Our bodies are political, with Clio Wood

In all my soapbox content, I really tried to get the message across that politics isn't all votes, caucuses, ideologies, and arguments. It's not all climate change, economics, and big business. Politics is in the everyday structures, systems, and barriers that we face. 

It's what gets funded. It's childcare. It's how we access healthcare. It's mental health support and how this helps us work. It's caring responsibilities and the rules and guidelines on the internet. It's food safety and who looks after playgrounds. It's families and who's protected. It's everything. 

And that's why today I'm talking to Clio Wood. Clio is a women's health and sex positivity advocate, a journalist, and the author of “Get your mojo back: sex pleasure and intimacy after birth”.  As well as the founder of &breathe: an award-winning well-being retreat company for motherhood and menopause.  

Because politics is also - sex.  

We talk about the marginalization of women's health.

We talk about how normal medical words are considered swear words or inappropriate across social media and in our own conversations. So that we feel uncomfortable talking about our own bodies. Which then has implications for how we can advocate for our own health and safety, and communicate in our relationships.  

The way that society treats mothers, and women at all stages of their lives is political.  And we do use words in this week's episode, like vagina and vulva. We use words like sex, childbirth, periods, we talk about episiotomies, internal scarring and ultrasounds.

If you're at all uncomfortable about those kinds of things, then there are plenty of other episodes that you can dive into.  But I really hope you won’t.  Because these are not issues that should be unspoken taboos.  These are the everyday experiences of over 50% of the world's population.  

We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to those around us. We owe it to our children to be comfortable talking about them. And to be comfortable dealing with the way that society is marginalizing the lived experience of half the planet.  

Things we mention in the episode:

• Clio on Instagram
• Clio's book: "Get your mojo back"
• Clio's website for retreat and 1-1 information
• "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado Perez
• Sex Positive Families on Instagram
• Contribute to the #censHERship survey

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