Blog of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research

Have You Heard? Menstrual Hygiene GOES GLOBAL!

June 10th, 2013 by Chris Bobel

Guest Post by Danielle I. Keiser, WASH United gGmbH/Berlin, Germany

From May #MENSTRAVAGANZA to Menstrual Hygiene Day:

WASH United is Turning Up the Volume

and Helping Breaking the Silence

Did you hear about May #MENSTRAVAGANZA? It was truly menstravagant. It was the first-ever social media campaign of its kind: a 28-day awareness cycle lead by WASH United to break the silence around menstruation and menstrual hygiene.

WASH United is a Berlin-based international social impact organization that promotes safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) for all. Using our expertise in innovative campaigning, positive communication, and network building, our ambition is to bring the most neglected of all WASH issues into the spotlight. Our vision is to create a world in which every woman and girl can manage her menstruation in a hygienic way — in privacy, safety, and with dignity — at home, at school, and at the workplace.

Menstruation: It happens.

Menstruation is a normal human process. Nevertheless, it is still treated as a taboo in many cultures and societies across the globe. A profound silence around the topic combined with a lack of access to information results in girls and women possessing very little understanding of their own bodies. Many are left to manage their periods in an unsafe manner, using old rags or other unhygienic and ineffective materials. The problem is exacerbated by limited access to hygienic products, safe and private sanitation facilities, inconsistent supplies of water for personal hygiene, and inadequate disposal options.

As a result, menstruating girls and women often feel ashamed and embarrassed about themselves. Facing health problems and socio-cultural taboos surrounding their periods, they become isolated from family, school, and their communities. Women and girls miss school and productive work days, thus falling behind their male counterparts.

Some facts and figures

  • 48% of girls in Iran, 10% in India, and 7% in Afghanistan believe that menstruation is a disease.[1]
  • In a survey of 747 women and girls across five states in rural India, only 30.2% of girls and women reported knowing about menstruation before they received their first period.[2]
  • Women in rural Nepal are often restricted to separate huts or cow sheds during menstruation. Other activities are also restricted, such as preparing and consuming food, socializing, traveling, and even attending school.[3]
  • In rural Nigeria, men and women may maintain separate quarters while a woman is menstruating. Some women choose to not wash their pads daily or worry about how to dispose of them out of fear they may be vulnerable to witchcraft attacks.[4]
  • A study across six rural districts in Sierra Leone schools revealed that up to 21.3% of students report missing school during their menstrual periods.[5]
  • In a study in Bangladeshi garment factories, where 80% of factory workers are women, a majority of them were using rags from the factory floor for menstrual cloths. Infections are common, leading to 73% of women missing work for an average of six unpaid days per month.[6]

If periods are such a normal and natural occurrence, why are people so afraid to talk about them or the specific needs related to managing them?

Using ‘Misses with Moustaches’ as spokesladies for May #MENSTRAVAGANZA, the idea was that, if women can have moustaches, can’t we all talk about menstruation? Throughout the campaign, questions raised by the ‘Misses in Moustaches’ included:

If Only!

March 22nd, 2013 by David Linton

Guest Post by Carly Schneider, Marymount Manhattan College

Unlike a lot of my peers, my childhood history with menstruation is relatively positive. In the small, rural town in Vermont I grew up in, the topic of menstruation was dealt with early. I remember as a third grader the two or three days we spent discussing this process and the human body. I remember we all wanted to get ours- it was a sign of growing up. Of course there was the typical giggling and insecurities that often come with such discussion but then again, this was the start of being taught the societal views regarded for this biological process. This was before I was conscious of the innate inequality between men and women. It wasn’t until high school that I learned that female sexuality and body were not subjects of empowerment and confidence, but of silence and shame.

It was when I came to New York City for college that I could define my feelings as ‘feminist’- that word was practically a swear in my town- and I studied the various waves and leaders of the movement including, of course, Gloria Steinem. In my final semester of undergrad, I made it a must to sign up for David Linton’s Social Construction & Images of Menstruation course. It was the perfect ending to four glorious years of out and proud feminism. I was working on my senior thesis film at the time and knew that for my final project for his class I’d rather make something visual than write a paper. I recruited three peers: Rebecca, a fellow communications major and Mauricio and Warren, both BFA actors. Rebecca and I sat down together one night to think of ideas- what kind of project could we do with two men? My mind instantly went to Steinem’s If Men Could Menstruate, a 1978 article published in Ms. Magazine. Rebecca and I came up with several scenes that were each inspired by points in her essay. Feeling inspired, I went home that night and wrote the entire script. A few weeks later, after hours of shooting, a multitude of iced coffees, and plenty of laughs, we shared with our class the video we created.

Each scene is less than a minute long and focuses on a particular point from Steinem’s article. Topics include societal shaming, marketing, product availability, synchronization, and menstrual sex. The reaction from the class was beyond inspiring and the activity on its Youtube page has been exciting. We’re already at 3,000 views and growing.

It is articles like Steinem’s that continue to empower me to feel pride for my femininity, my body, and my cycle.

Portnoy’s (Menstrual) Complaint

January 1st, 2013 by David Linton

One way of telling how comfortable a man is with the biological facts of women’s lives is how he responds to calls for him to go shopping for menstrual products or to have physical contact with a woman’s menses.

Depictions of this challenge have occasionally been a subject of humor on TV shows such as in the episode of King of the Hill titled “Aisle # 8″ in which the bumbling Hank Hill has to enter the fearful menstrual aisle of a supermarket or, for contrast, in an episode of Californication when the father of a daughter who has just had her first period heroically fends off other customers to get her the last package of pads on the shelf.

An early literary description of a menstrual product shopping moment, one that was deeply traumatic for the character, is in Philip Roth’s 1967 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint. Set in a psychoanalyst’s office during a single rambling session, Alex Portnoy relates a terrifying incident from his childhood when, at the age of eleven, his mother sent him out to buy a box of Kotex:

“It was years later that she called from the bathroom, Run to the drugstore! bring a box of Kotex! immediately! And the panic in her voice. Did I run! And then at home again, breathlessly handed the box to the white fingers that extended themselves at me through a narrow crack in the bathroom door. . . Though her menstrual troubles eventually had to be resolved by surgery, it is difficult nevertheless to forgive her for having sent me on that mission of mercy. Better she should have bled herself out on our cold bathroom floor, better that than to have sent an eleven-year-old boy in hot pursuit of sanitary napkins!” (43-44)

Whew! Now there’s a Freudian field day, and from a time when Freudian technique was in full fashion. More than 30 years later, in The Dying Animal (2001 ), another Roth character seems to have made some progress, at least on the surface. Perhaps his analysis has succeeded. A senior professor, the 62-year-old David Kepesh, plays out an erotic fantasy with a 24-year-old graduate student, Consuela Castillo. Kepesh, a serial womanizer who considers himself an erotic master, is stunned when she tells him that a former boyfriend liked to watch her take out her tampon, realizing that he has never done anything like that. His sexual competitiveness requires that he immediately enact the same scene. However, the act throws him into a state of Portnoy-like humiliation:

“Then came the night that Consuela pulled out her tampon and stood there in my bathroom, with one knee dipping toward the other and, like Mantegna’ Saint Sebastian, bleeding in a trickle down her thighs while I watched. Was it thrilling? Was I delighted? Was I mesmerized? Sure, but again I felt like a boy. I had set out to demand the most from her, and when she shamelessly obliged, I wound up again intimidating myself. There seemed nothing to be done – if I wished not to be humbled completely by her exotic matter-of-factness – except to fall to my knees to lick her clean. Which she allowed to happen without comment. Making me into a still smaller boy.” (71-72)

Though there are more scenes in this book and others by Roth that employ menstrual details to capture character and advance plots, these two embody deep-seated male confusion and anxiety about how to deal with menstrual encounters. The candor Roth exhibits, as is often the case with his writing, is admirable for its openness to exploring taboos, but one also wishes he was able to provide more nuanced treatments of women’s experiences as well. Perhaps we should turn to Joyce Carol Oates in search of such treatments. Perhaps in a future post.

Breaking News: Men Discover Tampons Can Absorb Blood

June 13th, 2012 by Elizabeth Kissling

Photo by henteaser // CC 2.0

Last week at The Art of Manliness, a contributor wrote a post about numerous possible wilderness survival uses of tampons. The post was picked up by the popular site, Boing Boing, and the commenters in both sites added more uses, as well uses for disposable maxi pads (although some contributors seem uncertain of the difference). Many creative uses for disposable femcare products were suggested, and while I can’t personally vouch for (or against) any of them, I offer this post as Public Service Announcement to correct some of the misinformation about tampons and pads that those uses presume.

The use of an opened tampon or a maxi pad for a bandage probably seems obvious to re:Cycling readers, as many are familiar with the history of Kotex, developed when World War I nurses discovered that the cotton cellulose they were using on wounded soldiers was highly absorbent. (The phrase ko-tex stands for cotton texture.) But as a few sharp readers of The Art of Manliness are aware, it has been decades since maxi-pads or tampons of any brand were made of cotton (except, obviously, the all-cotton types sold in health food stores). Pads are made from mostly from wood cellulose fibers, with plastic outer layers made of polypropylene or polyethylene. Some of the newer, improved maxi-pads feature synthetic gels designed to draw blood away from the body — not exactly a feature you’d want in a bandage, when you’re trying to stanch the flow of blood and promote clotting. If you’re bleeding heavily, you’re probably better off tearing off your t-shirt and pressing it against the wound. Tampons are also made of wood cellulose, often with a core of viscose fiber. Viscose fiber is rayon, created by treating cellulose with sodium hydroxide and carbon disulfide.

And although most brands are individually wrapped these days, neither tampons nor pads are sterile. Nor are they produced in sterile conditions. I’d be very leery of using a tampon as a water filter. Surely there are safer, equally portable, emergency filters one could pack in a wilderness survival kit.

Many of the other emergency uses of tampons involved using the fluffy wood pulp as kindling, or otherwise setting them on fire. Now there’s a use I can get behind!

“When it comes to their balls, guys just don’t seem to have any”

November 18th, 2011 by Elizabeth Kissling

I’ve spent so many years as a professor of Women’s Studies telling students that feminism is about equality, and that being pro-woman doesn’t mean being anti-men. I thought perhaps we’d moved past that 1990s meme of seeing everything that is for women as male-bashing, but here we go again.

The latest marketing strategy of Essure, a permanent birth control method for women that destroys the Fallopian tubes, is to appeal to men’s fear of vasectomy: “because you can only wait so long for him to man up”.

Le sigh.

Curb Your (Menstrual) Enthusiasm?

August 9th, 2011 by David Linton

From time to time menstrual references show up in TV programs, mostly on situation comedies and, unsurprisingly, they are usually played for laughs.  The most common inclusions have had to do with menarche with menopause coming in second.  First periods have provided laughs and plot material for the writers of DeGrassi, Roseanne, Californication, Seventh Heaven, The Cosby Show, Beverly Hills 90210, King of the Hill, and others.  In nearly every one of these episodes the humor and plot tension derives, at least in part, from an exploration of male response to unwelcome exposure to the cycle: close encounters of the menstrual kind.

The most recent, and most daring, occurrence appeared in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 8, Episode 1) involving a girl selling Girl Scout cookies getting her first period standing in the foyer of Larry David’s home while writing up a cookie order.  Rather than dashing off to find a woman to “take care” of the situation, as depicted, for example, in King of the Hill and Beverly Hills 90210, the protagonist rushes upstairs to get a box of tampons, left behind by his wife who has left him, and stands outside a bathroom door shouting instructions to the bewildered girl inside.  Apparently she knows what the period is but has never been told how to use a tampon.

The episode is extraordinarily daring.  Even the simple detail of having an older man hand a young girl he just met a tampon is startling, given the depth of social taboos requiring strict gender separation in matters menstrual.  But to have him stand outside the bathroom door shouting instructions and reading the sheet packed in the box about placing the tampon in the vagina while the girl inside responds with confusion and frustration is risky indeed.  But the most striking thing of all is that while both characters find the situation awkward, neither one is overly embarrassed, particularly the girl who calmly announces, “I think I just got my period for the first time.”  Though she has apparently received little education about the technology, she is fully aware of what is happening in her body and accepts the fact that the adult she happens to be with when it happens is able to help her out.  The fact that it’s a male, and a quirky older one at that, seems not to matter at all.

This indifference on their parts is both a source of the humor and, perhaps, an indication of a watershed in menstrual decorum.  Or is that too optimistic a reading?

Cross-posted at The Communicated Stereotype

 

Her First Period Won’t Be Forgotten

August 5th, 2011 by Elizabeth Kissling

This is funny, and in some ways, quite charming, sketch comedy about a dad talking his young daughter through her first period.

[via Glad Rags on Twitter ]

For those with Vaginas

March 17th, 2011 by Chris Hitchcock

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.

Dating the men of Stayfree

August 31st, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

Via Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet, I learned of this new internet campaign from Stayfree.


At last, my girlish fantasies realized! I have always dreamed of a man who would have dinner almost ready when I got home, and then mansplain the intricacies of feminine hygiene products while the risotto simmered.

Except I grew up in the 1970s, so my fantasy man shaved his face, not his chest, before our date.

[See also A date with Ryan and A date with Trevor.]

A Pill for Men – Still Five Years Away

July 2nd, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
mouse2

Photo by Flickr user be_khe | CC 3.0

The Internet, especially the feminist blogosphere, is all abuzz this week with the promise of a new contraceptive pill for men within the next five years. But researchers always say a pill for men is just five years away, according to University of Washington medical professor John K. Amory.

The spark of new hope stems from an interview with Professor Haim Breitbart of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, published June 28 in London’s Telegraph. Breitbart promises a monthly pill, free of side effects, for men. The Telegraph says human trials are scheduled to begin next year.

How does this proposed pill work? The answer lies in a breakthrough paper Breitbart published four years ago, in which he and his colleagues announced a new discovery about how sperm cells create new proteins after ejaculation, while hanging around in the uterus before fertilization can take place. Breitbart believes that if this protein production process can be derailed, conception can be prevented without hormones. He calls his chemical concoction the Bright Pill (a twist on his name).

So far, the prototype works very well, inducing temporary sterility for one to three months at time, depending on dosage. In mice, that is. Breitbart believes there are no side effects, telling a reporter for an Israeli news service,

The mice behaved nicely. They ate and had sex; they were laughing, and everything, so all I can say is that we couldn’t see any behavioral side-effects–all their sex behavior was retained, which is a very important consideration for human men.

Well, then. If the mice were laughing and still having sex, then it must be all right. (Mice laugh? How can you tell?) I’m certainly willing to give Breitbart the benefit of the doubt on this one and believe that so far, the Bright Pill is very effective for male mice.

But we’re a long way from the jubilation seen in some corners of the Internet over this news. Not only does effectiveness in mice not guarantee effectiveness in humans, Breitbart and his research associate, Dr. Yael Gur, plan to continue rodent testing for at least another year before moving on to test the pill on primates. Then come three phases of clinical trials in humans, after lab and animal testing, to assure the drug’s safety and efficacy before developers can apply for U.S. approval (other countries have similar processes). Funding is needed for this lengthy process, and since there’s presently no drug company behind the project, Breitbart and Gur are seeking investors.

So even if a Pill for men is five years away, would men use it? Depending on the study and the country, anywhere between 14 percent and 71 percent of men say they would. What do you think, re:Cycling readers? If you’re male and heterosexual, would you take Brietbart’s “Bright Pill”? If you’re a woman who has sex with men, would you want your partner to take it?

Cross-posted at Ms. Magazine Blog

Ultrasound Man:Birth Control Superhero

May 17th, 2010 by Laura Wershler

superheroYou know how most superheros become superheros because of exposure to some weird, intensified chemical or element? Take Peter Parker’s spider bite for example.

According to a story reported in various media, including International Planned Parenthood Federation’s website, if science can perfect the contraceptive effect of ultasound on men’s testicles, then we may be in for a new breed of superhero.  Ultrasound Man: able to bear the burden of pregnancy prevention for women everywhere. 

I joke, but for decades women have yearned for gender equality when it comes to bearing the burden of birth control. Could the promise of six months of ultrasound induced, reversible infertility in men be the answer? Well, to date, we only know it works in rats. There is a long way to go before we send the men for a bi-annual ultrasound “zap test”.

This isn’t the first male method touted over the last decade. In 2003, news out of the UK about a birth control pill for men had women nodding their heads with approval. I was immediately dubious and dashed off a commentary for the Calgary Herald that began thus:

Memo to Big Pharma: Save your money. If you think the male birth control pill is going to be a big seller, think again. Memo to women everywhere: Curb your enthusiasm. If you think it’s time men took more responsibility, you’re right — but the Pill for Bill is not going to be it.

Because of the complex hormonal action of the pill for men, I knew it wouldn’t fly. As I noted in my piece:

According to a story from the London Telegraph, because the treatment is invasive, it is likely to be used only by men in long-term relationships. Read it and weep, gals, because this is the wicked truth. It’s OK for women of any age or relationship status to ingest birth control pills or receive the Depo-Provera injection that completely shuts down their reproductive systems, but men would never do the same. It is already postulated that only men in committed relationships are likely to submit to invasive hormonal contraception. That would be supportive husbands and partners of the best kind.

Although a recent  survey by the Family Planning Association found that one third of men would definitely use a birth control pill for men if it became available, I doubt very much, once the mechanism of action were explained (full disclosure), that there would be many takers. I suspect the side effects, and concerns about synthetic testosterone, would result in a pathetic compliance rate.

Certainly the ultrasound method sounds much less invasive. Research leader James Tsuruta of the University of North Carolina said: “We think this could provide men with reliable, low-cost, non-hormonal contraception from a single round of treatment.

Happily, “the team plans to investigate the mechanism that causes temporary infertility.” I think the guys would want to know how and why it works before signing up.  But they can rest assured because Dr. Tsuruta also said: “Establishing safety, efficacy and reversability: these are our top concerns.”

As media stories proliferate documenting the growing trend among young women to eschew the Pill (et. al) in favour of non-hormonal methods, news that there may be a safe, simple method for men on the horizon is both welcome and long overdue.

What I find hard to take, however, is this suggestion expressed by Allan Pacey from the University of Sheffield:

There is certainly a place for an effective non-hormonal contraceptive in men, but whether men would find it acceptable to have their testicles scanned regularly remains to be seen.

I’d Rather Hold Your Bike than Your Tampons

April 19th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling


Is it wrong that I like this ad because it makes men look foolish for fearing tampons? It’s not that I mean to endorse mocking men as a class, it’s just that unlike the Kotex “Ridiculous” ad, this new ad frames something other than menstruation as this lady’s biggest problem.

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.