, though Asia, Africa, and other underrepresented regions still need sharper, localised science.
💡 Her Spotlight
Found her voice. Loved her clarity. Needed you to see her.
Alexandria Masse (@alexandria.masse) is doing what algorithms and institutions often fail to do: making reproductive information impossible to ignore.
Her ongoing Birth Control Tapestry turns the language of contraception, side effects, consent, and bodily autonomy into a massive piece of crocheted work made from dozens of balls of yarn and months of labour. What is usually hidden in fine print becomes a room-sized act of memory.
It is actually a craft historically dismissed as “women’s work” which now becomes a public record of what women have had to fight to know about their own bodies.
In a moment about reproductive autonomy, Alexandria’s work feels like a soft scream stitched in red: birth control saves lives, information saves futures, and women deserve the full story before the world asks them to make choices.
🤍 Note to Her
Her Weekly Download has a new rhythm now:
Two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – and a Sunday news special to help you enter the week with the women-first stories worth knowing.
✨P.S. Send this to her, the one who is always reachable, but maybe not always met.
Because the best kind of perspective is the one we pass woman to woman 💚