Sweetening the Pill, the documentary Ricki Lake and Abby Eptsein are set to produce and direct, met it’s Kickstarter campaign goal on Friday, July 3rd, 2015, raising $119, 884 from 1750 backers to give the project the green light. The documentary was inspired by the book of the same name by SMCR member Holly Grigg-Spall. Lake and Epstein also produced The Business of Being Born, a film that challenged the “one-size-fits-all” approach to giving birth. Sweetening the Pill is intended to do the same thing for birth control.
Watch: Sweetening the Pill Trailer
- It’s old news that men find women’s faces more attractive when they are fertile, but the facial cues to explain this have eluded researchers. A new study from the University of Cambridge, as reported in the Science Daily, shows that women’s face skin gets redder at the point of peak fertility. However, as this change in face redness is too subtle for the human eye to detect, skin colouration has been ruled out as the reason for this “attractiveness effect.” Dr. Hannah Rowland, who co-led the study, said, “Women don’t advertise ovulation, but they do seem to leak information about it, as studies have shown they are seen as more attractive by men when ovulating.” The mystery continues.
- NPR tells this story: People Are Finally Talking About The Thing Nobody Wants To Talk About.It begins like this:
When Elynn Walter walks into a room of officials from global health organizations and governments, this is how she likes to get their attention:
“I’ll say, ‘OK, everyone stand up and yell the word blood!’ or say, ‘Half of the people in the world have their period!’ ”
It’s her way of getting people talking about a topic that a lot of people, well, aren’t comfortable talking about: menstrual hygiene.
- Teenager June Eric-Udorie writes about the #LiveTweetYourPeriod campaign in the New Statesman: Why I’ll be livetweeting my next period — The only way we can break the stigma around periods is if we all talk about it.
