Photo by E. Kissling // Quote from student of Chella Quint – photo from Chella Quint’s “Adventures in Menstruating” Presentation at SMCR 2013, New York, NY
- Japan’s health ministry has issued a nationwide notice, withdrawing the recommendation of HPV vaccines for girls due to adverse reactions.
- Suzan at PeriodWise wonders how the NFLs new rule that fans are permitted to bring only clear handbags into the stands for gams will affect the league’s female fans, given the prevalence of menstrual shaming.
- Remember last fall, about two weeks before the election, when CNN.com posted and then quickly removed an article about research that claimed to show a link between ovulation and whether a woman would vote Republican or Democrat? Here’s an interview with the researcher.
- An alternative to the grandmother hypothesis: a recent report in PLOS Computational Biology suggests that men’s preference for younger, fertile women is the evolutionary cause of menopause. Anna Haensch of NPR suggests that if the model is correct, perhaps we could induce male menopause by middle-aged ladies dumping their “paunchy, balding partners in favor of younger mates”.
- It is possible that women’s declining fertility as they age has been exaggerated in mainstream media: “The widely cited statistic that one in three women ages 35 to 39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying, for instance, is based on an article published in 2004 in the journal Human Reproduction. Rarely mentioned is the source of the data: French birth records from 1670 to 1830. . . . In other words, millions of women are being told when to get pregnant based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment.”
