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I'm there with you, sister. It's a rock and a hard place and there seems to be no way to divine an answer or quench the star. Some people have been like, oh, work hard and you'll get over it. And I'm like how? What is the actual, specific mechanism? Because I don't know what it is.

Can I make a suggestion? I just finished a book by Judith Herman called Trauma and Recovery. It's very intelligent and I think everyone with PTSD--and the most important people around them--should read it. Still chewing on it, but it's helped me understand myself better. I found it valuable and positive.

http://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Recovery-Aftermath-Violence---Political/dp/0465087302/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421741442&sr=8-1&keywords=trauma+and+recovery

http://www.amazon.com/Plastic-Squeezer-Toothpaste-Dispenser-Bathroom/dp/B0087FIHDW

You may be a hideous freak, but this should help you no-longer create heinous acts against nature in your bathroom. I can't decide if we need one as well, my wife has done very well at learning how to be a human but I'm worried this one may not stick. She used to not eat cheese or hot wings, and now she appreciates cheeses by themselves, we are still working on getting her to like cheeses with some flavor so we are starting small like Camenbert.

If she can do it I have faith in you.

There's an awesome book called Female Chauvinist Pigs that looks at how we went from women burning bras to 18 year olds posing for girls gone wild. It's a great read and I highly recommend it! It explained a lot about my own journey into feminism. =)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0743284283?pc_redir=1414449178&robot_redir=1

Since you're both 'queer feminist types' what about something like a Sarah Walters book like Fingersmith or Tipping the Velvet? I mean who doesn't love a little lesbian romance with a plot set in Victorian England while in a residential treatment facility?

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ is my go to tactic for negotiating, although it's geared specifically for software jobs. It's definitely helped me out immensely with salary negotiation, especially since that's a trickier field for women. We have to be much more careful in our wording, lest is be mistaken for being "aggressive".

I also found that What Works for Women at Work by Joan Williams to be an incredibly helpful guide to navigating negotiation and a career.

I definitely think that's part of it. To give an example from some Christian feminist bloggers I read, they had some sadly distorted views on sexuality thanks to both the oppressive purity culture and the hypersexualized secular culture.

Their boyfriends manipulated them into sex since "that's what you do in a relationship," and later used the first-time sex "no one will marry you now since you're not a virgin" to keep them in abusive relationship.

Take the lack of good sex education, add in both the easy access to porn and the availability of porn with taboos, and mix together with toxic masculinity. What we might get is more young men expecting (and thus pressuring) certain sex acts from their partners. If you spend as much time as I do lurking in /r/relationships, you'll see these problems already exist.

Also, I found the book. This is an Amazon link, but not an affiliate one. It's called The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality.

Also, these are not the particular essays that I had read, but they're still enlightening.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/when-your-sex-life-doesnt-follow-the-script/

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/07/the-sex-myth-rachel-hills

I use that word broadly, since obviously not everyone will agree on what is or is not a taboo. Blow jobs used to be taboo, and now they're not, for example.

So do I! I saw them recommended somewhere on reddit, and they're officially called Sea Bands. Basically they push at a pressure point on your wrist that's supposed to relieve nausea. I still have no idea if it works or not, I just use them for mild cases or long car rides.

Vandana Shiva has discussed at length the impacts of Monsanto on her native country.

Check out her words in Feminist Politics Activism and Vision for the full article, sources included.

The problem, in essence, is that Monsanto has claimed to have property rights on seeds, which forces farmers to use expensive terminator seeds that must be purchased annually.

This displaces the farming done primarily by women into the hands of large corporate farms, forcing women who have relied on farming for generations further into poverty.

> why do people think I'm an extremist when I call myself a feminist? Why do people have such a problem with the label?

Because of the backlash against Feminism. It started in the 1980s as a reaction against the 2nd wave of feminism in the 60s and 70s. Susan Faludi described how it started in the book Backlash.

With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine back in the 80s, political broadcasts now go unopposed. So certain politically oriented stations/networks become echo chambers, where lies go unchecked and unquestioned. How many Americans still believe that President Obama is a Muslim? Or was not born in the US? As an example of the lies one sees in the echo chamber, when Republican politicians get caught in scandals, the titles on the screen show a "D" so that the members of the echo chamber can go "oh, those evil democrats"

Much of the backlash comes via strawman, reductio ad absurdum arguments and also via shared urban legends. It is the same tactics that were used during the Cold War to isolate and denounce "socialism" and unions. It is also much of the same tactics keeping racism alive. So it is the identical logic to get you to "all feminists are extremists" as to "all blacks are scary and going to mug me". And the backlash against feminism is so effective that you get people starting sentences with "I'm not a feminist, but...." and then articulating a feminist position. Or how people stopped at a traffic light will subconsciously press their door locks when a black person is using the crosswalk.

So when the echo chamber claims that X happened because of Y, then it goes unquestioned.

TL;DR - decades of barking heads on Fox and AM talk radio have successfully managed to turn the word "feminism" into a dirty word, like they're doing with the word "liberal".