Blog of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research

On Menopause Definitions

December 28th, 2011 by Elizabeth Kissling

Guest Post by Paula S. Derry, Ph.D.

In a recent blog post, Heather Dillaway commented on the uncertainty, confusion, and frustration she felt as a menopause researcher, given the lack of consensus about the most basic aspects of the menopause transition. Researchers don’t agree about their definitions, and can’t even agree on what needs to be defined. She asked for reactions to her entry; I’ve found that my reaction has grown into this separate post.

Fire in the Head by Beate Knappe // CC 2.0

I, unlike Heather, am not a sociologist. I’m a health psychologist. My training and current work include analyzing, critiquing, and making sense of experimental research and theories. I have also developed workshops for community women and for professionals whose aim is to provide health-promoting information and decision-making heuristics. I have given a lot of thought to the issues that Heather raises, and this is as far as I’ve gotten with them.

To me, there are many layers of issues involved. The first is the fact that the science — about the physiology of menopause and the processes leading up to it — is limited and incomplete. Part of the reason that professionals disagree about whether the life course of menstruation has five stages or seven, or why women have hot flashes, or even why women have a menopause, is that we don’t actually know. We simply do not have the scientific facts. We don’t understand what the underlying process is or how it works. Given this uncertainty, professionals must make judgments about how to define terms and what their hypotheses (or best guesses) are about underlying processes. A second fact, along with our limited real knowledge, is the tenacity with which professionals assert their judgments and argue against competing views. People disagree and they hold strongly to their positions—about language and the facts. To me, it makes sense to have definitions of stages of menstrual life that are objective and easily measurable (like the STRAW staging system) for researchers who need to compare results with each other. It doesn’t make sense to assert that this system, based on expert opinion and not on experimental facts, actually defines when a particular stage really “begins.” It makes sense to say that experimental research supports the idea that changes in the thermoregulatory center of the hypothalamus are important processes if you’re trying to understand hot flashes.  It does not make sense to conclude that these brain changes in themselves explain hot flashes; other factors must also be involved.

I think another source of confusion is that menopause is not one thing, but many. It is a circumscribed biological change (lack of periods and what leads up to them physiologically) and also a psychosociocultural matter. We have a term for when girls begin to menstruate (menarche), a separate term for the larger biological changes of which menarche is a part (puberty), and another term for the biopsychosociocultural changes of which puberty is a part (adolescence). I think these kinds of distinctions are confused with regard to understanding menopause in part because there is cultural confusion about midlife (or mature adulthood or whatever term you use) as a life stage.  There is no cultural consensus about this stage of life.  And, indeed, this isn’t surprising.  Some women are planning retirement while others are training for a new job or career.  Some are grandmothers while others are raising a young child.  My opinion, also, is that we as a culture have a paucity of concepts of mature, responsible adulthood and what it means.  Continue reading...

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Posted in Communication, Language, Menopause, Philosophy | 4 Comments »

How do YOU define reproductive health?

December 8th, 2011 by Heather Dillaway

By Justine Siegemundin, 1723. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Menstruation and menopause are reproductive health experiences, aren’t they? At least that’s what I think. But I’m starting to wonder how many people agree. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people define the things they experience and how researchers define the things they research. The last blog entry I wrote was on the confusing and frustrating definitions of the menopause transition. Today I thought I’d zoom out a bit more and think about what “reproduction” and/or “reproductive health” means. I personally think of reproductive health as encompassing a woman’s entire life course and including a whole range of experiences (and the pursuit and achievement of individual wellbeing throughout all of these experiences) but I don’t know if others do. For instance, about two weeks ago I was on the phone with a potential coauthor, and she and I had a misunderstanding because I was talking about “reproductive health” as including prevention of HIV and other STDs and she was thinking of “reproductive health” as just about conception, pregnancy, and birth.  I’ve been studying what I think of as women’s normal reproductive processes and experiences (e.g., menopause, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding) for a long time, so I thought I would use this blog entry to tell readers what I think about “reproductive health” and see if anyone agrees with me.

Adrienne Rich, in her 1986 edition of Of Woman Born, proposes that biological reproduction has been defined narrowly by most people (feminist or otherwise). Thus, for many, “reproduction” is equated with just two female processes: pregnancy and childbirth.  While it may not have been the goal of any one person to define reproduction so narrowly, this seems to be a reality.  At various points throughout history, conception and contraception – at times, even abortion – have been added to the definition of what “reproduction” meant, or what “reproductive rights” women were owed, but “reproduction” and “reproductive health” still refers to a very short list of experiences.

I believe we should acknowledge, however, that women’s “reproductive” experiences include more than just conception, contraception, pregnancy, and birth. Reproduction includes an entire range of reproductive experiences, including: menstruation and menopause, use of and problems with contraceptives, choosing whether to become a mother/father, breastfeeding, HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases/infections, prostate and breast cancer, awareness of and access to reproductive health care, protection against sterilization abuse, vasectomy and hysterectomy experiences, the rights of single and/or lesbian mothers, the rights of single and/or gay fathers, donor insemination, cloning and other new advancements in reproductive technology, adoption, infertility treatments and experiences, gynecological practices, alternative reproductive health movements, decisions over whether to engage in heterosexual intercourse, and making informed “choices” in any of these instances. This is just a partial list, and I could go on and on. I propose that we think of “reproduction” (and, by default, “reproductive health” experiences) as the collection of (a) biological, physiological and/or embodied processes and (b) emotional, social, economic, and political decisions and/or actions that individuals — along with their families and other social groups — participate in (either voluntarily or sometimes through some sort of coercion), as they transition in and out of certain stages of their life course, decide whether or not to be sexually-active, and/or decide whether or not to become genetic, gestational and/or social “parents” or caregivers of children.  Any one reproductive experience – for example, menstruation or menopause – can also really be a set of processes and decisions and actions that women make/take/experience/pass through over an indefinite period of time – usually not happening in just one moment. Thus, menstruation or menopause are full-fledged and complicated reproductive experiences in and of themselves, as much as pregnancy or childbirth or any other “reproductive” experiences are, that the majority of women pass through, albeit in different ways, throughout their lifetimes. So are all of the other processes and experiences I’ve named above, and more I haven’t named. “Reproductive health” would then refer to a state of physical and mental wellbeing, indeed biopsychosocial wellbeing, while experiencing any of these sets of processes or decisions or actions.  Continue reading...

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Posted in Language, Menopause, Menstruation, Reproduction | 2 Comments »

Earlier menopause with ovary-saving hysterectomy

November 22nd, 2011 by Chris Hitchcock

Recently Heather Dillaway blogged about the challenges and frustrations of naming, and this blog continues with that theme, looking at a recent article about increased rates of ”ovarian failure” following ovary-preserving hysterectomy.

“Ovary-saving hysterectomy linked to early menopause,” reads the USA Today on-line headline, and the article opens with the statement that:

Younger women who have a hysterectomy that spares the ovaries are almost twice as likely to go through early menopause as women who do not have their uteruses removed, according to a new study. 

It’s an alarming statement, and one likely to alarm an already anxious woman. The study in question was a longitudinal study following 406 women aged 30-47 at the time of their surgery and a control group of 465 similar-aged women who did not have a hysterectomy. The study will be published in the December 2011 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, and the news coverage was drawn from the Duke University press release, entitled “Hysterectomy Increases Risk for Earlier Menopause In Younger Women”.

The first challenge of naming is in the subtle difference between the press release’s earlier menopause, and the USA today article’s early menopause. Early menopause is defined as menopause that occurs before the age of 40; the earlier menopause in the article is a difference of about 2 years — an important difference.

In women who no longer have menstrual flow, how did the authors establish menopausal status, or ”ovarian failure”, as they called it? In women with a uterus, menstrual flow is a convenient landmark, which is roughly aligned with the hormonal changes to decide when menopause (or is it post-menopause?) has begun. We assume that 12 months without menstrual flow likely means that there will be no further flow (although that is not always true), and that it is a good estimate of when ovarian hormonal cycles have stopped. In this article, the authors used an annual blood sample to measure a hormone called FSH (follicular stimulating hormone). FSH is high in menopausal women, and an FSH>40 IU/L was used as a criterion for reaching menopause. However, we have known since 1994 that a high FSH level is not diagnostic of menopause, and, indeed, 6 of the 504 women were excluded because they had a baseline FSH > 40 IU/L, despite having menstruated within the previous three months. Regularly cycling women in their 40′s can have high FSH levels, and later have low FSH levels and ovulatory cycles. In menstruating women, blood samples would also be timed, which is not possible for women who don’t menstruate. It would be interesting to know how the high FSH criterion corresponded to menstrual cycle history in the control group.

Studies like this are hard to do. The authors were careful — they enrolled women prior to surgery and followed control women in the same way. To get 403 women with complete data, they started with over 900 women.  The controls were fairly well matched — similar in age, age at first period, c-section and oral contraceptive history. However, women undergoing surgery were more likely to have had at least one full-term pregnancy (84.5% vs 68.3% in controls), and more likely to have had a previous tubal ligation. In addition, fibroids, endometriosis, ovarian cysts and previous surgery for fibroids were more common in those having a hysterectomy. Both the hysterectomy itself and the history of previous surgery, particularly tubal ligation, may also contribute to a difference between the two groups. Finally, women with hysterectomy were heavier than the control group.  Continue reading...

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Posted in Language, Menopause, New Research | Comments Off

Feeling Uncertainty, Confusion, and Frustration about Menopause

November 10th, 2011 by Heather Dillaway

Last Friday I attended a conference on autoethnography and was privileged enough to listen to Carolyn Ellis give the keynote speech on this new and upcoming qualitative methodology.  Sitting there and listening to Ellis talk about the need for all of us to be reflexive and put ourselves into our research projects, I realized that I probably do need to acknowledge my own feelings of uncertainty and frustration as I study menopause and midlife. Therefore, this blog entry is for you, Carolyn Ellis, as I am inspired by you to be better from now on about acknowledging the connections between me and my work and trying to understand myself as a research instrument as I seek to understand menopause and midlife better.

The reasons I really started studying menopause are the very reasons why I’m still studying it but also frustrated by it. In the mid to late 1990s, my experiences as a birth control counselor at Planned Parenthood in Delaware and Michigan led me to realize that plenty of middle-aged women don’t understand what’s happening to them when they start to have irregular periods in perimenopause. I also watched my mother begin perimenopause in the mid 1990s and be confused and embarrassed to talk about the experience when she had always been the first one who always wanted to talk about pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and birth control (“What was so confusing about menopause?,” I thought).  I’ve now formally studied and written about women’s thoughts and experiences of menopause since 1999. All along, the terminology and definitions of menopause have been as problematic for me as for the women I’ve studied. I’ve listened to menopausal women who tell me that they are completely confused about biomedical terminology for their life stage and completely baffled about what they’re going through.  I’ve heard them talk about how doctors and other women they talk to are just as confused as they are. What is this thing they’re going through? I’ve talked to other feminist social scientists and humanities scholars who think we should call menopause “reproductive aging” or “the menopause transition” to signify that variation over time is really the only guaranteed experience at this time of life. Endocrinologists and biologists turn around and tell me that the term “reproductive aging” is faulty because all that term signifies is that we are all maturing from birth on – that it is an empty term signifying nothing. I listen to endocrinologists, epidemiologists, public health educators, women’s health advocates, menstrual activist researchers, biologists, and clinical/biomedical researchers who are all ready with their own take on what terminology and definition is “best” for describing this time of life. Some argue that there is a strict three-phase model of perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause that we should follow. Some argue for a five or even seven stage model for “menopause,” parsing out pre, post, early and late stages of the menstrual life course (such as early and late  premenopause, early and late perimenopause, menopause, early and late postmenopause, etc.). Some argue that perimenopause is really the only “stage” of “menopause” or late reproductive life that women really want to know about because that is when all the (negative) symptoms come. I hear others argue that “menopause” and “postmenopause” are the same thing, or are that these are conflated terms that mean nothing, and that both of these terms should be scrapped. (Yet then I hear individual women I interview tell me that postmenopause is as frustrating as perimenopause.) I hear other researchers say that EVERY term associated with menopause or reproductive aging is faulty. If I listen to individual menopausal women, they tell me the same. Two months ago, I did a presentation on midlife in general, and a feminist humanities scholar (whom I respect quite a bit) told me I shouldn’t be using the term “midlife” at all, because it is a non-term itself, defined by nothing. If I think about all of the terms I associate with menopause – menopause, the climacteric, the change, the change of life, perimenopause, postmenopause, the late reproductive years, the menopause transition, women’s midlife transition, reproductive aging, etc. – I don’t even know what terms I should be using. Over time I have thought that the best case scenario is just to use the term that women themselves use (therefore I used the word “menopause” a lot to describe a whole transition, or adopted the term “reproductive aging” when urged by feminist scholars to do so in order to define a broader transition). But, now, I’ve been critiqued recently for not correcting individual women when they use the “wrong” term to describe what they’re going through.  Continue reading...

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Posted in Language, Menopause, Menstruation | 8 Comments »

The Pussy is Stronger

October 3rd, 2011 by Chris Bobel

A friend shared this clip from stand-up comedian and actor Hal Sparks.

He leads with  this “I disagree—vehemently—with the use of the word “pussy” to describe a weak person. Because the vagina is the tougher of the two genitals…. by a long shot!”

And later…”It bleeds every month and it won’t die.”

That puzzled reaction to menstruation is as old as time, say the cultural historians of menstruation. We know now, of course, that the monthly shedding of the uterine lining is no mystery. Nor does this regular occurrence suggest that women are necessarily witches or demons or otherwise intrinsically cursed or even blessed.

But his point is a good one.

It IS important to reframe the female body as POWERFUL.  As RESILIENT.

And demonstrate how our language—especially the words we use to slur and to exalt—obscures this reality.

Thanks, Hal, for a good laugh and a better think.  You are a REAL pussy.

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Posted in Communication, Humor, Language, Media, Menstruation | 2 Comments »

Summer’s Eve Campaign Targets Wrong Body Part

August 2nd, 2011 by Laura Wershler

The print ad for the Summer's Eve campaign refers to the "V" but not the vagina.

If a product manufacturer or its advertising company, or both, cannot figure out which part of the female body their new line of feminine hygiene products can be used for, then both are in big trouble.

There has been much hoopla over the recently launched Summer’s Eve campaign. Links to stories about and response to the campaign can be found in my fellow blogger Elizabeth Kissling’s July 27th post. The most serious backlash to the campaign resulted in three videos perceived as “racially insensitive” being pulled from the campaign website late last week.

What rankles me about the campaign – beyond its patronizing, unsophisticated and euphemistically silly approach to the female genital area - is that it appears to target the vagina when it is clear that none of these products are actually intended for use in the vagina.

Regardless of what one might think about the value of or necessity for these femcare products, an advertising campaign for such products must convey accurate information. Like where to use them.

The product line includes: cleansing wash, cleansing cloths, deodorant spray, body powder, and bath and shower gel. Click on the OUR PRODUCTS box on the website home page and you’ll see this: Meet the products that love your vagina. Oh, really?

These products are not intended, I repeat, not intended for use in the vagina. One would think that the product manufacturer knows this. Why then did they choose a talking vagina, and across-the-board references to the vagina, to convey their product message on the website?

Interestingly, the print and TV ads hold no direct reference to the vagina. The website coyly advises viewers that they can call it “V” for short. It is this moniker and the tagline ” Hail to the V” that crosses over to print and television.

Maybe this was intended as a subtle reference to the other “V” word – vulva . It’s pretty clear this is the body part for which the Summer’s Eve products are intended.

I wanted to know why the creative team at The Richards Group, the ad company responsible for the campaign, chose to use the word vagina instead of vulva. My request for an interview to ask this question was turned down, so instead I asked two colleagues what they thought the reason might be.

Valerie Barr, veteran sexual health educator and training centre manager at Calgary Sexual Health Centre, suspects it’s because vagina is assumed to mean what is actually the vulva. She says, “I believe this assumption, or taken-for-granted use of the term, serves to avoid discussion of the clitoris and therefore, female sexual response.”  Barr says she thinks it demonstrates that in our culture we continue to be unconsciously uncomfortable with women being sexual beings.

Rebecca Chalker, female anatomy expert and author of The Clitoral Truth, also believes that fear of the word clitoris has much to do with it. ”Clitoris is the most toxic word in the English language, and to this day is considered obscene and too offensive to be used in the media. Just try it on people,” she says.

“Eve Ensler (author of The Vagina Monologues) made the vagina safe for the general public – even she did not use the C–word. Vagina has now become the default reference for everything ‘down there.’ Those ad guys are no different. Perhaps they’re just using the default because that’s what they think people can relate to most readily,” Chalker says.

Although vulva is the accurate word to describe the female body part intended to benefit from the Summer’s Eve product line, Chalker says, “It would be a tragedy if vulva becomes the new default. In anatomical parlance vulva just means covering.”  Continue reading...

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Posted in Activism, Advertising, anatomy, Communication, FemCare, Language, Media | 1 Comment »

KOTEX: The Antidepressant of the Ancients

March 3rd, 2011 by David Linton

BH0260-medIn the late 1920s, at the peak of the Flapper Era, a series of Kotex ads made extravagant use of images of attractive young women in couture outfits in sophisticated settings. The most intriguing and subtle ad in the series was published in 1929. It shows two slender young women lounging on the deck of an ocean liner dressed for the evening’s shipboard festivities. The way we know that they are aboard a liner is the presence of a life preserver attached to the railing beside them. The name of the ship is printed in large letters upon the device. They are aboard The Nepenthe.

This is an extraordinary detail, perhaps penned by an English major turned copy writer who remembered fondly Edgar Allen Poe’s well known and often taught “The Raven.” Poe’s poem, the tale of a grief stricken man unable to overcome the loss of his dead lover, pleads with the stolid, unflinching raven for “surcease of sorrow,” some balm or drug to slake his misery, such as the mythic potion alluded to in Homer’s Odyssey and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen: the mysterious elixir, nepenthe, the drug that banishes sorrow by making the user forget his woes, the antidepressant of the ancients. The narrator implores the raven,

“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee–by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite–respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

The young women in the ad have set sail on the good ship Kotex Nepenthe, the miracle conveyance that will carry them away from conscious need to worry or grieve over the burden of their menstruating bodies.

What does it mean to board the Kotex Nepenthe? What port is being left behind? Where have the women set sail for? The ad copy provides three answers. First, as the headline and the first sentence of the text assert, one can advance one’s class: “Why 9 out of 10 smart women instinctively prefer this new sanitary protection,” states the headline, and the copy adds, “It is easy to see why the use of Kotex has become a habit among women who set the standard of good taste.” Furthermore, as one “smart matron,” puts it, “Now I wouldn’t go back to the old way. This is so much more civilized-how did we ever get along without it?” By implication, women who continue to use old rags are of a primitive nature. And note the use of the phrase “Kotex has become a habit,” an apt coinage for a drug-use metaphor.

Second, as the photo illustration and the copy confirm, a Kotex user can feel young and glamorous: “For such women have young ideas, young minds.”

Third, and most significant, Kotex can help one hide the olfactory and visible signs of one’s very gender: the scent of menses and the sight of a pad beneath one’s dress: “ROUNDED, TAPERED CORNERS – make for inconspicuous protection,” and “DEODORIZES. . . safely, thoroughly, by a patented process.” [caps in original]

The ad embodies the major theme that runs through nearly a century of advertising, that one can pass through the decades of one’s menstrual life as one who does not menstruate. The difference is that rather than using a drug metaphor to claim you can make the period disappear, now, thanks to the pharmaceutical industry, we’ve got the real thing.

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Posted in Advertising, Disposable menstrual products, FemCare, Language, Literature, Menstruation | 1 Comment »

Marked for Life

February 9th, 2011 by Elizabeth Kissling

CarewNorwegian athlete John Carew just revealed his new tattoo, which features wings and the phrase ‘Ma Vie, Mes Régles’. Apparently Mr. Carew believed that reads “My Life, My Rules”, but with an acute accent (é) instead of a grave accent (è), the actual translation is either ‘My Life, My Period’ or ‘My Life, My Menstruation’.

That’s frankly awesome.


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Posted in anatomy, Art, Celebrities, Communication, Humor, Language, Menstruation | 5 Comments »

Vintage FemCare Advertising

January 20th, 2011 by Elizabeth Kissling

In my visual communication class this week, I used several femcare ads (along with a couple of cell phone commercials and other images) to illustrate Althusser’s concept of interpellation. My students got more of a lesson than they bargained for, as I ended up also talking a little about the history of advertising for femcare products. I mentioned but did not show this historically significant ad, notable to my students for the appearance of pre-Friends Courtney Cox, but more important because it was the first time the word “period” was uttered on television in a menstrual product ad.

It aired in 1985.

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Posted in Advertising, Disposable menstrual products, Language, Media, Television | 1 Comment »

“A Non-Hormonal ‘Fix-It’ for Women Suffering From a ‘Broken Internal Thermostat’”: Just Wear Athletic Clothing to Bed!

November 15th, 2010 by Heather Dillaway

sleepless.jpgThe title of this blog entry comes straight from a media release about Goodnighties® Recovery Sleepwear. That’s right, now there is finally sleepwear made out of a fabric similar to the fabric worn by “Olympians, Astronauts and Even Racehorses” to wick away the moisture of hot flashes, night sweats, and chills accompanying some women’s perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause. Using the “power of negative ions,” Goodnighties® sleepwear purportedly offers that rest, relaxation, recovery (and, ultimately, sleep!) that most midlife women are lacking! Some users are quoted on the website as saying that Goodnighties® sleepwear “changed their lives.”

One one hand, this makes complete sense — why didn’t people think of this before? Athletic clothing would help someone deal with hot flashes and night sweats in the middle of the night, if only making it so that one doesn’t have to get up and change their clothes or sheets. And considering we’re currently in a “menoboom” (Barbre, 1998), with the aging and menopause of the Baby Boomers, what a great idea to market moisture-wicking clothing to menopausal women! Talk about a money-maker.

On the other hand, while I think on the whole this is probably a good product for many, I do take issue with some of the language on the site, because of the negative connotations about menopause in particular (e.g., the emphasis on “fixing” “broken thermostats,” “suffering,” and quotes about how 85 percent of women are “known to suffer”). But, this line of clothing is also marketed towards others — those undergoing infertility treatments, “athletes, regular exercisers and weekend warriors with sore muscles,” “people with aches and pains due to injury, surgery, chemotherapy, etc.,” and “[t]hose suffering from painful health issues like fibromyalgia, arthritis and diabetes” — so, it’s not exclusively marketed to menopausal women and not exclusively designed to define menopause as a bad thing.

On another issue, though, the emphasis on relief, recovery, and fixing does make me think that this product is being marketed as something that resolves (negative) symptoms, but I’m not sure how that could be the case? Does anyone have any experience with Goodnighties® sleepwear? Is it actually capable of alleviating the symptoms, or is it just making the public manifestation of the symptom disappear?

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Posted in Advertising, Language, Menopause | 5 Comments »

Waiting

October 28th, 2010 by Heather Dillaway

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the words we use when we’re talking about menstruation or reproductive experiences more generally. I’ve been noticing lately that we use the word “waiting” quite a bit. I have a friend who is “still waiting” for her menstrual cycle to be “normal” again after her second child, and several other friends who are either “waiting” to figure out whether they will get pregnant, “waiting” to be done with their pregnancies, or “waiting” before they can have their last and final kid. I just had my basement waterproofed and one of the basement repairmen told me that his wife had been “waiting” ten months to get a menstrual period and that they were worried about her (this is information he volunteered after I told him I studied women’s health). I started thinking more about how the menopausal women I interview always talk about “waiting” to figure out whether they are really “at menopause,” or “waiting” to figure out if this is really their last menstrual period. Or how so many girls/young women who are sexually active are “waiting” to get their periods so that they can be relieved to know they are not pregnant. Or how women with painful periods, endometriosis, or migraines are waiting until those days are over each month. What does all of this reproductive waiting (waiting for menstruation, waiting for menstruation to be over, waiting for pregnancy, waiting for birth, waiting for menopause) mean?

 

In all of these instances of reproductive waiting, waiting seems a negative connotation and that seems to stem from the fact that we do not feel in control or in charge of this reproductive time. When I think of the other situations in which I might use the word “waiting”, the same holds true. I tell my kids to “wait their turn” and they don’t like it. And none of us really like waiting in line. Fast food restaurants, frozen dinners, and ATM machines are all in existence because we don’t have time or don’t like to wait. Phrases that we use like “worth the wait” also connote negativity about waiting. So, I finally looked up the actual definition of waiting. Depending on which online dictionary you visit, definitions of “waiting” include: “pause, interval, or delay,” “the act of remaining inactive or stationary,” or “the act of remaining inactive in one place while expecting something.” While some of these definitions do not automatically lend themselves to negativity, waiting is defined mostly as a passive activity that we are forced to participate in, perhaps against our will.


All of this makes me think further about whether women really dislike the waiting or the time that comes with menstruation or other reproductive experiences, and whether women really feel out of control as they engage in their experiences. Is this just a word we use or are we really impatient about menstruation and reproduction? When I think about alternative words that are sometimes used, like “tracking,” other words seem much more agentic in that they put women back in control of their cycles and other reproductive experiences. So, is it just the word “waiting” that has the negative connotation or is that word signifying some larger impatience that we have about reproduction these days? I have a colleague who writes about the “inconveniences” of reproduction and how, in so many ways, we try to avoid the reproductive waiting or reproductive uncertainties we face. For instance, instead of waiting to see when a baby is born, we might plan a c-section so that we can know when we’ll get that baby. Or, now we’re told that if we’re “waiting” more than 6 months to get pregnant that we should probably start taking fertility drugs to shorten our wait or get rid of some of that uncertainty. Or now we can find out that we’re pregnant a couple weeks after conception instead of waiting to see whether we menstruate a few weeks later. We attempt to cut out some of those reproductive waits these days. Menstrual suppression is at least partially popular because then women won’t have to be surprised by their periods or wait to know what bad day their period might fall on.  Continue reading...

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Posted in Language, Menopause, Menstruation, Philosophy | 9 Comments »

Visit From A Friend

August 10th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

Guest post by Anastacia Kurylo, Marymount Manhattan College

"Ovulation", oil on canvas by Von Taylor

"Ovulation", oil on canvas by Von Taylor

It’s been four years since I had my period. I did get a visit from my ‘friend’ for six months a couple of years ago but considering that I menstruated regularly for nearly twenty years before that six months was not a long time to get reacquainted. Now I am menstruating again regularly.

Having my period again reminds me of the person I was for the twenty years before I had my children-independent, in control, free to eat and sleep when I wanted – and how that part of my life is over.

Having my period again also reminds me of the person I have become the last four years – pregnant or lactating with one of my two children either in my belly or on my breast for most of this time – and how that part of my life is over too.

I never liked or understood the euphemism of my ‘friend’ representing menstruation. I saw it as a silly way to refer to a mundane biological occurrence females should own, be proud of, and state bluntly.

Now I understand the metaphor. For twenty years, my ‘friend’ was close to me physically and emotionally. My period was a reminder of my maturity and femininity and just as often an inconvenience and annoyance. I knew her well – her tendencies, how she would behave, and how to handle her. After twenty years of being inseparable, my ‘friend’ left and was replaced by my daughter and, then, my son. At times, my children are also reminders of my maturity and femininity and are also, at times, an inconvenience and annoyance. As I have begun to get to know my children, I forgot about my ‘friend.’

Having my period again and no longer being or anticipating being pregnant or lactating marks the start of yet another part of my life. Now that my ‘friend’ is back, we have to get reacquainted –she is not the same and neither am I.

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Posted in Language, Menstruation | 1 Comment »

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