Q. WFH boundaries: My husband and I are both working from home due to COVID. Things have been rocky at best. My husband works in a room that is his dedicated office. We don’t have the space for a dedicated office for me as well, so I usually work throughout the house and oftentimes in our bedroom. My husband just does not seem to understand that I am working during the day and will often walk into a room and start asking me questions or make small talk. He also will open the door if I have it closed, without knocking or announcing himself. I have tried talking to him about this many times and I have asked him repeatedly that if he needs something or if he wants to take a break to talk, to send me a text message before just barging in. He feels that it is insulting that I don’t want to talk to him and that he “has to ask permission” to talk to me.

Am I being unreasonable? Is it too much to ask that I have space to work without being interrupted? I understand that working from home means many people have fewer social interactions outside of the household, but I can’t just be available to my husband at all times during the work day. If I am not being completely crazy in asking for this, how can I get my husband to actually respect my boundaries? Please help!

Religious orders are supposed to provide spiritual guidance to those who join. But some of the women who entered Sisters Minor of Mary Immaculate (SMMI) say they faced physical and emotional abuse.

Patricia Budd, one of the former nuns of SMMI, first entered in 1995 in hopes of connecting with her Catholicism. It was at her first retreat where she met the order’s U.S. delegate, Sister Theresa Kovacs.

“It was a lot of hugs. There was a lot of encouragement,” Budd told HuffPost. “They would listen to you, and you felt really important, and you felt like you’re valued.” But soon after she joined, Budd and the other nuns realized things were not as they seemed.

“I witnessed other girls just being yelled at on a constant basis by Theresa Kovacs,” said Rose, who joined SMMI in 1995. (Three interviewees asked to only be identified by their first names.) According to Rose, a sister named Georgiana often got the brunt of Kovacs’ anger.

“It would be a torrent of the nastiest stuff you could ever say to a human being, she would say to me,” said Georgiana. “It was meant to keep people in line.”

The nuns faced strict rules. They weren’t allowed to speak to each other. They weren’t allowed to go for walks outside the convent doors.

“Basically your food is pretty much less and less,” she said. “And so, that’s pretty much like what a cult is — and break you down. That’s the whole thing. Always to break you down.”

We know that women make less than men during the best of times—in 2018 women’s weekly wages were 81.1% that of men, according to a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. During this recession not only were sectors with higher proportions of female employees disproportionately affected, but female employees have been disproportionately more likely to be laid off than their male counterparts. Women-owned businesses are also more likely to be in the healthcare, education, or retail sectors that have been so hard hit during COVID-19. Partially due to lower income overall, women also tend to have less buffer to weather financial storms.

This paints a dire picture for women’s mental health. We can readily empathize with financial strain, the fear that accompanies it and the catastrophic negative impact it can have on mental health. We may also appreciate that despite the reluctance we might frequently feel to get out of bed and go to work on a Monday morning, there is a well-established link between employment and mental health. We know that becoming unemployed is associated with depression and suicidality, and that gaining employment is associated with an improvement in mental health. Furthermore, in a socially distanced world in which women are substantially less able to receive household help or have contact with females outside their immediate household, there is a greater burden on the support that partners provide. Unfortunately, we know that within relationships, financial concerns are a major driver of conflict between partners, jeopardizing the support available to struggling mothers.

Dan only lives two streets away from me, so I can’t just blame bad luck when I bump into him on the way to the shop wearing the “Don’t Mess With Yorkshire” novelty T-shirt my dad bought me when I moved to London. Dan swings over on his bike, the two corners of his checked shirt flapping in the wind, like a character from a Harmony Korine film.

“How’s it going, B?” he asks, and I’m so embarrassed by my appearance I want to dissolve into the sewer grate under my feet.

For some reason, I invite him over again. He says he’ll be over in 20 minutes, so I shave my legs over the bath, rub cream blush into my cheeks, put on this powder-blue ribbed lounge set that I saw on Instagram.

“I might actually just go to sleep,” he texts me five minutes later, and I just say, “No worries,” because how can you get annoyed at someone you’re not supposed to rely on? But then he says: “If you send me a nude, I might change my mind.” I take a selfie of me with my top open so you can see my boobs, another with the camera balancing on the radiator with me bent down in front of it. “Damn,” he said. “I’ll let you know what I’m doing in a bit.”

Hip hip hooray!

People with chunky thighs or large hips are less likely to die early compared to those with bigger bellies, a new study suggests.

The study, published this week in the medical journal BMJ, says that central fatness or fat stored around the abdomen is associated with a higher risk of early death from any cause — regardless of overall body fat – while larger hips and thighs are associated with a lower risk.

The coronavirus pandemic and the anxieties it’s triggered have pretty much stolen my mojo. But pre-pandemic, evening sex, post-dinner and drinks, was absolutely my jam. My partner, on the other hand, was always more down to bone morning or night. I’ve been pondering the cause of my erstwhile evening horniness, and why the time of day didn’t matter as much for my partner. My bigger question: What determines whether you’re horny in the morning or at night?

Dear How to Do It,

I’m a 36-year-old single straight woman, and I really didn’t think this was going to be an issue until later in life. I’m a very sexual person (just reading about sex in your column is enough to turn me on) and I’d like to get married one day, but for the past few years, I haven’t even been able to manage halfway decent sex, much less great sex or a relationship. The problem I keep experiencing in the dating world is the same: men with all kinds of erection issues.

The most recent guy could get hard but would lose it after a few thrusts, saying sex doesn’t do it for him these days (he preferred mutual masturbation or blow jobs). Guy No. 2 was good in bed but refused any touching outside of that 20 minutes. Guy No. 3 required 20 minutes of me going down on his flaccid penis before possibly getting hard enough to have intercourse for three minutes (most of the time, he wouldn’t get hard at all). Guy No. 4 hadn’t had sex in years so he’d either come in 30 seconds or he’d stick it in and barely move so he could last five minutes (I could have worked with him sexually, but we broke up for other reasons). Guy No. 5 completely ignored his problem, continuing to thrust even after I told him he was soft (I suspect he had a porn addiction).

The list goes on. I’ve barely had any good sex in the past six years. I don’t know what to do. These guys are all my age or younger. I try to be patient and understanding, asking if there’s something they’d like me to do or offering up a menu of things they might like, but most just shrug awkwardly and avoid talking about it. None of them sound like they’ve made any effort to get help. I get that it can be embarrassing and men might feel ashamed, but these guys keep cropping up in my dating pool. I can orgasm on my own, but I crave and miss sex, and I know I wouldn’t be happy in a relationship without it. So I’m stuck in a lonely, sexually frustrated land and I can’t get out. Any suggestions?

—Elusive Wood

After years of decline, rates of congenital syphilis are once again on the rise in the US. According to an analysis published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on June 5, cases of congenital syphilis—or a syphilis infection passed from mother to baby during pregnancy—rose 261% from 2013-2018, from 362 cases to 1,306 cases. Of those 1,306 cases in 2018, the CDC reported 94 resulted in stillbirths or early infant deaths.

“This is the highest number of congenital syphilis cases reported in the US since 1995,” Anne Kimball, MD, MPH, who works in the CDC's Division of Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention, tells Health. “The rise in congenital syphilis parallels an increase in syphilis among women overall, so the increase is largely because more women of reproductive age (15-44) are getting syphilis. In fact, the US rate of primary and secondary syphilis has increased almost every year for nearly 20 years.”

Bigger is better — to a point.

In a time where easily sharable video provides weekly, if not daily, evidence of America’s violent racism, a constant cacophony of individual voices respond in real-time. At the beginning of this week, the conversation-provoking event was a video of a white woman, Amy Cooper, calling the police to claim her life was being threatened by Christian Cooper, a black man peacefully watching birds in Central Park. That news was followed quickly by the excruciating footage of the police killing George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. These videos have sparked protests, demands for America to address its deadly racism, and a certain kind of social media scolding, often openly addressed to “Fellow White Women.”

For as long as social media has provided a platform for activism, slactivism, and sometimes outright grandstanding, the phrase has popped up. But since the 2016 election, when white women proved to be the tipping demographic in the election of bigoted game show host Donald Trump as President of the United States, it seems to have come into heavy usage.

An Indonesian official has been ridiculed after she warned women that they could get pregnant from swimming in the same pool where men with “very strong” sperm ejaculate, according to reports.

Sitti Hikmawatty, a senior child protection official, made the unscientific claim in an interview last week with the local Tribunnews.com, according to Agence France-Presse.

“In a swimming pool, there’s a certain kind of sperm that is very strong,” Sitti told the news outlet during a video interview about teen pregnancies.

“If a person is aroused and ejaculates (in the pool) a pregnancy can happen even though there is no sexual penetration,” she said.

The number of women dying each year due to pregnancy or childbirth in the United States has remained steady and some women remain more at risk of death than others, according to a new government report.

In 2018, the year with the most recent national data, a total of 658 women in the United States died while pregnant or within 42 days of the end of pregnancy, according to new data published in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Vital Statistics Reports released on Thursday.

Maternal death was defined as the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of being pregnant, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or the management of the pregnancy. These maternal deaths in the new report do not include women who died by suicide or homicide.

In 2018, there were 17.4 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in the United States, according to the report. When that number was broken down by race and age, significant disparities emerged.

Getting married is like voluntarily committing oneself to ride a tandem bike forever with no real destination. When one person gets tired, the other has to pedal harder or the entire operation collapses, and most divorce proceedings are just both partners yelling that if the other had pedaled hard enough then the bike would still be moving. Perhaps the appeal of living apart together (LAT) is avoiding this pressure for married couples to constantly synch up and operate in tandem rather than operating as separate entities that come together when it suits. LAT seems like an ideal solution for many of the problems that arise over the course of a marriage, affording the opportunity to be responsible for one’s own bike without having any reason to critique anyone else’s peddling.

Joanna Williams was raised a feminist. But these days, she hesitates to identify as one.

The author and academic thinks today's feminism "lost the plot somewhere along the line," describing it as a "white middle class feminism."

"[It] seems intent upon telling women that they are victims, that they are vulnerable, that they need special protections," she says. "For me, feminism was always about fighting for liberation."

Allergan announced a worldwide recall of textured breast implants Wednesday after the Food and Drug Administration found a sharp increase in a rare cancer and deaths linked to the products and asked the company to pull them off the U.S. market.

The Dublin-based company said it is recalling Biocell textured breast implants and tissue expanders from all markets in which they are sold. The devices had already been banned or recalled in several countries.

The FDA said the new data shows that 573 cases worldwide have linked the rare cancer to the implants since the agency began tracking the issue in 2011. The vast majority of those cases involve Allergan products. Thirty-three women have died of what’s known as breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. Of those fatalities, authorities identified the implant manufacturer in 13 cases — and it was Allergan in all but one.