Chella Quint celebrates Fashion Week, recently ended in London and New York, with clot couture.
StainsTM. A removable stain to wear on your own clothing as you see fit. A fashion statement that really says something, and that something is, ‘Screw you, Madison Avenue. I’m taking this one back. I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve and my blood on my pants. I’m gonna reclaim the stain, reclaim my blood, and reclaim my period.’ Because people, I’m telling you red is the new black.
Umbra Fisk is a character developed at Grist TV (and performed by Jennifer Prediger) who brings a surprising smile to a movement more familiar with a Green grimace. Her Ask Umbra videos appear often enough to remind us how to bike to work safely or enlighten us on growing food in your apartment. In her latest video, she describes how to make lube from flax seed. As she explains, personal lubricants are loaded with petrochemicals that one might otherwise find in brake fluid and antifreeze. The recipe is as quick and easy as her messages and welcome humor. Thanks Umbra for bringing on the Omega 3′s and helping us all avoid “Toxic Hoo-Ha Syndrome.”
Because the endometrium, the lining of the uterus, regenerates each month, some researchers believe menstrual blood may be a viable source of stem cells. Stem cells have been found in the uterine lining, although it is uncertain whether healthy, viable stem cells are shed with other menstrual fluids. The research is ongoing. So Chelsea Briganti, senior at Parsons School of Design, may be ahead of her time.
Her senior thesis involves the design of a storage container to preserve menstrual fluid for later use. Her idea is to develop a design for a successful consumer product. If you’d like to help her out, click here to complete a short survey (only five questions) and contribute to her data set.
Confidential to Chelsea: Please let us know when you no longer need survey respondents.
You’ll also be helping with science: Ariel intends to post the top ten reasons given by age range, so we can see why women of all ages support reusable options during their periods.
I don’t want to horn in on re:Cycling readers’ chance to win, so I just zipped over to Metrokitty’s site and shelled out $2 for a copy.
We’ve mentioned Elizabeth Scharpf’s SHE (Sustainable Health Enterprises) at re:Cycling before. In 2009, Scharpf won the inaugural Harvard Business School Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship for her project helping local women in developing countries “jump-start their own businesses to manufacture and distribute affordable, quality, and eco-friendly sanitary pads.” This is a truly innovative program, combining microloans with the use of local raw materials (instead of imported materials) to ensure affordability and accessibility – quite different than Proctor & Gamble’s “Protecting Futures” campaign of a few years ago.
Scharpf is currently working in Rwanda, helping local women set up business making sanitary pads out of banana tree trunks. Using banana tree trunks – a part of the plant that is normally trashed – means more use is made of an existing cash crop while the expense of importing raw materials is eliminated.
A brief story about Scharpf and her work is featured in the February 2010 issue of Marie Claire magazine. I’m glad to see this project getting more publicity. (Story is not yet online, but you can view a PDF here.) The article is online here.
If you’re anywhere near NYC, don’t miss this opportunity to see our friend Chella Quint perform tonight at Bluestockings. She will be reading from Issue #5 of Adventures in Menstruating, her awesome period-powered zine, at 7pm on Tuesday, December 29th, at the Women’s/Trans’ Poetry Jam and Open Mike. Bluestockings Radical Books is located at 172 Allen St., New York, NY 10012.
*(I really did type “cosmetetical”. Readers under the age of 40 and/or outside the U.S. can find the origin of the term here.)
Guest Post by David Linton, Marymount Manhattan College
Here’s where exploitation and menstrual activism crash into each other. While activists have been diligently working to reduce the “Ewww” factor so that women are not treated with disgust when (and because!) they menstruate, commercial interests have been just as diligently striving to find new ways to cash in on the period.
One of the newest gambits is found at an online beauty products site called M.S. Apothecary promoting a service that been around for a few years, C’ELLE®. C’ELLE® offers to cryogenically freeze the stem cells found in menstrual blood for future use. Originally the pitch for C’ELLE® focused mostly on the potential of stem cells to yield material that can be used to treat diseases, once medical science discovers a way to use them. Meanwhile, the material is judiciously stored away in one’s “portfolio.” The initial cost is described as a “special introductory rate for new clients” of $499, although the price hasn’t changed in more than a year. Following the first year there is a yearly storage charge of $99 that is subject to later increases.
The connection between a menstrual blood collection service and a beauty store comes in the way the service is described in the link that is posted on the M.S. Apothecary site:
Begin your beauty from the inside out. C’ELLE®, a revolutionary service that empowers women to take charge of their future health and beauty, allows for the collection and preservation of their precious stem cells. With C’ELLE’s® exclusive process and step-by-step instructions, any woman experiencing menstruation can easily and painlessly gather her own stem cells in the comfort of her own home. In the future, these cells may be the basis of medical treatments for threatening diseases, personalized cosmeceuticals and regenerative medical procedures, providing the potential for living a longer, healthier life.
It remains to be seen if menstruation will eventually come to be seen widely as a source of beauty “from the inside out,” but this is not the first time that menses and fashion have been linked. In the early 1990’s the sketch comedy series In Living Color ran several skits featuring menstruation. The fashion statement depicted in this one might be compatible with the pitch for menstrual blood collection.
*I really did type “cosmetetical”. Readers under the age of 40 and/or outside the U.S. can find the origin of the term here.
So I heard there are a couple of big holidays this month that involve elaborate (or not-so-elaborate) decoration of one’s home. Perhaps you’re the crafty sort, and would like to make your own holiday decorations; Tampon Crafts is the web site you’ve been looking for!
My personal favorite is the tampon lights pictured at right, but the site also offers instructions to make a tampon menorah, angels, snowflakes, and more. There are seasonal tampon crafts for the entire year.
What a great way to recycle all those extra tampons lying around after you’ve switched to cloth pads and/or menstrual cups!
In Rwanda, Harvard Business School Fellow Elizabeth Scharpf is breaking menstrual silence and challenging female poverty with the Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) program. SHE helps local women in developing countries “jump-start their own businesses to manufacture and distribute affordable, quality, and eco-friendly sanitary pads.” This truly innovative program combines microloans with the use of local raw materials (instead of imported materials) to ensure affordability and accessibility.
In our previous post on this topic, Chris theorized, not unreasonably, that cramps and menstrual silence play at least as big a role as lack of menstrual products in keeping girls out of school in developing nations.
Despite tax waivers introduced to reduce the cost of sanitary pads, finding money to buy them each month is a challenge for many grown women, never mind pre-teen girls.
A packet of sanitary pads costs the equivalent of $1.50 in Uganda – for the same amount you could get a kilo of sugar for the whole household. Girls whose parents can’t afford to give them the money improvise with strips of toilet paper or old cloth. [. . . .]
As Chris suggested in her post, the solution is about communication as much as it is about resources; FAWE found this to be true among the girls they studied in Uganda. The silences and taboos around menstruation make it difficult for girls to ask their parents for money to buy pads. FAWE has launched a campaign to de-stigmatise menstruation through educating girls. They’ve started a “girl education movement”, organizing clubs in schools, and teaching girls that menstruation is is a normal occurrence, nothing to be scared of or ashamed of.
You can’t ask for help if you can’t talk about it.
For your seasonal pleasure, I bring you cloth menstrual pads decorated with Dia de los Muertos motifs (with thanks to Lisa, one of my Women’s & Gender Studies alumnae). These handmade pads are available at Etsy (of course!), either individually or as a set with several different sizes for your menstruating convenience.
Soft flannel or terrycloth pads are far more comfortable than paper, as well as more economical and better for the environment. If you’re going to use cloth pads, you may as well have some fun with them! CherryRiot, the Etsy seller who makes these beauties, also offers mentrual pads with tattoo themes, cherry blossoms, and other designs, as well as plain red.
Readers should note that statements published in re: Cycling are those of individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Society as a whole.
