The following is a condensed version of a post I wrote on my own blog about one of the most important and amazing nights of my life: my marriage. Please check out the original post for the full story, complete with the wonderful photos taken by my fabulous friends.

Here is the happy jist of it:

Last month, I got married. To my Wife Rebecca – or Bex, as she is better known.

My Post Modern Marriage. (Lauren Blue)

Truth be told, we’ve been married (on Facebook at least) for many months. But we thought it was time to do our marriage justice and tie the knot properly, with 70 friends and a crate of champagne.

Let me be clear: We are not lesbians. We do not have sex with each other. This is not a legal marriage, nor a civil partnership. We are not going to raise children together. We have long-term sexual relationships with men, and we both fully plan on finding “the one,” being with them forever and having babies.

Many people seem to have misunderstood this point, and a surprising number declined the invitation to our wedding because they found the whole concept so odd. It made them uncomfortable. More’s the pity.

So I wrote this for everyone who was confused by our marriage, to explain why she is my Wife.

(more inside…)

Yesterday I published in The Globe and Mail a feature that is very close to my heart: an exploration of vulvodynia, severe and often debilitating pain at the opening of the vagina. (If you find the story locked to paid subscribers on the Globe site, you can see the full text on my website here as well.) It was once dismissed as a psychiatric condition - and still is by many uninformed physicians - but now doctors and scientists are finally uncovering the real, biological secrets behind this strange and sad condition.

I had never heard of vulvodynia until a few years ago, when an editor asked me to look into it for a story on medically unexplained symptoms. What I learned broke my heart - not so much the fact that so many women are in pain, but that so many are turned away by their doctors without answers - or, worse, told they are crazy. If the condition affects an estimated one in six women at some point in their lives, and if 60 per cent of them decide not to seek treatment - and of those who do seek help, they have to consult three or more physicians before a proper diagnosis (if they get one), then how many women are suffering in silence right now? How many women have been sent to shrinks and told it was “all in their heads”?

(more inside…)

A friend - a male friend - sent me this link, an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, commenting:

“Leave it to the Washington Post to set feminism back twenty years with one op-ed piece. And, of course, just like Thom Yorke [of Radiohead] said, ‘You do it to yourself…’ Terrible. Just terrible. Like black-on-black crime.”

This op-ed piece really is just breathtaking. I’m speechless.

Here are a few choice extracts:

I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

I swear no man watches “Grey’s Anatomy” unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of “The Friday Night Knitting Club.” No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either — although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn’t some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.

(Note: Plenty of men claim to have Morgellon’s - I’ve interviewed them myself. Click here for a piece on the controversy.)

(more inside…)

This isn’t motivated by anything in the news, anything in the world of ideas, or anything that has happened to me. This is just something that has been kicking around my head for a while, that I just feel the need to say.

We talk a lot on this blog about what is lacking in our lives, and in the lives of women all over the world: equal pay, reproductive choice, justice and support for victims of sexual assault – this list is long, depressing, and infinitely worthy of our attention.

But as many barriers as we still face, I don’t want any of us to forget just how incredibly lucky we are.

We are – arguably – part of the first generation of women (if not the very first) to know freedom like this. It is unprecedented. For all of human history, stretching back tens of thousands of years, has any group of women had so many choices open to them? And, for that matter, do most women on this planet today share this luxury?

(more inside…)

I was out with a couple of my best girlfriends earlier this week, both of whom have suffered, and continue to suffer, from acute anorexia. You wouldn’t know it to look at them - they both make efforts to eat properly, so they don’t look underweight - but inside their heads they say it’s a constant battle. In the spirit of tackling their problem head-on, they’ve agreed to meet up once a week to eat an entire meal together. Which, they joked, will usually consist of steamed veggies, brown rice and fish, “A typical anorexic dinner!” I laughed as well. Often humour is the best way to deal with our problems.

It’s such a terrible shame that for so many women today food is such a problematic issue. While for centuries most people struggled just to get enough to eat, in the west today, where food is cheap and plentiful, different problems have become ubiquitous: chronic overeating and chronic undereating, particularly among women. For both groups, food becomes an enemy, not a friend.

Which is such a heartbreaking shame: food - along with sleep and sex - should be one of the joyful cornerstones of each of our lives. We should love to eat, and to eat well. And yet for so many of us, the simple act of consuming food is fraught with guilt and pain. Compulsive under-eating, just like over-eating, can become like an addiction.

These problems are so complex, and can be so difficult to alleviate. And yet for all the self-help books out there, endless diet tips in glossy women’s magazines, and countless exercise regimes advertised, there seems to be a real dearth of healthy and helpful information that deals with the issues. Not just from a nuts-and-bolts perspective regarding nutrition and health, but also from a psychological and - dare I say it - feminist perspective.

Which is why it’s so great to see The Guardian‘s new series on weight loss, authored by the editor of the women’s pages, Kira Cochrane. Click here for the first installment - she’ll be putting out a new column every two weeks for the foreseeable future. It’s a wonderfully atypical perspective.

(more inside…)

I got my period this morning, and I’m - pardon the pun - over the moon.

Not because I thought I was pregnant (although I am indeed glad not to be pregnant right now). No, my menstrual joy derives from two sources.

One: I’m not on the birth control pill right now. I was on the pill until this past winter, and since coming off it, have had very irregular and sparse periods, which is - although not unusual - a bummer. It’s not nice to feel like your body isn’t working properly, and particularly not nice to feel that an artificial pill you took messed you up good and proper. But I was greeted by a throbbing uterus this morning, and damn, it’s nice to feel my body working like it should. I didn’t realize how much I liked ovulating until I stopped. Now that things are up and running as normal, I can’t help but feel like there’s something pretty magical about my cyclical peaks of progesterone and estrogen - it’s like there’s a little alchemical lab right in my tummy.

And,

Two: Eco-friendly menstrual products. My eagerly anticipated package arrived in the mail last week, with a collection of re-usable cotton panty liners (in a variety of shapes and colours), reusable panties - which have the cotton padding sewn right in, and - that most awesome of menstrual products - a reusable cup.

(more inside…)

Check out this piece from The Guardian about a new trend in finance: “female-oriented” banking, which “is not about frivolity and bows but profit and the bottom line.”

Emotion Banking’s chief executive, Christian Rauscher, says that until now banks have failed to tap into the lucrative female market. “Fifty-one per cent of [banking] clients worldwide are female … more women are standing on their own feet and deciding their own finances … [banks] tend to address men in their communication, which is not necessarily the best way to be successful.”

The article is pretty vague about exactly what female-oriented banking actually looks like, or how it differs from “conventional” banking.

Catherine Tillotson, a partner at the wealth management consultancy Scorpio Partnership, says private banks are often guilty of “wrap[ping] up their services in pink … now it’s becoming [clearer] the issue is not about whether women should be treated differently. [Banks need] a different marketing approach, rather than different service.”

I don’t think I like the idea that women require different banking services or different marketing strategies compared to men. And I kind of find it a bit, um, weird that the consultancy firm first mentioned is called Emotion Banking - is my savings account supposed to ask me about my feelings when I make a withdrawal because I have ovaries?

But the article does mention some heartening stats:

A 2006 Centre for Economic Business Research study estimated 53% of millionaires are likely to be female in 2020 … [Morevoer], the wealth gap between males and females is narrowing. In 2006, the average female millionaire was worth £1.97m, while the figure for men was £2.96m. This compares with £1.28m for women in 1998 and £2.71m for males … No longer reliant on divorce settlements or inheritances, women are now making their own money. Some 38% of Coutts’ clients gained wealth through salary, 19% did so from their spouse, 7% inherited it and the remainder acquired it through unknown means.

The article also mentions some Canadian figures:

As in Britain, Canadian women’s financial power is growing: between 1991 and 2001, women’s self-employment grew 43%, and there are some 821,000 female entrepreneurs in Canada, contributing in excess of C$18bn (£8.58bn) to the economy.

We’re not quite there yet - but nice to know we’re on our way.

I didn’t really want to like Natalie Portman - her image is a bit too cutesy for me, I think her acting is overrated, and the stain of the last three Star Wars movies is awful hard to wash off. What can I say, I’m human, and all humans have some bias in their soul.

But after putting in the effort to learn a thing or two about her, she has earned my respect. She once said “I’d rather be smart than be a movie star,” and she apparently meant it. She speaks five languages (and is learning more), and has taken time out of acting for her education - first a BA at Harvard, then graduate studies at Hebrew University. She has also done some work to promote micro-lending for women-owned businesses in poor countries.

I particularly respect her latest dabbling: acting as guest editor for Scholastic MATH, a mag that helps teens appreciate the fun and relevance of mathematics.

This is what she has to say:

“Math was one of my favorite subjects in school. It always gets a bad rap and I’m not sure why. I always found math to be such an exciting avenue to think about the world in new and different ways.

Sure, you need to use math daily for knowing how much tip to leave at a restaurant or how much flour you need to make double the amount of cookies in a recipe, but it is the less obviously practical parts of math that are most fun for me—like considering the principles of infinity. It made me excited about life to consider the limitlessness of the mind and what we can do with it.”

Nicely put. It’s always wonderful to see women promoting math and busting up the “girls are no good at math” stereotype.

This weekend I had the wonderful chance to see an exhibit here in London, England of the art of Lee Miller (1907 - 1977), feminist icon and one of the twentieth century’s greatest photographers.

Born in upstate New York, she actually began her career at 19 as a model for American Vogue - she made history when she appeared in the first advertisement for menstrual products that featured an actual woman in the picture. She was captured on film by some of the world’s greatest photographers, and was considered one of the greatest beauties of her day - her breasts were thought so perfect, champagne glasses were modeled after them.

But so much more than just a pretty face, she was much more passionate about working behind the camera than in front of it.

(more inside…)