Source: EpicFail.com, Monday Oct 15, 2012.
- Jezebel reports on an online study that found “almost 40% of women use their period as an excuse to get out of lame things“.
- Sex or meditation? Why not both?
- Have you seen Ruby Cup’s video response to the Bodyform video we posted and wrote about last week?
- You may have seen on our Facebook page that CNN quickly removed their story about that sketchy study about how women’s voting decisions are driven by ovulation. But Kate Clancy’s blog at Scientific American has a great takedown of the original study. The tl;dr version is this: “I do not understand how it is ok to publish papers that are predicated on an assumption about ovulation and hormone concentrations, but not measure ovulation or hormones.”
- Brown University student Cara Dorris has written a pointed and insightful column for her school newspaper about eating disorders and the far more common, even normalized, campus practice among young women of disordered eating. Dorris lists some of the consequences of habitual undernourishment (a.k.a., dieting):
You develop a significantly higher miscarriage rate. You may become anemic. You may stop getting your period and become infertile. Your bones will stop strengthening and might actually atrophy. You are at risk for stress fractures and early onset osteoporosis. Your heart may weaken. You may literally get dumber from changes in cognitive function.
- If you click on the “Advertising” or “FemCare Advertising” tag in the column on the right, you won’t have any trouble locating examples of magazine ads and television commercials that use shame to sell menstrual products. Yesterday, alert reader Melissa Doty sent me a link to a new ad for NuvaRing contraceptives that uses the old tried-and-true “it fell out of my purse and I was so embarrassed” trope. But this time it wasn’t a tampon but a packet of birth control pills that embarrassed the modern woman. Oh no! People might think she has health insurance! To see the ad for yourself, visit this page on the NuvaRing site, and select Oh!verheard at a Gym.
- GOOD magazine reports on a study about how gynecologists talk about sex – and fail to talk about sex.
I’ve used my period to get out of things. When I was studying in South America, we had to wear tight spandex during P.E. I dreaded it, so every week I told the P.E teacher (male) I was on my period. He never questioned me on why my period lasted an entire year or why it would eliminate me from participating in sports.
In high school, I got out of class by telling the office staff that I was menstruating and had stained my underwear.
Why? because when it’s menses…people don’t ask questions.