Everyone loves to talk about Norwegian welfare as the pinnacle of social policy while conveniently forgetting that it’s a tiny country of 5.5 million people backed by a trillion dollars of oil money from the state.

Edit: I love how everyone glosses over the population size as if it has nothing to do with policy making and the politically stagnant environment of the US.

The same top doctors and scientists responsible for perpetuating systemic biases in modern medicine against women and POC?

The same top doctors and scientists responsible for diagnosing 16x more boys than girls with ADHD because of antiquated diagnostic criteria that were solely based on white teenage boys?

The same top doctors and scientists who treat every woman with abdominal pain as a drama queen while they suffer from ruptured appendices and endometriosis?

The same top doctors and scientists who treat chronically ill patients as drug seeking hypochondriacs instead as people who have been failed by a medical system that does not treat them as reliable witnesses to their own bodies?

There’s a certain kind of privilege to be able to hold such confidence in the medical system without having to worry about medical gaslighting and abuse, and then use it to ridicule people who have been subjected to mistreatment.

Make no mistake, I’m pro-vaccination and pro-science. But scientists and doctors are human with human biases, and it is reflected in the quality of care received by people who are the subject of implicit and explicit biases.

AI slop. Get this shit out of here.

We don’t have to romanticize the present either.

People still work 10-12 hours a week except they still have to buy their own groceries, cook food, clean the house, take care of their kids, and every other logistic that goes into housework. The idea that people always worked more and had less leisurely time in the past is one often used to downplay the impact of unpaid female domestic labor in the past to justify to expecting it of every person in the present.

Moreover, preindustrial workers only worked 1440 hours annually compared to the modern standard of 2080 hours. And that does not even include unpaid domestic labor.

Yes, it’s great to have all the social advances and modern comforts that we do. But humans are not machines where by indefinitely increase our quality of life we can expect an indefinite increase in hours worked. Just because we have smartphones, AC, cars, and whatever modern luxury you want to include, it doesn’t mean that suddenly we can work 12 hours a day every day and mentally stay sane.

The idea that people before us lived worse lives is one often used to obscure the clinical nature of standards we attribute to quality of life such as lifespan, infant mortality, food security, and housing. This is because it allows corporations to trivialize the impact of doubling the workload by normalizing the 40 hour work week and housework and child care, what used to be two people’s worth of work, into one.

Are we living ‘better’ lives? On paper, sure. Are we living happier lives? That’s hard to say.

Girl boring guy quirky.

I’ll take a dog over a kid screeching in a store.

This says more about how women are socially pressured to wear make up, dress well, wax, and de-age themselves or risk being labeled as ‘unwomanly’ or become irrelevant.

How many men do you know feel pressured to put the same effort into their appearances as the average woman does?

And don’t tell me how working out counts. One, there are zero health benefits to putting on make up. Two, women are incessantly reminded about losing weight rather than just be healthy whether it’s from the media, advertisements, or just people using ‘fat’ as an insult especially for middle aged women.

How often do you hear old women being complimented on their appearances compared to old men? Forget about appearances, how often are they relevant in conversations? Invisible Woman Syndrome is almost like a super power.

Fun fact: women spend more time refuting casually sexist claims than men spend making them.