👋🏼 Hey ladies!

Welcome to Bodytalk, where we discuss the realities of women’s health, culture, and more. This is our space: To unpack the double standards, to confront the misinformation, and to open up about the things we’ve been told are “TMI”.

Raise your hand if the “toxic mom group” drama has been plastered all over your feeds 🙋🏼‍♀️.

Yup, same. And listen: I love a good celeb gossip moment, but something about this one has really rubbed me the wrong way, and I’m getting into it below.

But on the flip side, I’m cheering for something else that happened in the celeb world. Because a certain star just did something that honestly chipped away at a body insecurity I’ve had for….well, basically my entire life.

Anyway, enough preamble. Let’s chat 🗣️

Dr. Janell Green Smith made combatting the maternal mortality crisis — which disproportionately affects Black women — her life’s work. On January 2, Smith died of childbirth complications during her first child’s birth. She was 31 years old.

Smith was a Black midwife and a maternal health advocate — a person who could have made so many more strides in the fight against Black maternal mortality had she not been a victim of the very thing she worked to prevent. Her death isn’t just a tragedy; it’s also an infuriating wake-up call.

A tribute from The American College of Nurse-Midwives states: “That a Black midwife and maternal health expert died after giving birth in the United States is both heartbreaking and unacceptable. Her death underscores the persistent and well-documented reality that Black women—regardless of education, income, or professional expertise—face disproportionate risks during pregnancy and childbirth due to systemic racism and failures in care.”

And that’s just what it is: Smith had all the education and information and tools, yet it wasn’t enough. Read more.

🔎 Ask Clara: What is the maternal mortality crisis?

I grew up on female frenemy stories. There was Gossip Girl’s Blair and Serena, One Tree Hill’s Peyton and Brooke, Laguna Beach’s Lauren and Kristin (and eventually Lauren and Heidi, IYKYK). 

Pitting women against one another is the patriarchy’s favorite tool, yet women devour the “fraught female friendship” trope with a special kind of glee (and listen — I’m not above this myself!). 

That’s why I’m not surprised at all by the virality of the article Ashley French (better known as Ashley Tisdale) wrote. It’s the intersection of juicy celeb gossip and “hey, what a perfect opportunity to pit women against one another”, two things we love on a cultural level.

But the thing that is so striking to me about the whole “toxic friend group” debacle is that while my fellow millennial women and I have grown up, the frenemy obsession hasn’t evolved much. We still love to pick sides and dig into the details and assign the “mean girl” label. If reactions to this story are any indication, we’re not shaking the frenemy obsession anytime soon. 

Why does this matter? Well, because female friendships deserve better PR. They aren’t just nice to have, they actually bring so many important health benefits. Read more.

 🔎 Ask Clara: What are the benefits of female friendship?

The idea that tanning beds can increase your risk of melanoma is nothing new. We of course know that when it comes to skin safety, both natural sunlight and tanning beds carry significant risks — risks that outweigh the aesthetic benefits of a golden glow. But, important update time: New research suggests that tanning beds present even greater dangers than we anticipated.

Recent research from Northwestern Medicine and University of California, San Francisco finds evidence to challenge a long-held belief that tanning beds are no more dangerous than sunlight.

The study's first author, Pedram Gerami, MD, has noticed high numbers of women under 50 with histories of multiple melanomas in his work. This inspired Dr. Gerami and his research team to compare medical records of tanning bed users against records of those with no history of indoor tanning. Melanoma was diagnosed in 5.1 percent of tanning bed users compared to 2.1 percent of non-users observed. 

Dr. Gerami and his team were able to learn more thanks to the women who donated their biopsies to help him better understand this relationship. 

In an abstract for this news, the researchers point out a few things: One, the indoor tanning industry is making a comeback. Two, many of the women who had melanoma later in life started tanning in their teens. Dr. Gerami believes at the very least, indoor tanning should be illegal for minors. To me, this makes perfect sense: Minors don’t have the ability to truly understand the lifelong risks. And if this research is any indication, they’re even greater than we previously thought.

What’s the takeaway here? You may be seeing indoor tanning places pop up, but please consider this research before tanning this way. And also, let’s take this deeper: This represents yet another way women put themselves at risk in pursuit of an unrealistic beauty standard. Read more.

🔎 Ask Clara: What’s the safest way to tan?

I have a confession: I have always, always been very self-conscious of my stomach. It’s just…never been flat. Not when I was a teenager, and certainly not after birthing twins.

For most of my life, I’ve felt like I’m the odd one out, probably because I’ve been fed so many images of perfectly flat, edited, airbrushed images. And clearly, those images have affected the way we expect women’s bodies to look.

See: The fact that when a woman dares to have a visible belly outline, the world loves to tell her she “looks pregnant”. This recently happened to Ilona Maher, our body inclusive queen who always, always has the perfect clap back. Here’s the comment she directed to the man (of course it was a man) who body-shamed her.

“So to him, I say, ‘That's just a normal woman's body. You probably haven't seen a woman naked in a long time, if ever, and I hope you never get the privilege to again, 'cause that's just how we are, okay?’ ” Maher said.

And you know what? Heck yes! This is what a normal, healthy, strong body looks like.

We have been so conditioned to think we have to hide any shape through our bellies away from the world, or do a cleanse before we’re going to be in a bikini, or suck it in at all times. But the reality is, bellies have a whole range of shapes and it’s all normal. Read more.

🔎 Ask Clara: Why is my stomach not flat?