Given the choice between being filthy and being unnatural, can we trust women to make the right decision?
Published by Kyso Kisaen May 24th, 2007 in Bodily Autonomy, Feminism, For the ladies, Health, Shame on you for being a womanVia Amanda, ABC wins some sort of record for cramming the greatest amount of anxiety over menstruation possible into a single article. I was honestly shocked to go back up to the byline and discover that the damn thing had been written by a woman.
The curse. Aunt Flo. Riding the Crimson Wave. And, in British-bashing Australia, the red coats are coming! Women across the centuries have had names for their monthly “friend” — some laced with humor and many whispered in tones of taboo.
Quite frankly, The Onion’s euphemisms were better.
I prefer “Falling to the communists”, but that’s just crazy little me, with my having been educated to a high-school level of biology and not projecting some kind of gender blood-magic to my monthly Mudslide in Crotch Canyon. But upon learning that women now have the option of not “Ordering l’Omelette Rouge” (oh man, this is fun!) some people’s minds immediately jumped to the obvious problem:
“There may be important health consequences that we don’t know about,” said Christine L. Hitchcock, an endocrinology researcher at the University of British Columbia. “I don’t think we understand everything that the menstrual cycle does well enough to say with confidence that you can abolish it and not have any consequences.”
I’m just kidding, Susan Donaldson James didn’t have that anywhere in her article. That was already covered by sane publications. Susan has more profound concerns:
It’s unclear whether women will embrace this new pill, which contains the same formulations of estrogen and progestin used for birth control pills for decades, but its arrival marks yet another step toward the blurring of the genders.
As 21st century women dominate the universities and continue to climb the executive ladder, and metro-sexual men explore their feminine side, it’s harder to define what it means to be a woman.
Shit, maybe if we hadn’t encouraged men to exfoliate or use mousse, we’d have enough wiggle room to play around with our “red dollar days.” But we did! We did get that degree and we did take the promotion and our husbands did get their backs waxed, and now woe! Woe befalls those who tamper with the last remaining distinction between men and women!
Look, I know that for some women, this is actually an issue, but it is clearly an individual woman issue, not a social issue. Put two extreme women side by side, one of whom thinks that “serving up the womb steak medium rare” puts her in some sort of life-affirming granola-fuck moon cycle woman thing*, and another that finds “trolling for vampires” to be an absolutely reprehensible experience. Can you tell, just by looking, the difference? Nope, they both look like women to me. Whew! That settles that. Or does it?
Most of us are in the middle, and will choose yay or nay based on how squicky the idea of not “rebooting the Ovarian Operating System” makes us feel. It would help, however, if certain *cough* journalists would refrain from doing this:
Lybrel, manufactured by Wyeth, stops the growth of the uterus, sending it into hibernation.
Or this:
But other women worry that taking Lybrel is tantamount to tampering with nature, and some doctors have warned that the pill is not 100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy, particularly for overweight women. Total bleeding stopped in only 80 percent of women in the trials, according to gynecologists. Iron retention can also be a side effect.
“I personally would not opt to take the pill,” said Erin Stahl, 28, an educational administrator in New Jersey. “I think it does seem a wee bit unnatural and physically frightening.
The first is just so inaccurate as to be mind-boggling. Unless it’s not, and my uterus is growing right now, in which case, holy crap! It’s about time someone made something to stop it before it eats my stomach or something. The second is a scare tactic disguised as legit medical information.
And someone please explain to me this complete non-sequitor:
Today, both men and women have different attitudes toward menstruation. Indie rock vocalist Ani DiFranco sings with 21st century attitude about her monthly cycle: “I woke up one morning covered in blood, like a war — like a warning that I live in a breakable takeable body.”
What in the fuck does that first sentence have to do with the rest of the paragraph? Ani DiFranco, as much as I love her, is only one woman. No other women or men are quoted at all, but hey, Ani provides a shocking quote, so maybe no one will notice, right?
So what stereotypes have we had so far? Let’s see, the ball-buster, the young idealist, the nervous woman…what’s left? Oh yeah, the really messed up:
“Someone else might choose to do this because she doesn’t want to menstruate because it makes her feel unfeminine,” (emphasis mine)
I don’t enjoy “playing banjo in Sgt. Zygote’s Ragtime Band” all that much, but it sure as hell ain’t because it makes me feel ‘unfeminine.’ Although it was kind of neat that Susan began this article tsk-tsking over how failing to “fly the red flag” might make us less of women, and ends with a quote about a hypothetical woman who would chose to stop that filthy, shameful cunt bleeding in order to feel more feminine. It’s a circle of misogyny so perfect it makes a grown woman weep.
*This is going to get me flamed with a vengance, I can just tell.
Gee, I didn’t know that uterii could go into hibernation. Silly me, I thought that was something that mammals in northern climates did every winter, but I guess reproductive organs can do it too.
The pill acts by preventing ovulation. This fact is readily available, is not difficult to grasp, and would take about 3 f*cking seconds for a journalist to look up. But that must be too much to ask of the ones who churn out sensationalist garbage on a regular basis, aka all of them.
Ooo, I’ll play along!
“joining up with Garibaldi”
“having it out with some Wolverines”
“running at 650 nanometers”
“hitting up the hemoglobin”
“Christmas sans green”
“panties and pinot noir”
Okay, now I’m just getting absurd.
“Tampering with nature?” What the fuck? Clearly, someone needs to make the obvious Viagra comparison. Since I’m just the one to do it, here I go:
So, using Lybrel to stop menstruation is “tampering with nature.” However, taking Viagra to get a hard-on when nature had clearly dictated (no pun intended) that a man’s dick should no longer function for sexual purposes is A-ok. Not at all tampering with nature; nope, no sirree.
Someone please explain this fucked-up excuse for logic to me.
I’m just kidding, Susan Donaldson James didn’t have that anywhere in her article. That was already covered by sane publications. Susan has more profound concerns:
Ha. Fabulous.
P.S. Yeah, i love the Ani DiFranco quote, too. That song is quite a few years old, too, and doesn’t really relate at all the to the sentence above it, leaving me to believe the writers were, like, “dude, don’t feminists talk about their periods alot?” “Yeah, man, who was that one feminist, you know, from the 90s? I bet she said something about her period, once,” “dude, google that shit … ”
Okay, I don’t know why in my mind the writer just became two people, and a stoner, but whatever.
If they were going to go with an Ani-period-quote, for shock value, they should’ve used “I’m gonna pull out my tampon / and start splashing around …” from Swan Dive … Hell, Ani could be the new poster-woman for Lybrel with that quote ….
Some friends and I were joking about how just about every word in British English is a euphemism for a woman’s vagina, and if you look at the language as such, it makes a lot more sense, to which I tossed out “She let me see her pine barrens.”
At which point the term “Autumn in the pine barrens” was introduced.
Someone please explain this fucked-up excuse for logic to me.
Simple. Men need their erections, and they need to know women are in pain at least once a month. Else, they can’t sleep at night.
Or something…
I would consider this drug, even when I’m possibly about five or ten years away from menopause, because frankly, the damn bleeding is horrid. I’ve had a fucking ’nuff and unless any of these asswipes would like to kindly wash my bloody twat six times a day, insert a new tampon and attach a clean pad to my underpants and wash out the ones that inevitably get stained with overflow, then they can shut the fuck up.
A seventy year perv can take a pill so he can rape at his leisure, but a woman must spend years of her life imprisoned by her body, if not by pregnancy, then by the shame and the physical disability of menses.
Yes, I have that condition where I overbleed, called whatever I don’t remember because not one GD doctor in all my life has ever bothered to give a damn enough to even let on that such a condition exists. Years of embarrassing bleed throughs, debilitating cramps, wild mood swings and depression and incapacitating anemia are supposed to make me feel like a woman.
Get out of my way you bitch Donaldson, I’m getting the damned pills.
*blinks* I use the IUS and I haven’t had a period for 15 months. I had no idea this was such a novel course of action. What’s the fuss?
1m–i’m not getting it, either. my girl’s on depo and she hasn’t bled in four years. why is this getting so much press?
I dunno about you guys, but I blame the patriarchy.
life-affirming granola-fuck moon cycle woman thing
Flamed? You just made my week.
What mythago said.
Screw all that womynly life magick stuff. If there’s a pill that’ll make me stop bleeding without messing up my head, sign me right up.
About the “life-affirming granola-fuck moon cycle woman thing”…
Not everyone who likes having a period does it out of sheer hippiedom. I had to be on the pill when I was in my teens because I had periods that never stopped. I nearly had to have a blood transfusion, I was *that* anemic.
The various dosages/brands/mixtures of the pill I tried made me morning sick, bloated, depressed, amd aggrivated my ulcerative colitis. I also just felt strange.
Now that I’m older, my periods are pretty light and managable, and I like the tickly feeling of it running out of me. I like the way I feel brilliant in a beautiful world on the second day of my period. I love how the hormonal fluctuations cause all sorts of changes in my sexual response patterns.
I completely empathize with desperately wishing it would stop, and I understand enjoying the experience. I like my biology sans pill, but pills sure did save my butt. Anyone who wants to do away with their periods should use science to their advantage. It might be worth looking into the Mirena, because then one doesn’t even have to remember the pill whilst cavorting about being an unnatural, baby-”hating” castrating slutasaurus rex!