Blog of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research
The lovely ladies of LunaPads have made a sweet little video that explains why you should make the switch from paper products to cloth pads – in less than 90 seconds!
If you’ve already made the switch, this is an easy way to persuade your friends. You can email it, Tweet, share it on Facebook, heck, cue it up on your smartphone and show it to ‘em!
The New York Times published an op-ed piece a few days ago about making the birth control pill available without a prescription. Kelly Blanchard, president of Ibis Reproductive Health, offers the following rationale:
Women don’t need a doctor to tell them whether they need the pill — they know when they are sexually active and want to avoid pregnancy. Pill instructions are easy to follow: Take one each day. There’s no chance of becoming addicted. Taking too many will make you nauseated, but won’t endanger your life, in contrast to some over-the-counter drugs, like analgesics.
I have mixed feelings, myself. I’m in favor of just about anything that makes contraceptives more accessible to the people who need them, but I fear that the likely increase in cost of OTC pills means the availability won’t benefit those who most the need them – the young and the poor. Also, there are some contraindications for pill use, such as high blood pressure, history of migraine, and use of certain anti-seizure drugs for epilepsy. And despite the happy, shiny images of Yaz and Seasonique commercials, some women just can’t tolerate the side effects, for any number of reasons.
What do you think, re:Cycling readers?
Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/blmurch/486046904/ // CC BY 2.0
Only a latter-day Rip Van Winkle could avoid knowing that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the FDA’s approval of Enovid, the world’s first birth control pill. Hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles have marked this anniversary.
Many incorrectly credit the pill with giving birth to feminism. As Elaine Tyler May notes in the current issue of Ms., the pill didn’t start the feminist movement but was in the right place at the right time:
The timing could not have been better. The feminist movement gained momentum just as the Pill became available. With the ability to control their fertility, women could take full advantage of new opportunities for education, careers and participation in public life.
But in the midst of all this celebrating, we’ve neglected another anniversary: 2010 marks the 40th anniversary of U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson’s congressional hearings about the pill’s safety profile, which arguably did launch the women’s health movement.
Elizabeth Kissling’s March 16 post on the launch of the U by Kotex campaign and the comments that followed touched on the implications of the “new” Kotex products and their accompanying empowerment crusade. Comments ranged from how the new tampon applicators resemble glow sticks to how, with the new “menstruation optional” pills and implants, tampon and pad manufacturers are grasping any marketing ploy to keep girls menstruating and buying their products. Indeed, “empowering” women about their menstrual cycle and encouraging women to “celebrate their bodies” is a smart marketing move by Kotex in the face of the menstrual suppression option. The following comment from Giovanna Chesler’s on Kissling’s March 16 post sums up my own opinion about the “radical new product”.:
“Might I add that when I heard that Kotex was bringing a new, radical product to market, I assumed it would be a menstrual cup. What’s new about painting a tampon applicator? Still plastic. Still disposable. Shows how naive I am. Kotex selling menstrual cups… that would be the day!”
Let us not forget, these products still have the same pesticide-infused cotton and the same one-time-use, land fill-bound plastic applicators and wrappers.
Back in 2000, when my Menstrual Monday journey began, an ever-reasonable friend had pointed out it took 13 years for Julia Ward Howe to establish Mother’s Day. Being a holidaymaker, and more on the creative side than reasonable, I poo-poo’d my friend’s caution. Seriously – Julia Ward Howe didn’t have the Internet! Thirteen years is two centuries in Internet time!
Eleven Menstrual Mondays later, I humbly look forward to the year 2012, and raising a glass (of tomato juice) to Julia Ward Howe, unmoved by any doomsday scenarios erroneously attributed to the Mayan calendar. Holidaymaking is just not as easy as it looks!
Display of Uterine Flying Objects (UFOs)
On the other hand, Menstrual Monday parties are rather easy to throw. Here’s all you need to do:
Display of MOLTwheels and FloFlags
If you like working with fabric, check out Have a Hester at MOLT, and learn about scarlet letters and flow-dyeing. Right now I’m enamored of red shop rags – I add glitter glue, and use them to package MOLTwheels – the mini-frisbees in the photo. See what ideas you and your guests can come up with.
I notice I’ve mentioned a couple of things that require spending money – the most intriguing question to me this Menstrual Monday is: Where is the intersection of feminism, menstruation, and entrepreneurship? I’m wondering: How can there be a transformation in attitudes toward the red stuff, without a corresponding transformation in where women’s green stuff (money) is being spent?
Strawberries and spinach: Food for thought, indeed.
Okay, Kotex? Here’s the deal: We’re only gonna stop feeling the shame when we take ownership of our periods. And we’re taking it back from you, dude. So you can’t reclaim our periods for us. You’re some of the people we’re reclaiming them from. Got it?
Tina Turner didn’t sing THOSE lyrics, but what if?
Those that follow re:Cycling may recall-with a grin and a cringe–how Ingrid Berthon-Moine’s portraits of women wearing their menstrual blood as lipstick sent many Guardian and Salon Broadsheet readers to the “icky” place, where unexamined assumptions run amok.
Plenty of folks readily expressed their disgust at the idea of menstrual blood on display (ack!!!on the mouth??) but few were willing to dig into WHY this disgusted them and how that disgust hurts women and girls…..if they dared to really look first, at those blood-smeared lips, and then, at themselves.
Moine’s models, silent and unblinking, issue a challenge. When we meet their gaze and contemplate their deep red mouths, we are forced to look back at ourselves, and at each other.
Why is there a menstrual taboo, anyway? And who and what does it serve? There must be an awful lot at stake when people work so hard to keep it alive.
This week Moine is exhibiting her work in London. Placing her portraits in the context of a V-Day show makes explicit the connections between the denigration of women’s bodies and violence against women and girls.
If you’ve been with us for a while, you may recall that last fall our friend and colleague Alexandra Jacoby participated in Vulvagraphics: An Intervention in Honor of Female Genital Diversity, sponsored by the New View Campaign challenging the medicalization of sex. For the benefit of those of us unable to get to New York for this event, there is now video available of some of the exhibits and speakers.
[via The Red Tent Sisters]
We’ve had a couple of productive discussions recently here at re:Cycling about men and menstrual humor, so it seems a good time to introduce Vinnie D’Angelo, creator of Vinnie’s Tampon Case. Therese Shecter has graciously shared this clip from her thought-provoking film, I Was A Teenage Feminist.
I’ve written about Vinnie and the role of men in menstrual activism before, in the “Menstrual Counterculture” chapter of my book, Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation. Here is a brief excerpt from that chapter:
According to interviews, D’Angelo’s motivation in developing his tampon cases was to help out his female friends. He would see them fishing in purses or backpacks for a tampon and retrieve “a mangled applicator and a lump of cotton with old gum stuck to the string” (quoted in Raappana). He also liked the idea of changing attitudes toward menstruation. . . . Interviews with D’Angelo reveal a feminist sensibility that extends beyond providing menstrual support.
[ . . . .]
I confess to some ambivalence here: I am uncertain what men’s role should be in celebrating menstruation. I appreciate [Harry] Finley’s genuine curiosity, and I admire D’Angelo’s feminist approach and his lack of squeamishness. I’m glad to see men talking about menstruation and not insisting that it remain hidden. I like D’Angelo’s playful, accepting attitude toward menstruation, but at the same time I find the fact that he has built a cottage industry of it vaguely exploitive. No one is harmed by his products, of course, but it is more than a little ironic that someone who doesn’t menstruate launched this successful line of whimsical, self-conscious menstrual products. On the other hand, perhaps D’Angelo’s masculinity adds a social legitimacy (as well as a humorous novelty element, as he has noted in interviews) that a woman’s name would not carry in the current cultural climate. And he’s great with the clever slogans: He owns the domain name knowyourflow.com, and recent ads for his tampon case say, “Don’t let your period cramp your style.”
What do you think, re:Cycling readers? How do you feel about the fact that two of the most visible examples of menstrual activism in the U.S., Vinnie’s Tampon Case and Harry Finley’s Museum of Menstruation, are created and promoted by nonmenstruators? Does it matter if these ventures are commercially successful? (Just for the record, Finley has received no financial benefit – only internet notoriety – from the Museum of Menstruation. Since introducing his eponymous tampon case in the late 1990s, D’Angelo has also developed Vinnie’s Giant Roller Coaster Period Chart and Sticker Book, and Vinnie’s Cramp Relieving Bubble Bath, which is also available packaged with Vinnie’s Soothing Bubble Beats CD of “music to menstruate by”. I do not know how profitable these products are for him.)
Interior of Red Tent, Belly & Womb Conference, Baldwinville, MA, 2005
The act of reframing the menstrual cycle–as a source of deep awareness and even, power–is hardly news, and yet, it seems that way to most of us.
Liz Kissling sent me this link to a 2002 essay written by Gina Cloud. Here is a classic passionate call for a new (or very old, perhaps) way of responding to menstruation. While I bristle at the essentialism at the root of this reframing, I certainly appreciate any effort to reclaim the menstrural cycle and render it as more than a nasty nuisance that depends on consumerism to make it go away. Cloud renames the menstrual cycle, the “sacred cycle” and PMS as “powerful monthly insight.” For her, the week before a menstruator’s period is a time to “get clear” and unblock what she calls the “repression of expression” most women are socialized to practice every day.
Cloud numbers among a steady stream of women–health educators, midwives, at least one physician, and lay women dedicated to empowering women through resisting more conventional attitudes about menstruation. They have written books, led workshops and generally promoted the idea that menstruation can and should be seen as a not a curse, but a gift.
Remember last fall, when half the Western world was shocked – shocked! – by The Guardian’s publication of an Ingrid Berthon-Moine photo of a woman with menstrual blood on her lips? We’ll never forget.
Apparently menstrual activists are just a few steps ahead of high fashion: Blood red lips are now considered “quite glam”.
Perhaps Laura, my colleague here at re:Cycling and SMCR, is right: Menstruation IS coming out of the closet.
Ariel of Cephaloblog is giving away five copies of Cathy Leamy’s “totally cute, funny and informative comic on eco-friendly solutions for that time of the month“. To win, you just need to add a comment to her blog post (first link above) explaining why you’re making the switch (or have already switched) to reusable menstrual products. She’ll select and post the winners on January 24.
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.
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