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Women's Health

Naomi Watt's awkward 'menopause patch' sex story is both hilarious and enlightening

Naomi Watts really is the best.

naomi watts, drew barrymore, menopause
The Drew Barrymore Show/TikTok

More candid conversations like this, please.

Unless you’re a 40ish+ woman going through it, or maybe a medical student with a specialization in female biology, menopause remains mostly a mystery. Sure, we all know about hot flashes, no more periods, something about hormones, but other than that…what? Not much, that’s what.

Which is why anytime someone actually shares about their experience—the good, the bad, the awkward, and everywhere in between—it can, no joke, feel like a monumental discovery/about the human condition. Take, for instance, when actress Naomi Watts recently got candid about her first attempt at sexy time with her husband Billy Crudup while going through “the change.” Spoiler alert: it’s hilarious. And also pretty damn enlightening.

File:Naomi Watts 2012.jpg - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

For context: Watts was appearing on The Drew Barrymore Show to promote her new book Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause, which details much of her menopause journey, including trying to start a family age of 36, after being told she was perimenopausal. Watts also recalled her mom, who had herself gone into early menopause at 45, saying that she never had conversations on this topic with her own mom. “It was just the societal message that was passed from generation to generation that we suffer in silence."

All this to say, Watts is clearly on a mission to stop the secrecy. Hence why she wrote the book, and why she shared her “embarrassing” sex story involving a couples of menopause patches, which can help alleviate certain menopause symptoms…but spoil the mood, apparently.

As she told Barrymore, she was “mortified because I had my patch on. If anyone’s ever worn a patch, you know that they’re very sticky, the adhesive takes ages to get off.”

"In fact, my first doctor that told me to wear the patch said just use car oil, that'll be fine. And I'm like, 'I don't want to use car oil on my body,’” she added.

She later mentioned that she actually had “a couple of them on both sides,” which only made things more difficult. Even the patches she succeeded in removing left a "nasty mark.” Fun.

At one point, the struggle escalated so much that Watts “excused myself, ran off to the bathroom and panicked, like, ‘What am I gonna do? And I’m scratching away…”

Naomi Watts While Were Young GIF by A24Giphy

That’s when Crudup finally asked “‘Are you okay, are you not in the mood?’”

Reenacting her embarrassment during the moment, Watt’s held her head in her hand and said, “I have this patch and I’m wearing it and it leaves this… I’m old, should I just leave?”

Much to Crudup’s credit, his response was perfect. "I was trying my best to apologize and I was shrinking and he was like, ‘We’re the same age. We're the same age. What is this? This is science. How can I help?’"

That’s when Barrymore, and the audience, collectively awwed. "Now you're melting. That's what happened to me,” said Watts.

And here’s where Watts really drove the message home.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

"It's freeing. It's so freeing. Truth can be so liberating. People fear that when they get to this point that the sex is gonna be over, and for some, it is true that your libido goes down. You can get support for things like that. But I just encourage women to get the communication going. Be honest, tell them what you're going through. Most of the time people wanna help."

Finally, she added, "Don't carry the secret or the shame by yourself."

And that’s really the crux of it all. There’s actually nothing shameful about menopause. It is, as Crudup put it, science. It’s just another chapter of life. And the more we communicate about it, the more we understand about it, and the more we understand about it, perhaps the more we can appreciate about it. Awkward sex moments and all.




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Teacher goes above and beyond for a biology lesson by wearing an anatomically correct suit

That's one way to keep students engaged!

@mikemoratinos/X

Veronica Duque wearing her famous anatomy suit

Being an educator in the American public school system is one of the hardest jobs in our nation. Not only is the work itself challenging, but with constant battles for educational funding and a student body increasingly tethered to their electronic devices, most teachers in America and around the world are navigating uncharted territory when it comes to finding ways to keep their students engaged in their studies.

And that's why when Verónica Duque came across a form-fitting, anatomical bodysuit while doing some online shopping, she thought it would be perfect visual aid to convey vital information (pun intended) to her students in Spain, in a way they'd actually remember.

Turns out, the entire internet would remember it too.

Duque's husband tweeted a collage of images from the classroom lesson, which quickly went viral, with nearly 70,000 likes. Loosely translated, the tweet from her husband Michael reads: "Very proud of this volcano of ideas that I am lucky to have as a wife. Today she explained the human body to her students in a very original way. Great Veronica !!!"

In an interview with Bored Panda, Duque explained the thought process that led her to presenting her third-grade-class with a unique approach to learning.

"I was surfing the internet when an ad of an AliExpress swimsuit popped up," she said. "Knowing how hard it is for kids this young to visualize the disposition of internal organs, I thought it was worth giving it a try."

anatomy, anatomical suit, teachers, science, cool teachers, science class, amazonThis is a teacher who cares. assets.rebelmouse.io

Online retailers like Amazon have a number of similar anatomical bodysuits for sale. While most people apparently purchase them for Halloween costumes or as gag gifts, it's now likely that Duque's viral moment will inspire some other educators around the world to take a similar approach to teaching the body basics to their students.

anatomy, anatomical suit, teachers, science, cool teachers, science class, amazonHalloween costume, check. Amazon

While some on Twitter were critical of the suit, the vast majority have praised Duque for her innovative approach to teaching. And the anatomical bodysuit is reportedly far from her first creative endeavor in the classroom.

"I decided long ago to use disguises for history lessons," she told Bored Panda. "I'm also using cardboard crowns for my students to learn grammatical categories such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Different grammar kingdoms, so to say."

And when it comes to the inevitable, made-up controversy that tends to latch itself onto virtually anyone that goes viral, Duque said she says there's another far more controversial stereotype she hopes her brief moment of fame will help address.

"I'd like society to stop considering teachers to be lazy bureaucratic public servants," she said. "We're certainly not." Get this teacher a raise!

What really works about Duque's presentation is that it engages students in a sensorial experiences, which helps lessons stick (and let's face it, anything that engages he sense nowadays is a godsend). But there are other methods teachers/parents can try that don't involve wearing a suit with guts on 'em.

Here are some suggestions for hands-on "DIY experiments", courtesy of the Little Medical School website:

1. Building the respiratory system by creating a model lung with straws, balloons, bottles, and duct tape

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

2. Sculpting Body parts with Play Doh

(Grab free printable mats on 123Homeschool4Me)

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

3. Build a functioning heart model

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Of course, these lessons are a little more geared towards younger students, but at the same time, it could provide some inspiration for how to get students more involved in their own learning, just like Duque did.

This article originally appeared six years ago.

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Pop Culture

Millennial shares her spot on theory about why Gen Z 'romanticizes' the early 2010s

Here's why she dubbed it the "last era of sweet delusion."

Giphy

A still from HBO's 'Girls'

Travel back in time to 2010. For millennials entering adulthood, this meant navigating through challenges like the aftermath of the Great Recession, getting their first taste of student loan debt, and becoming increasingly vocal about social and political issues.

But 2010 also ushered in new and novel technologies, like the iPad and Instagram (granted, we might be a little jaded towards these things now, but back then, it felt like the dawning of the golden age). And let’s not forget it brought us some pretty epic pop culture moments: Lady Gaga’s famous meat dress, Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to win best director at the Oscars for The Hurt Locker, the ending of Lost (!), just to name a few. That’s all without taking into account the hope many people felt as Barrack Obama entered his second term.

Point being—even with the not-so-great stuff happening, there were reasons to feel, as 36-year-old Chelsea Fagan puts it, “an ambient level of optimism about the future.” And she theorizes that it’s this feeling Gen Zers long for when they “romanticize” this time period.

Obama Biden GIFfrom Obama GIFs

In a video posted to her Instagram, she really painted the scene of her own experience as a 20-something entering the workforce—oat milk latte in hand, dodging folks on fixie bikes as Passion Pit’s “Sleepy Head” played on full blast, walking into an open space office with industrial lighting and exposed brick to perform her full time gig writing listicles, and, like other millennials, thinking she had “made it.”

“And I really feel for Gen Z,” she said, “that they never got to enjoy that period of just collective delusion, because it was not long for this world.”

"There's just so many ways in which life is more difficult and less hopeful for young people now than it was for millennials,” she would later tellNewsweek. “Even coming out of the recession, I think being in the Obama administration felt very different.”

In the same interview, she surmised that a major culprit behind this longing is our current relationship with technology, which has gone from wonder and interest to codependency.

"We weren't living on social media as much. I think people were more present, living the life that young people today don't get to enjoy as much. There's more anxiety and self-awareness because everything is so performative now."

So far, the reaction to Fagan’s video has been…palpable. By and large, fellow millennials could recall similar sentiments, particularly on the economy and tech front.

“The stock market was growing, jobs were surging, and while affordability wasn’t as good as when we were kids, it wasn’t crushing like it is today. The Affordable Care Act was brand new and still immensely powerful.”

“We were fresh post recession, deep in debt, and YET life was more affordable.”

Happy Birthday Hbd GIFfrom Happy Birthday GIFs

“It was magical. We just had nothing to lose. There were no jobs and our college degrees were useless, but there was also hope that the world WAS becoming a better place. There was a yearning for a simpler time but in a wholesome way, not an alt right way. The lack of opportunities for ‘real jobs’ allowed people to be creative. And we lived an extended childhood because, why not?”

“The internet still seemed positive and hopeful, and not yet soul crushing and exploitative..”

“I miss when the Internet was fun. When chatrooms and games and fun little websites were a great way to learn and play and even meet others.”

Of course, as few pointed out, even this perspective wasn’t necessarily shared by all, especially those who didn’t come from a middle/upper class background. But the point its, it’s understandable that younger generations might envy the positive future-gazing associated with the era.

Interestingly enough, according to data from the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust at Work, a pessimistic outlook mostly belongs to younger Gen-Zs, while the oldest Gen-Zs are incredibly optimistic. If you look elsewhere, you’ll see that, contrary to popular opinion, a majority of Gen Zers actually do believe they can achieve their goals. So, one could argue that while they don’t have that Millennial brand of optimism, it still shows up in its own way. After all, no matter what generation you hail from, aren’t our 20s all about having a “the world sucks, but I’m gonna make it” kind of attitude?

Our 30s on the other hand…that’s a different vibe entirely.

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American English includes one of the rarest sounds on Earth, but we use it all the time

Er…this is odd.

Photo credit: Canva

Learning to make sounds we didn't grow up with can be tricky.

When (or if) kids learn phonics at school, they're taught the symbols that go with sounds of their country's native language or languages. People all around the world grow up learning to make specific sounds with their mouths by imitating the language(s) they are immersed in, which can leave us completely unaware of how many other sounds there are until we hear a language that's far different from our own.

Even the common foreign languages that American school kids learn have sounds that can be tricky to get down. The rolled "r" in Spanish. The nuances of French vowel pronunciations. The glottal stops in German. The sound that's a mix between "r" and "l" in Japanese. And for people learning English, one of the trickiest sounds to get down is "er," as in the American pronunciation of "bird," "world," "summer," or "percent."

Oddly enough, for as common as the "er" sound is in English, it's linguistically rare. According to the Linguistics Channel @human1011, the "er" sound is found in less than 1% of the world's languages, rarer than the click consonants found in some languages in East and Southern Africa.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

As rare as the sound is, there are a lot of people in the world who use it, mainly because it's also used in Mandarin Chinese, or at least many variations of it. So, while there aren't many languages that use it, by sheer numbers of people, it's not that uncommon.

"So, a sound that's so rare that it's in less than 1% of the world's languages just happens to exist in the two most spoken languages on Earth? Can that really be a coincidence?" the @human1011 video asks. Well, yes. English and Chinese don't share a common linguistic root, so those sounds just happened to evolve in very different parts of the planet. According to some people in the comments of the video, there are regional dialects in Brazil where the "er" sound is used and in certain parts of the Netherlands as well.

Pronouncing the "er" sound is hard if you don't grow up with it, largely because it's all about the placement and shape of the tongue inside the mouth combined with the way the lips are positioned. That combination is physically tricky to show someone. This video, from a non-native-English-speaker does a good job of explaining the mouth movements that create the sound.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

What's particularly interesting about the "er" sound in American English is that it functions as a vowel sound. Most of us learned that the vowels in English are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, and that's true as far as written vowels go, but vowel sounds are different. In the word "bird," the letter "i" is a vowel, but doesn't make any of the "i" sounds that we learned in school. Instead, the "ir" combine to make the "er" vowel sound. It's called an r-controlled vowel, and we see it in tons of words like "work," "were," "burn," "skirt," etc.

Learn something new every day, right?

Here's another video that explains the physical aspects of articulating the r-controlled vowel sound.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Most of us don't think about the fact that sounds we pronounce without even thinking about it have to be specifically learned and practiced by people who didn't grow up with them. It's not until we start trying to learn a language that's different from our own that we see how many sounds we have to work hard to make, sometimes even having to train our mouth muscles in ways they've never been used before.

It's also a good reminder to be patient and kind with people who are learning a language. It's not easy, and anyone making an effort to communicate in someone else's language deserves our grace and kudos.

You can follow @human1011 on YouTube for more interesting linguistics trivia.

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Humor

"How to use a printer" satire perfectly captures our frustration with modern technology

There's a word for why everything that should be awesome by now seems to be getting worse.

Canva Photos

Home printers are incredibly frustrating to use, and they aren't getting better.

Anyone who has ever printed a document at home knows the inevitable rage of dealing with your standard home-office inkjet printer. They're clunky, unreliable, and prone to a litany of problems—everything from drivers to ink cartridges to the WIFI is bound to malfunction at some point. And without a usable interface, they're extremely difficult to troubleshoot on your own.

The problem with printers is that they have been around since at least the 80s. And while the technology has improved in some ways, they remain incredibly buggy and difficult, and printer manufacturers have found infuriating ways to make them even more annoying and expensive to use. (Ink cartridge subscriptions, anyone?)

office space, printer, printers, home office, technology, profitsThe boys from Office Space knew how to handle wayward printers.Giphy

But YouTuber Gus Johnson is here to help. He's created a perfectly simple guide for anyone who wants to get their printer set up and begin printing documents. Let's go!

First, Johnson walks us through how to make sure our printer is turned on. It's on? OK, great! Now we're ready to print—well, after the printer installs the 18 mandatory driver updates.

Once those are all done, it's time to print. Except it turns out the ink is low—well, not low, but low-ish, which means the printer won't print until you replace all of the cartridges. And no, you are not allowed to print in black and white if your magenta is low, just so you know.

The cartridges, by the way, are not compatible between printers and often not reliably sold in stores. So, Johnson shows us how to order them online and then wait. Days later, now we're ready to print! Well, after one more new cartridge update installs, and of course given that you can figure out how to get your supposedly "wireless printer" to talk to your laptop.

Johnson's video is a gut-busting watch for anyone who's grappled with a home printer and been tempted to pull an Office Space on it with a hefty baseball bat. Watch the whole thing here:

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Printers are a really complicated piece of technology. But that shouldn't let them off the hook. Most of the problems spoofed in Johnson's video are solvable. And that's exactly the larger issue.

The Wirecutter writes that "there is some amazingly complicated technology in your printer, including the printheads, the ink, and the mapping software. You take your printer for granted, but that box can cover a piece of paper in millions of dots of precisely located, color-matched ink in a few seconds," and that most manufacturers take a loss on the actual machinery of a printer, hoping to recoup the earnings via ink sales later down the road.

If printers were the only piece of technology that seem to get worse and worse, bleeding us for more and more money while offering a rapidly deteriorating product, maybe we'd be willing to spare a few tears for the poor manufacturers. But this is a global problem affecting practically everything we touch—from social media, streaming content, journalism, and even restaurants. We pay more or the same for something that doesn't ever get any better, and often gets worse!

There's a term for this phenomenon. It's officially called "enshittification," or platform decay.

Writer Cory Doctrow, who coined the term, describes the pattern like this: "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

Bill Maher described Silicon Valley's approach to technology as, "If it ain't broke, f*ck with it."

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Doctrow even mentioned printers specifically in a recent Medium post:

"They make printer-scanners that won’t scan unless all four ink cartridges are installed and haven’t reached their best-before dates. They make printers that won’t print black and white if your $50 magenta cartridge is low. They sell you printers with special half-full cartridges that need to be replaced pretty much as soon as the printer has run off its mandatory 'calibration' pages. The full-serving ink you buy to replace those special demitasse cartridges is also booby-trapped — HP reports them as empty when they’re still 20% full. ... HP tricks customers into signing up for irrevocable subscriptions where you have to pay every month, whether or not you print, and if you exceed your subscription cap, the printer refuses to work, no matter how much ink is left."

Ink is outrageously expensive, but the printer companies exploit copyright laws to make sure you can't buy third party cartridges. When that fails, they push out security updates that break compatibility with anything but their own ink cartridges. These kinds of offenses go on and on.

In other words, long ago it was very exciting that we were able to print our own documents at home. Initial innovations focused on making that process better and better. But we're long past that now and the problems with most home printers will probably remain forever, or as long as manufacturers think they can keep squeezing our wallets. They're not really incentivized to make a printer that actually uses 100% of an ink cartridge or reliably connects to WIFI—they just want to make sure we buy the next one.

Johnson's YouTube rant is so funny precisely because it's true, but also because it finds humor in the frustration we all share at this cycle of enshittification. If we can't get our $300 printer to reliably spit out a basic black and white document, at least we can all laugh at our shared misery.

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A former hoarder gives life-changing hacks on how to declutter your world

"I was literally drowning in clutter."

Photo by Samet Kurtkus on Unsplash

A hoarder's home.

Sometimes, it simply starts with one pile. Some receipts, pay stubs, and bills. Then another pile forms—a shirt you meant to hang up, some workout gear. The piles begin to multiply, and before you know it, they've erupted like tiny volcanoes spewing lava (and junk) around your home. If you don’t even know where to begin in terms of clean-up, you're not alone.

cleaning, clutter, piles, hoarding, hoarderCleaning Hoarding GIF by 60 Second DocsGiphy

Mai Zimmy, on the TikTok page Mom Life & Cleaning, knows this feeling all too well. With over 400,000 followers and 9.1 million likes, she's living proof that an inability to organize is more common than one might think. In one post, she confesses that she was once a hoarder while showing screenshots of her cluttered house in 2020. Her voiceover exclaims, "I was literally drowning in clutter" as the camera pans over a junk-filled bathtub she dubs the "trash tub."

Now, just a few years later, she has helpful tips on how to remedy the situation. She mentions, right off the bat, that she learned the fundamental methods from "Queen" Marie Kondo. Questions like "Does it spark joy? Have you used/worked with it in the last year? Remove duplicates" and more, made famous by Kondo, help her begin. This leads to the truthful realization, "You can't clean clutter."

The first step, she says, is to "Learn to let go." Per Kondo, she shows how to put things into categories and work through them one step at a time.

@maizimmy

Ok. Maybe I was 1% of the problem 😆😅 people ask me all the time how I got my house in order when it was SO FAR GONE. The decluttering and cleaning schedule was HUGE. But even more than that was how my life has changed and just gotten easier over time. The babies aren’t helpless babies forever. It gets easier there for sure one they are in grade school. Plus, the obvious elephant in the room 😅 being a divorced mom in MY situation is about 100 times easier than what I was going through as a “married single mom”. I by no means want to promote divorce, but I do want to promote healthy marriages. No marriage counselor would have ever said my marriage was healthy and that is abundantly clear with how stress free life feels after leaving. #momlife #motherhood #cleantok #cleaningmotivation #cleanwithme #declutter @Procter & Gamble @Clorox

Step two is to "Implement a cleaning schedule." The idea is for that decluttering becomes an actual habit, etched into your mind. She urges people to "find cleaning schedules that work for you." She writes over a cleaning video, "I personally aim to do a nightly reset of the kitchen and living room before bed because these are the most-used parts of my home." She adds, "Then I have my weekly 1.5-hour reset and the occasional 'panic clean' before people come over lol."

Zimmy tells us that the third step is the most important to remember: "Give yourself some grace." She confesses, "When my home was at its worst, I was a 'married single mom' of three kids, two and under." She further relays that she had a full-time job, only to come home "to the second shift of taking care of everything for everyone." She then, adorably, throws some clothes into drawers, writing she still believes in the #NoFoldMethod.

She stresses the idea that "sometimes we're just in the thick of it. Things won't be so crazy forever, and to make the effort to do what you can in the free moments you have." She jokes, "As kids grow and life sorts itself out, you'll realize you were never the problem. Everyone else was." (She then notes in her TikTok description, "Okay, maybe I was ONE percent of the problem.")

Many in the comments seemed to really connect to her use of the phrase "married single mom." Zimmy also writes, "I by no means want to promote divorce, but I do want to promote healthy marriages. No marriage counselor would have ever said my marriage was healthy, and that is abundantly clear with how stress-free life feels after leaving."

In Zimmy's vulnerability, she gets to the root of what was or wasn’t working for her without vilifying anyone. Decluttering is so much more than tidying up, and many therapists explain what it can do to lift depression and anxiety. In her piece "The Many Mental Benefits of Decluttering" for Psychology Today, Diane Roberts Stoler, Ed.D. writes, "Excessive clutter often leads to feelings of shame, hopelessness, and guilt. The feelings can spiral, making it difficult to find the motivation to address the clutter. If someone is already suffering from depression, a cluttered home can worsen that depression. It is often a cycle. The more depressed you get, the harder it is to clean and organize."

Big and small changes, with a game plan and grace for yourself, can help break the shame spiral and get your living space actually "livable" again.

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