Welcome to Our Bodies Ourselves Today!

September 9, 2022

A banner that says "Our Bodies Ourselves Today We're Back." The background is a blue to green gradient

Dear Readers, 

We are thrilled to welcome you to Our Bodies Ourselves Today, a unique and trustworthy guide to your body and sexuality for women, girls, and gender-expansive people. Our work builds on the original Our Bodies, Ourselves, the bible of the 20th century feminist health movement, which offered women the freedom that grew from understanding and honoring their bodies and themselves. 

Today we face a grim reality in the USA, and Our Bodies Ourselves Today is here to meet the moment. Women, girls, and gender expansive people are facing all manner of backlash, as part of the larger political attack on our multiracial democracy. Our post-Roe nation has rolled back the clock by stripping away 50 years of reproductive rights for half of the population. Libraries and schools are enduring an unprecedented wave of racist, homophobic, and transphobic book banning – over 1,500 books in just the last year. We’re living through an onslaught of anti-LGBTQ laws, more than at any time in history. And we’re on track to break last year’s record; as of April 2022, reactionary legislators had proposed at least 325 such bills, with about 130 targeting transgender rights specifically. 

In this increasingly hostile political and social environment, fraught with disinformation, it is critical that people searching for information about their bodies, health, and sexuality have access to trusted and accurate resources. Just as the original Our Bodies, Ourselves,  was a revolutionary document, our site promises to throw open the doors to women, girls, and gender expansive people who need this information for their very survival. 

Our Bodies Ourselves Today is a digital platform featuring expert analysis, personal stories, and decades of research about the health of women, girls, and gender-expansive people. We provide feminist, intersectional, accurate resources, and are launching with nine core areas: Abortion and Contraception, Gender-based Violence, Growing Older, Heart Health, Menstruation through Menopause, Mental Health, Pregnancy and Childbirth, Sexual Anatomy, and Sexuality. 

With a simple search, you can dive deep and explore your topics of interest. We’ve done the digging for you. Our content has been curated by panels of diverse experts from across medicine, advocacy, mental health, law, policy, and lived personal experience. Moreover, we see this as a living site, where we will regularly update the platform to answer even more of your questions. 

Knowledge is power, and the kind of knowledge in Our Bodies Ourselves Today can fortify us against those who want to subject girls and women to forced pregnancy and all it entails, send LGBTQ people back in the closet, and relegate BIPOC people to utter subjugation. This knowledge can also help us explore our sexual desires, cope with our mental or menstrual suffering, choose the best birth control for us, and figure out if we have a urinary tract infection or just yeast.

Our work is grounded in the feminist human rights principle that all people have a right to the highest attainable standards of physical, mental, and sexual health. As educators, we know that knowledge can be revolutionary–because we see it every day. We want this site to be a north star in this period of disinformation and insecurity, as we lift up the many amazing people and groups who are doing the work in honorable ways. We plan to deliver on promise by offering meaningful, relevant, and useful resources. And we hope that everyone who visits the site sees themself reflected in its content. Whatever your age, race, class, ability, sexuality, gender, or location, we developed this site with you in mind. 

We are honored to offer the Our Bodies Ourselves Today platform, and to work with such brilliant co-conspirators. Look around–there’s lots to see here. Let us know what you think, and share the site with your friends, colleagues, and loved ones. (You can even share it with your not-so-loved ones.) Together, we can make things a little bit better. Or a lot.

 

In Solidarity, 

Amy & Saniya
Executive Director & Program Director of Our Bodies Ourselves Today
Suffolk University
Boston, USA