A dozen periods is called a clot: a giveaway, and the four wolves inside me
Ok that’s not true. But, shouldn’t it be? Can we make it a thing? Or maybe, a dozen menstruating people is a clot? I feel like we could design a pretty badass feminist civil disobedience around this.
In this episode of “way to bury the lede, Kate,” let’s read some book news!
The University of Illinois News Bureau just put out a press release about PERIOD – feel free to check it out for contact info and, if you’re a member of the press, a way to get an early copy of the book.
The Beckman Institute – one of my primary research institute homes at Illinois – put out two videos about PERIOD. One is about busting myths, the other more of a general pitch. In both cases you get to see me in professorwear sweating under heavy lighting! (If you follow me on Instagram you pretty much only see me in trucker hats and pump covers lifting heavy things or doing mom things.) Anyway they are kind of adorable and I’m endlessly thankful to Steve Drake for putting them together.
AND perhaps in the BIGGEST NEWS… dun dun dun… my audiobook (which I narrate) has been selected by LibroFM, the audiobook retailer that splits profits with local bookstores, for their March influencer campaign! That means book influencer type people will be getting free copies in the hopes of getting them excited about and sharing the book too. If you know any, or you are an influencer yourself, please do have a listen and share widely!
AND AND… dun dun DUN dun… LibroFM is giving away three free copies of the audiobook! I’ve made a giveaway on Twitter – you can participate through 3/19 and I’ll select three random winners on 3/20!
Yeah, I probably should have mentioned this first, but I did edit the title so you knew to look for it!
Short links because this week’s period fact is more of a rant
Hooray, finally someone noticed that constantly putting athletes who menstruate in white shorts is a dick move. (It would be great if the next target could be beach volleyball uniforms.)
A paper out the other week looks at gender and racial inequities in NIH funding and… surprise! It’s not good!
Peste Magazine, which has been consistently on top of truthtelling COVID reporting, addresses (again) the myth of the one in a million chance of a kid dying of COVID. (bee-tee-dubs five hundred people are still dying a day from covid in the US alone, wheeee)
Extended weird period fact slash rant
Over the last week or so I have been asked the same questions by a number of different journalists (all great people) around what products I think we should be using for periods. This is in large part because of the Thinx settlement where consumers found out that their period underwear – marketed as safe and sustainable – actually contains PFAs. Rose Eveleth dug into this years ago and because of their reporting I’ve only ever bought Dear Kates and Aisle.
But this isn’t a product endorsement, I don’t particularly recommend period underwear (for me it can only ever be a backup because I bleed way too much – I’ve tried and my desk chair has paid the price). I also don’t particularly recommend menstrual cups. Not because cups are going to cause prolapse, which has been going around again – that’s highly unlikely. But because I’m unwilling to recommend any particular individual solution that is supposed to make us feel like we are doing something by buying shit from corporations.
This newsletter is weeks late because I’ve written at least four different versions of this section. And it’s because there are at least four different wolves inside of me fighting for survival.
One wolf says corporations will not save us and I trust them about as much as they have regard for me as a human being (which is approximately zero). I’m glad there are some more sustainable options on the market now (except lolz at least Thinx and who knows who else was not disclosing what was in them), but are they sustainable if you have to buy a number of different styles, brands, and sizes to find what works for you? I have prolapse from growing and pushing out two big babies and have yet to find a cup that fits comfortably. How do you choose if there are predatory companies out there selling menstrual cups of such bad quality they melt or get slimy when you boil them? (Yes this is a thing – if you see one being sold for a few bucks I wouldn’t trust it, good ones of medical grade silicone are going to be pricey.) And what do we know of the labor and sustainability practices of the factories generating these products? Who is affected by factory waste?
The second wolf says menstruation is so incredibly different for different people that no one solution is going to work for everyone – I have friends who have to just sit on the toilet on their heaviest days or swap out tampons every forty five minutes, and I myself can barely trust period underwear as a backup, let alone a standalone management option. For some of us the reusable products on the market are not enough, and chemical suppression of the period is not appropriate or desirable for everyone. For others who do not have easy access to water, or washing machines, or means to fully dry their reusable products, they are simply not an option.
The third wolf reminds me that some amount of discomfort or products not working well is absolutely something people should be willing to put up with for sustainability. While we’re at it, yes, we should start getting used to colder homes in winter and warmer ones in summer. We should not see electricity as an endless resource. We should reconsider the amount of air travel we do. And so on. This is why personally I use as few disposable products as I can get away with, and why my backup is always a reusable one. And it’s why when I am menstruating I pretty much always wear dark pants, just in case my cribbed-together situation is insufficient to that cycle’s crimson wave.
But then the fourth wolf is so filled with rage it eats the first three wolves. Because what makes me angry about this question (through no fault of people asking it) is that we cannot and should not expect menstruating people to bear the complete burden on how to manage our lives if we are going to use more sustainable but less effective products (But X product is effective for meeee! someone cries. You just haven’t tried Y! wails another). Bathroom stalls need to be designed so that it is easier to dump and clean menstrual cups, and with more room and privacy so we can swap out period underwear. Our days should have more bio breaks built into them. Our furniture should be easy to clean. We need to normalize seeing menstrual blood and being ok with someone occasionally leaking a little. If we are going to seek alternatives we need our environment to accommodate this.
In her book Under Wraps, Professor Sharra Vostral describes the major technological changes that both users and companies made to menstrual products over the last hundred years or so. Part of the reason people so often stayed home or were advised not to participate in society when menstruating were because to do so you had to risk menstruating everywhere. Pads were not super absorbent! They chafed until peoples’ legs bled! People wore either rubber aprons or rubber underwear OVER their pads to try and prevent leaks! The impact of the use of these sustainable products (even if that’s not the values that motivated the use of them at the time) fell to the menstruating person and meant for days at a time they were denied full participation in various publics.
Professor Vostral’s other book Toxic Shock: A Social History (and her paper on part of this story, which I reference in the weird period fact from newsletter #2) covers the feminist activists who looked at the R&D practices of the corporations making tampons and pushed them to do better. The Thinx settlement is a similar move – an insistence that we deserve to know the materials that go on and in our bodies. The question is where do we go next?
As just one example, I’m glad to see lots of young people activated around issues of menstrual justice. High school and college chapters of these organizations could set the agenda: they’ve gotten pads to unhoused and incarcerated people, they’ve encouraged sustainable menstrual management options, they’ve lobbied against the tampon tax. What would it look like to insist our college campuses become the next big place to accommodate periods? How would it look to do a complete revamp of all the bathrooms (for all genders) to create more ease in menstrual management? How can those of us with a little more institutional power help organizations navigate systems and find success? With what groups should we be seeking solidarity, finding co-conspirators?
Even though the only wolf left in me these days is the rage wolf, I also find myself glad (and terrified for obvious reasons) of the ways bodies have been taking center stage politically. We are talking about abortion, pregnancy, disease, disability, gender, gender/sex, hormones, and more… seemingly more than ever before. The backlash against those of us with bodies that in some or multiple ways do not meet the white, colonial, heterosexist, masculine, hygienic norm is definitely real, and definitely happening. But the good news is it means they are afraid of us.
Instead of being afraid of what comes next… what is our next move? What small thing can we do today to enact Professor Ruha Benjamin’s viral justice?
References:
Vostral, S. L. (2018). Toxic Shock: A Social History. New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479877843.001.0001
Vostral, S. (2017). Toxic Shock Syndrome, Tampon Absorbency, and Feminist Science. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 3(1).
Vostral, S. L. (2008). Under wraps: A history of menstrual hygiene technology. Lexington Books.