Allison Yarrow > Quotes

“From its very conception, “bitch” was a verbal weapon designed to restrain women and strip them of their power.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Women were expected to be sexual gatekeepers, required to set boundaries for going to bed, and blamed if things went awry.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Brain-imaging studies reveal that the deep attachment we feel to the music from our adolescence isn’t a conscious preference or reflection of critical listening, but the result of a host of pleasure chemicals bombarding our brains.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“....birthing a larger-than-average baby is far less risky to a pregnant person than her doctor thinking she is carrying one. One study compared women whose doctors suspected they were carrying large babies (babies bigger than eight pounds, thirteen ounces) with women who gave birth to large babies that doctors hadn't anticipated. The group predicted to have big babies was three times more likely to be induced, more than three times as likely to have C-sections, and four times as likely to have birth complications. Far more problematic than a big baby is the need to intervene.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“Hands speak more intimately than words," writes author André Aciman. He's discussing the deaf here, specifically his mother, but I immediately think about healthcare, about perinatal care specifically. Touch is intimate. It can excite, comfort, heal. It should also be welcome. [...] Entry to a person's body should occur by invitation only, never amid confusion, never by coercion.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“Globally, most women have babies, and it seems that a high percentage of them are still suffering postpartum injuries long after their births. Urine leakage starts with the pelvic floor. One doctor told me that families commonly give up on caring for their aging loved ones when they lose bladder control. Kids don't want to change their parents' diapers. Urinary incontinence is a leading cause of nursing home admissions for women. This means that whether or not you can live your final days independently may come down to what's unresolved from giving birth, in a part of your body you don't really understand or might not even know is there.

The healthcare system isn't just failing postpartum women. It's failing women of all ages for their entire lives.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“...when I became pregnant with my third kid, these seemingly small moments of nonconsent replayed in my mind—the obligatory pelvic exam, the needle in my arm, the bruise like rotten fruit, the lithotomy position someone put me in both times. Sure, both births were beautiful, vaginal, natural—tick, tick, tick on the boxes of imaginary birth "success." But these were the moments I couldn't shake, that wedged themselves in and made me angry, ill.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“Modern obstetrics still preaches that birth is a battle between mother and child and worries that babies grow too large to safely exit the bodies that built them. However, obstetricians cannot accurately discern a baby's size in utero toward the end of a pregnancy, according to recent studies. When ultrasounds predict big babies, they are wrong about half the time, far too frequently to be relied upon. This fact has not stopped doctors from inducing or scheduling surgery for pregnant people, essentially claiming they cannot birth their own babies, that their babies won't fit through the birth canal before they have even tried. Despite obstetric alarm sounding, what we know hardly suggests that women routinely build babies too large to birth.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“Objectification theory” explained that women and girls are “acculturated to internalize an observer’s perspective as a primary view of their physical selves.” Thus, because society values female bodies primarily for their function and consumption, women and girls are more susceptible to suffering as their bodies change, like during puberty, but also due to pregnancy, weight fluctuation, and aging. This objectification enables discrimination, sexual violence, undervaluing women, and depression, the authors wrote.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Ultimately, why we birth the way we do transcends the boundaries of our bones. Physiologic labor is a complex process involving, yes, bones, but also tissues, muscles, organs, cells, hormones, an exchange of signals between two people, mechanical changes, emotions. Bones are easier to see and study, so bone shape and size are what obstetricians, historians, and anthropologists have historically prioritized.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“Not only do we live in a totally fucked-up patriarchal society run by white men who don't represent our interests at all, but we are in a country where those people don't care if we live or die. And that's pretty scary.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality

“[Grantly] Dick-Read proposed a theory in his 1942 book Childbirth Without Fear to explain what causes the pain that we're not supposed to feel: the fear-tension-pain cycle. The three evils, as he calls them, are antithetical to the body's design but have been "introduced in the course of civilization by the ignorance of those concerned with preparations for an attendance at childbirth." He concludes that "the more civilized the people, the more pain of labour appears to be intensified."

The book can feel pejorative and coddling. Dick-Read believes that women's purpose is to give birth. I found this Madonna complex hard to stomach. But women weren't really Dick-Read's audience. He was speaking to his obstetric colleagues. Other men. He wanted them to stop drugging, cutting, and manipulating the birthing body when it was awesomely capably of ushering out a baby without those painful interventions. He anticipated contemporary research finding that such abuses threaten women and their bodies. He was so focused on reaching medical doctors that he even dedicated the book to Joseph DeLee, father of the "drug them and cut the baby out" school of obstetrics. It was a challenge and a plea: women can give birth and, in the right conditions, avoid pain.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“When it comes to women, people are not ready to take more than a teaspoonful of change at a time”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality

“As a laboring person, it's hard to know whether the resident or nurse trainee is capable and caring or is following orders to do something to your body, to rush your labor because of hospital quotas and conventions, with or without your consent.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“Birth in America became more dangerous when men began attending it instead of women.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“Bitch” is a gendered insult with a long history of reducing women to their sexual function.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Television’s ideal woman in the late 80s and early 90s was “beautiful, dependent, helpless, passive, concerned with interpersonal relations, warm and valued for her appearance more than for her capabilities and competencies,”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Tracey Vogel, an anesthesiologist also trained as a rape crisis counselor, told me that trauma-informed care, crucially, shifts power. "It takes us from 'I am your doctor, and this is what I'm going to be doing to you' to 'I want to know what you might need from me,'" she explained.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“In the end, the 1990s didn’t advance women and girls; rather, the decade was marked by a shocking, accelerating effort to subordinate them. As women gained power, or simply showed up in public, society pushed back by reducing them to gruesome sexual fantasies and misogynistic stereotypes. Women’s careers, clothes, bodies, and families were skewered. Nothing was off-limits. The trailblazing women of the 90s were excoriated by a deeply sexist society. That’s why we remember them as bitches, not victims of sexism.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Women weren't telling their own stories; men were telling the stories of women that they wanted to see.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality

“Hands speak more intimately than words," writes author Aundre Aciman. He's discussing the deaf here, specifically his mother, but I immediately think about healthcare, about perinatal care specifically. Touch is intimate. It can excite, comfort, heal. It should also be welcome. [...] Entry to a person's body should occur by invitation only, never amid confusion, never by coercion.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“Squishy, stretchy babies adapted big brains but also soft, mobile heads to fit through their mothers' birth canals. Mom's hormones encourage pliability in the ligaments that hold her bones together—pelvises widen during the fertile years and, of course, during pregnancy and birth. [...] These adaptations seem to disprove the argument that birthing pelvises are the wrong size and shape to birth, that they lack compatibility with their babies. Labor is like two bodies dancing, not fighting.”
― Allison Yarrow, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

“The passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence, disconnection, and dissembling, a troubled crossing that our culture has plotted with dead ends and detours.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality

“It’s about labeling. For me feminism is bra-burning lesbianism. It’s very unglamorous. I’d like to see it rebranded. We need to see a celebration of our femininity and softness,” she said.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate