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...
Guest Post by Alexandra Epstein – Marymount Manhattan College.
how school helped me come out of the menstrual closet
Finally, the time had come where I was choosing my classes for my senior year of college. I had finished my required courses to complete my social work minor, and with only a few required courses left until I complete my psychology major, I had lots of room to choose electives! What to take though? Maybe an art class? Or what about a science class? As I scrolled though my options online, something caught my eye. “The Social Construction and Images of Menstruation”. Honestly, anything to do with the social construction of anything is good in my book, so without even thinking much about it, I registered.
Day one in class, it hit me; I was in a class completely focused on the idea of how menstruation is viewed by society. I was a bit taken aback. As a woman, I had grown up “dealing” with my period, but I had never actually thought about it, or what it meant to me as a woman. Now, I can’t stop. I can’t stop thinking about it, I can’t stop talking about it, I can’t stop reading about it. The idea of the social construction behind menstruation has not left my head since I entered that classroom on the first day of the semester.
Not only has this class opened my mind to a whole new concept, but it has made me more comfortable to openly talk about menstruation and everything that goes along with it. It wasn’t even two months ago that I was so uncomfortable with the concept of the period. I wouldn’t talk about it often with my friends, I would hide my tampons in bags within bags so no one would know that I was on my period, and I thought of my period as a burden and huge inconvenience. Within the past month I have grown to love my period. It is something I am proud to be able to experience. I have become very open with conversation regarding menstruation. I have asked all of my female friends about their first experience with their periods, and all of my male friends if they know how to use a tampon. I love the responses I get. Some people embrace the chance to talk about something we as humans don’t normally talk about. However, most people I talk to become so uncomfortable with the fact that I’m talking about such a taboo topic. They ask me why I choose this class, or why my school even offers such a rare subject to study. What they are most shocked by is the fact that my professor is a male. “A guy teaches that class? Isn’t that awkward?” “No!” I reply, “Its brilliant and insightful and I am in love with it.” Too many people are uncomfortable with this topic. I am making it my mission to take the awkwardness out of menstrual conversations.
Guest Post by Michael Yazujian, Marymount Manhattan College
I found this sketch the other day when I was on www.ucbcomedy.com. It is by a sketch duo called Klepper and Grey, who are originally from Chicago, but now live in NYC. It is very similar to the “Her First Period” sketch by the Frantics (posted at re:Cycling August 5, 2011), in that things that are considered socially unacceptable to be shared are being shared in such a friendly tone; the main difference is that in this sketch the information is being shared knowingly. Both sketches make you wonder how do subjects get to a point when they are considered rude or unacceptable to discuss, even though they are so common among so many people. Things like menstruation, sex, and bowel movements are all normal bodily experiences, but they certainly don’t make appropriate dinner party conversation, or topics to share casually with an acquaintance on the street.
I’d be interested to hear comments from others about what they think the increased public display of formerly private matters means, especially when it comes to the conventional menstrual taboos.
The ways in which a “menstrual stain” can signify embarrassment, shame, or even some sort of moral or career failure are surely infinite. If not a literal stain even being associated with menstruation in the most benign way can be seen as perilous. Sharra L. Vostral, a Keynote Speaker at the June 2011 SMCR conference, reviews this dynamic in her book, Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology.
And until the tennis star Serena Williams broke the taboo in 2009, no established celebrity, actress or athlete was willing to appear in a menstrual product advertisement. [Editor's Note: Brenda Vaccaro, with her "Make Mine a Double!" ads for Playtex tampons in the 1980s, was an earlier exception.] The notion that being publicly associated with menstruation (in fact, being a menstruator!) is a sign of failure or at least marginalization crops up in peculiar places.
For example, the novelist and journalist Carl Hiaasen is known for his snarky style as he lambastes Florida’s often bizarre and convoluted social political and ecological goings on. His most recent novel, Star Island, features a young actress named Ann DeLusia who has been hired to double for a teen pop star who is frequently so drunk or drugged that her career would be ruined if her dysfunctional behavior were captured by the ever-present paparazzi.
One of the ways Hiaasen lets the reader know that the actress is in the lower tier of Hollywood hopefuls and desperate for a role is by revealing that previously she has been limited to appearances in obscure films, failed series and menstrual product commercials. On three occasions he makes the same point:
If the stand-in job didn’t work out, “Unfortunately, . . . Ann would again be waiting on line with her friends, auditioning for soap operas and sanitary-pad commercials.” (p. 25)
At the start of her career “. . . she landed nonspeaking parts in TV commercials for an assortment of feminine hygiene products, including a recyclable contraceptive ring.” (p. 111)
Her mother quit speaking to her after “. . . one of my mother’s so-called friends called her up after she saw me on a Maxipad commercial. . .” (p. 160)
It’s too bad that Hiaasen couldn’t come up with a more creative and original way of illustrating the character’s career limitations than by signing on to the trite, and fading, prejudices about appearing in menstrual product ads. He’s not as progressive as he might like to seem.
Here’s an interesting political approach. While there are hairs to split (do all women have vaginas? do all people with vaginas consider themselves women? and what about those of us with no sexual partners, or sexual partners without penises?), there’s something to be said for appealing to the majority. After all, those of us who already get it, get it, no?
I do wish it came with an action plan, though. Links to a site for people to contact their congresscritters would be good.
Since we’re often talking about the lack of attention to men’s attitudes about menstruation, I thought I’d post the abstract of a great new piece in the Journal of Family Issues, due out in February 2011! Kudos to Katherine Allen, Christine Kaestle, and Abbie Goldberg, for getting their great work published! Here’s the title and abstract for their work:
Title: “More than just a punctuation mark: How boys and young men learn about menstruation”
Abstract:
Parents, peers, schools, and the media are the primary contexts for educating young people about sexuality. Yet girls receive more sex education than boys, particularly in terms of menstruation. Lack of attention to how and what boys learn about menstruation has consequences for their private understanding about the biology of reproduction and also for social and cultural ideologies of gendered relationships. In this qualitative study, 23 written narratives from male undergraduates (aged 18-24 years) were analyzed using grounded theory methodology to explore how young men perceive their past and present learning about this uniquely female experience. Findings suggest that most boys first learned about menstruation in their families, primarily through their sisters’ menarche; menstruation is experienced—in boyhood at least—as a gender wedge; and most men described a developmental process of moving from a childish attitude of menstruation as “gross” to seeing themselves as maturing through the experience of an intimate relationship.
Where to find this piece: Journal of Family Issues, vol 32 (Feb 2011), pp. 129-56.
Read those stories, run for the cure, but – at the behest of Breast Cancer Action - think before you pink. National chains and brand names aside, some of the more questionable vendors, hawking wares to consumers, leave one wondering how breast cancer became such ”big business”. Who will want a cure, or effective prevention strategies, if it will mean putting a lot of people out of work? Including manufacturers who make mammography machines, and pharmaceutical companies that focus on breast cancer drugs.
Breast Cancer Action positions itself as ”the watchdog of the breast cancer movement“. They are the only national breast cancer organization in the United States that does not accept money from any source that profits from breast cancer. Their position on shopping in support of breast cancer awareness is clear:
Think Before You Pink™, a project of Breast Cancer Action, launched in 2002 in response to the growing concern about the number of pink ribbon products on the market. The campaign calls for more transparency and accountability by companies that take part in breast cancer fundraising, and encourages consumers to ask critical questions about pink ribbon promotions.
This October, consider carefully how you will demonstrate your breast cancer awareness. “After all”, as Breast Cancer Action notes, “ if shopping could cure breast cancer, it would be cured by now.”
Red Moon: Menstruation, Culture and the Politics of Gender may have crossed your path as The Moon Inside You (its original title prior to 2010 its current distribution through Media Education Foundation). It is a film that has enjoyed wide release, with exhibition on French television and inclusion in an EU showcase of films that circulated last year. The broad exhibition strategy of Red Moon is fitting; it has a casual, heartfelt and humorous style that should appeal to many.
The purpose of Red Moon, as articulated by the filmmaker Diana Fabianova in voice over, is to answer this question: “At any given time, 25% of the female population is menstruating. Invisible. Discreet. Why is this normal, biological function taboo? There must be some deeper meaning.” There are problems with this statistical framing device – 25% is an over inflated number that eliminates girls and post-menopausal women as “females”. It also glosses over females that do not menstruate because of gender transformations and amenorrhea. Outside of this statistical malfunction, there are a few other facts provided through voice over which are not supported by specific research or attributed directly to any menstrual researchers. However, beyond these slights, Red Moon has great potential to make a taboo subject approachable.
As it begins with man-on-the-street interviews, the film seems to have interest in addressing men as equally as women. Through interviews with researchers who have written about menstruation in the 80’s and 90’s, the film attends to menstrual taboo historically and highlights menstrual suppression as an issue to address within patriarchy. There is a fantastically creepy interview with Elsimar Couthino, famous for inventing Depo Provera, Norplant and for writing Is Menstruation Obsolete (the book that launched millions of suppressed periods.) In his interview Couthino believes that women should have no more than one period in her lifetime and he likens menstruation to pending death: “First of all, menstruation is incompatible with life and nature, because an animal cannot survive bleeding longer than a few minutes in the forest. Blood, the smell of blood (he sniffs) attracts the predators. This one is bleeding. She is going to die.” Fabianova comically cuts to a hooting owl, waiting for your blood.
Fabianova is critical of pill-popping mentality and finds it better to challenge the negative view of menstruation, and silence around it, rather than do away with the period altogether. While she provides some examples of solutions to painful PMS (a belly dancing class delights, for example) the film does not directly address dysmenorrhea and severe menstrual challenges which have become justification for suppression in the first place. It does however, remind menstruators on hormonal birth control that the blood you see is a fake-period.
In fellow Re:Cycling blogger Chris Bobel’s recently released book New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation, she focuses on the type of menstrual activist stylings akin to Red Moon. In short, feminist spiritualism, according to Bobel, is a narrowly focused mode of menstrual positivism that essentializes the idea of womanhood through menstruation. The movement typically appeals to middle class white women and identifies menstrual change through the self. In feminist spiritualism, political action is limited to the individual menstruator or to the girls the menstruator is encouraged to educate. Red Moon treads in this territory throughout as interviewees speak to menstrual energy, the preciousness of menstruation, and the spiritualism in bleeding. The film ends with this logic as a nude woman walks through city streets, dropping red blobs that spring new trees to life through CGI effects. In voice over we hear about the filmmaker’s changed subject position: “I no longer fight with my hormonal clock, because it is she that reminds me once a month that I have a personal, intimate connection to nature and the universe.” It’s too bad the film narrows its final message to the individual, rather than reflecting on some of the broader work done throughout, like connecting negative menstrual associations to patriarchy, and demonstrating how certain menstrual practices harm the environment and our wallets. Overall, Red Moon is a conversation starter that requires additional reading to supplement its message. Continue reading...
London newspaper The Telegraph reports on the development of a new medical treatment for dysmenorrhea, or painful periods. The article contains very little information about the new pill — most of the article describes the variety of misery some women experience with menstruation. The only information about the new medication is that the drug blocks vasopressin, a hormone involved in regulating uterine contractions and thus a cause of menstrual cramping.
But I was struck by this sentence in the second paragraph:
But now [women with painful periods] might no longer have to soldier on stoically after researchers have developed a pill which could put an end to the root cause of their discomfort.
See that? Women with cramps aren’t whiners or crybabies or just making excuses. They’re hard-working troupers who soldier on stoically despite being miserable.
This week, Kotex is launching a new campaign “that aims to encourage women to talk candidly and without embarrassment about periods and vaginal care”. Research statistics from the brand indicate that “vaginally-aware women” are more likely to have a positive body image (40% vs. 31%) and to be satisfied with their level of self-confidence (64% vs. 43%) and ability to express themselves (76% vs. 55%). In the same survey, 70% of women said they wish society would change the way it talks about vaginal health, but less than half feel like they can do anything about it.
Of course, this means new products from Kotex. But from where I sit, there’s little new here. The products seem to be the same old Kotex pads and tampons, now individually wrapped in bright, “fierce” colors instead of the usual pastels. The same old plastic applicators are now yellow, blue, or green, instead of just pink. The anti-ad advertisement technique (see video at right) was pioneered by Sprite (a CocaColaTM product) in their mid-1990s “Image is Nothing. Obey Your Thirst.” campaign. The Sprite ad was featured in Douglas Rushkoff’s 2001 film, The Merchants of Cool, as an example of how corporate advertising appropriates youth culture to appeal to young people.
And that seems to be what Kotex is doing with “Break the Cycle.” The new web site has a hip, blocky style and multiple ways to interact with the company and with other customers (hello, Twitter! hi there, Facebook!). Quotes from girls and young women appear throughout the site, many in handwritten fonts. The FAQ file (“Real Answers“) features three answers to each question: one from a peer, one from a mom, and one from a health expert.
At the same time, this looks likes an honest effort to increase education and honesty about menstruation and vaginal health. Kotex surveyed 1,607 North American girls and women aged 14-35 about their knowledge of menstruation, vaginal health, and self-esteem and body image. The findings won’t surprise anyone at re:Cycling:
Most women are satisfied with their personal relationships, self-confidence, and level of happiness – a majority describes themselves as intelligent, independent, and happy. However, the majority are not satisfied with what their body looks like and only a minority describe themselves as beautiful or sexy.
Many women think of their vaginal area as ugly and are self-conscious about what a potential sexual partner might think of how their vagina looks.
The specific findings about menstruation are sadly familiar; I recall finding similar statistics in a widely-cited survey conducted in 1981 on a similar population when I first began studying menstruation 20 years ago.
Society’s attitudes toward vaginal health – menstruation in particular – have had an effect on how women experience certain milestones, communicate with each other, and how they feel about
themselves. Continue reading...
More than half of women (59%) felt awkward around others when they first got their period, and about 3 in 5 (62%) report that they felt uncomfortable discussing the experience with other people, even their close friends and family.
Though a majority (66%) say getting their period didn’t really change anything else about who they are or how they behave, more than half (55%) report that they became more self-conscious about their body once they started menstruating, and even now, more than half of women (54%) feel dirty when they have their period, and 2 in 3 (67%) don’t want people knowing when they’re menstruating.
One in three women (32%) think buying period products is embarrassing.
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.)
Before you ladies under 30 rush off to get impregnated, let me point out a few things. First, this study is a computer model. It is not definitive evidence that women cannot conceive after 30. Second, there has been ongoing new research in the last several years that suggests mammals may be able to produce new ova, contrary to conventional doctrine that females have a fixed reserve of egg cells enclosed in the ovaries at birth. Although there are many skeptics, there is still a great deal that is unknown about how the ovaries work.
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.
It’s October again: breast cancer awareness month. Women’s magazines are 
