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:
Check out the official mission statement for Menstrual Monday – of note, the first goal is to create “a sense of fun around menstruation.” One benefit of “silly” party favors and decorations, such as the U.F.O. (Uterine Flying Object), PMS Blowt-Out, and Tampose (tampon + rose = tampose), is that women from all walks of life are put at ease, wondering “what is that?” rather than being focused on menstrual negativity (taboo and shame are such heavy words, aren’t they?).
Ask everyone to bring something from the Five Menstrual Monday Food Groups: Green stuff, red stuff, chocolate, poppy seed, egg. Or serve a spinach salad with tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs and poppy seed dressing, with chocolate for dessert. Before sitting down to eat, why not chant “green stuff, red stuff, chocolate, poppy seed, egg” a few times, just for fun?
To get the discussion going, you can download A Cuppa Questions from MOLT – the questions are printed on drawings of human ova. Cut the ova out, drop them into a cup, and let each guest select a question. Make sure to download the answer sheet as well. You can also cut out extra circles, for guests to write their own questions on.
If you haven’t tried reusable menstrual pads or menstrual cups before, a Menstrual Monday party is a good time to learn about them. Two such companies are LunaPads and Glad Rags. You and your friends can decide to try these products yourselves – as well as donate pads to young women, who would otherwise be kept out of school.
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.
Andy Kurovets, the designer who brought us those lovely maxi-pad shelves is displaying a new item: The G-spot computer mouse. When you find the secret spot, the computer automatically goes to your favorite thing online, whether it’s your email application or your favorite feminist blog (that would be us, right?).
Word on the street is that Apple is introducing their first tablet computer today. With their usual flourish, they’ve named it . . . wait for it . . . the iPad.
We’re sad to learn that brilliant funnywoman Sarah Haskins is leaving Target: Women (and especially sad that she’s leaving before creating a TW about femcare products). But we still have her fine piece about how birth control is sold to us as period control.
Fortunately, the rest of her archive lives on, on the internet.
Since I am both far too old to follow Katy Perry on Twitter and too completely uninterested in celebrities’ personal lives to read The Huffington Post (WTF? Didn’t HP used to be a political blog?), a friend had to tip me off to the big news that Katy Perry is menstruating and presumably not pregnant.
The image at right is of one of Ms. Perry’s Twitter messages from Wednesday, which reads, “ur gonna make me cry, maybe that’s my period tho. THAT’S RIGHT I’M BLEEDING. Face. Better luck next month peepz”.
As far as I’m concerned, Katy Perry can tweet about her period until the cows come home – hell, that’s what Twitter is for. And in general, the more open acknowledgment that Menstruation Exists, the better for all menstruators. But the comments on the Huffington Post article provide another fascinating study in communication about menstruation. I don’t have enough Sanity Watchers points to read all six pages (and still accumulating) of comments, but I did scan a couple of pages. Most of the comments are along the lines of “TMI” and “It’s gross to discuss that kind of stuff.” One Perry fan posted this remark: “Katy, get pregnant fast so that you can talk about that instead of this.”
Apparently it’s acceptable to talk about the contents of one’s uterus only when it’s full.
Of course, if you’re going to take oral contraceptives, taking it consistently is important. With a short half-life and low dosage in many of today’s pills, ideally they should be taken at the same time each day for maximum effectiveness. (This also may reduce breakthrough bleeding.) Research indicates that the average birth control pill user misses three pills each month, which changes the failure rate from 0.3% to 8%.
The commonly used Dialpak® dispenser, introduced in 1965, was designed to make it easy to remember to take the pill every day, long before iPhones or internet access. Legend has it that it was invented by a fellow who frequently argued with his wife over whether or not she had taken her pill. The Dialpak® is iconic in American culture; it has made the birth control pill the only prescription drug identifiable at a distance simply by its container. It is even evoked in the perfectly circular swimming pool and costumed synchronized swimmers of the NuvaRing® advertisement frequently seen on American television.
These ads (“Break Away from the Pack”) promote NuvaRing® for those who can’t be arsed to take a pill every day, rather than any claims of its effectiveness as birth control. (Needless to say, the ads neglect to mention that the ring can be accidentally expelled surprisingly easily. That’s got to impact its effectiveness rate.)
Physicians refer to failure to take one’s medication as “non compliance”, as though patients – especially female patients – are deliberately defiant rather than forgetful. But wouldn’t a real rebel be more likely to reject hormonal contraception completely in favor of Fertility Awareness and/or barrier methods? And she’d employ reusable menstrual products, too.
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.
*(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!
As anyone with a blog or website can tell you, the referrer logs are fascinating reading.
When we started re:Cycling, I knew that people looking for menstrual porn would find us. (No, we don’t have any.) But I did not predict the interest in celebrities and their periods. Pictures of Dakota Fanning have been download 58 times from this post. The next most popular download is the ad we mocked in this post.
In addition variations on menstruating celebrities and pR0n, here’s a small sample of creative search words and phrases that have brought people to this site:
beutiful viagina
are men uncomfortable with menstruation
PREMPRO LAWSUIT WILL WYETH SETTLE CASES
vagina artwork
the beautiful vulva
euphemisms advertising
what is the shelf life of maxi pads
Don’t blame PMS men
menstrual cycle economics
whisper for menstruation
authors who wrote about menstruation hygiene
ETA: I should note that with the exception of the creative spelling and “shelf life of maxi pads” (I’m pretty sure they last forever), we’ve written about all of these topics!
I’m guessing many re:Cycling readers are familiar with Frank Warren’s Post Secret project. Every Sunday, Frank publishes online a collection of confessional postcards he’s received. He’s also curated several larger collections into best-selling books. The postcards are fascinating, both sociologically and artistically.
If you follow Frank on Twitter, you are privy to additional secrets posted mid-week via his Twitter stream. That’s how I came across the secret posted at right: “I sign men who I don’t like up for every single pad and tampon sample I can find.”
Apparently menstruation is so disgusting, so shameful, so dirty, that the writer of this secret believes that receipt of new, clean menstrual products is a good way to humiliate a man.
Note, however, that this revenge strategy works only on men; perhaps women are in a state of perpetual humiliation from dealing with femcare products on a regular basis. This message reinforces the core feature of hegemonic masculinity: the worst insult to a man’s masculinity is to suggest that he is female.
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.
