Huge roaches, meetings,
Long driving to get bad dog.
Enough. I'm finished.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Thursday
A haiku for the morning:
Cockroach in death throes...
Mildew perfumes its passing.
Office loo mocks me.
Only 4 hours left until the chaos resolves into normal idiocy. That's all I can manage un-caffeinated.
Cockroach in death throes...
Mildew perfumes its passing.
Office loo mocks me.
Only 4 hours left until the chaos resolves into normal idiocy. That's all I can manage un-caffeinated.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
I enjoy being a girl
Sometimes I am struck by inspiration. It feels nice, like a friendly chuck on the chin. Other moments come on like the gentle caress... of a Mack truck hitting a subcompact car. This week, whacked by one of the latter, I decided to start... a BLOG. (I do accept warm welcomes to the 21st century.)
So, why the show tune title?
There are times, often separated by about 21-25 days, when being a female is not my favorite thing in the world. It hurts, it's inconvenient, and it's messy. And the world certainly doesn't look as lovely from the angle of doubled over in pain. But there's no escaping the warm, chromosomal fact of my distinct double x-es. Outside of those several days out of the year, many times it's an awful lot of fun to be a female.
The other day my boyfriend thought he'd let me know of an option out there for women, like me, who find the glow of feminity dims considerably several days out of the month. He's understandably concerned when my vocabulary narrows to moans and mumbled requests for Advil or a mallet strike to the head.
So, he sent me a link to an article in the UK publication The Telegraph about a one-pill solution to all your menstrual ills. For about 30 seconds of reading, it seemed like a good idea. No more periods, ever. How clean! How convenient! Think of the money I could spend on things other than paper and cotton disposables!
Then I was overcome with a visceral disgust. I don't think it was all from the very popular Joss Whedon post on the murder of Dua Kalil. But I'm sure his rant of brililance brought my feelings of feminine outrage to the fore, not to mention visuals of blood.
I don't think Western Medicine has come up with a good solution in the no-period pill. On longer reflection, it seems extremely misogynistic to me... ill-informed, at least. I even question the health of being on the pill, actually. But there is a certain degree of body rhythm syncopation I'm willing to engineer in order to choose when and if I reproduce.
But menstruating is not a disease that needs to be cured. Many people still view an essential part of being female as inconvenient or shameful, even. So why not get rid of it, without any long-term studies of the long-term physical ramifications. I may complain about it and not feel well when it's going on, but I'd rather have a natural process occur than... not.
Bleah.
What if there was a pill that made men not produce Precious Bodily Fluids, even if they could still "arrive" coitally... you think that would go over well? Nope. Even though it's not everyone's favorite substance, stains like crazy, and no one wants the "wet spot", getting rid of it isn't anything that has crossed anyone's mind, at least not to the point where it's been addressed medically. Men get medicine to enhance their masculinity, making it last longer (to the tune of priapism).
Yes, there is pain associated with menstruation. But we live through it, and childbirth, too. People are so discomfort-adverse, they use that aversion as an excuse to make this kind of "medicine." The avoidance of discomfort, mental and physical, is a different discussion altogether, and Pema Chodron has done it far more eloquently than I can, through her wonderful books and essays. But Western medicine addresses our aversion to discomfort as a marketing opportunity. Little pains? Don't feel them any more... even if the underlying cause isn't addressed in the slightest by that pill. Pop a pill, get a woodie. Pop a pill, lose weight. Pop a pill, relieve your chronic pain. Pop a pill... defeminize yourself.
Now, I've had many opportunities to benefit from Western medicine. It has been a huge boon to many people I've known. I'm not ignorant enough to write it off, because it does extend and enhance human life (to quote the Bristol-Myers Squibb statement). However, in some cases it ignores the bigger picture, treating the symptom rather than the underlying cause. And then, there are the vanity drugs.
Vanity drugs are those treatments (I hesitate to call them medicines) that play into our insecurities, laziness and fears. We don't need them. Yes, the morbidly obese man needs the pill to lose weight in some cases, but many who would benefit from a lifestyle change and are unwilling to give up their Snickers bars and sedentary lifestyles ask for that pill. I would argue that the no-period pill is a vanity treatment, even more so than the weight-loss pill. I wager that the number of women whose health is threatened by menstruation is vanishingly small. For them, yes, such a pill would be a lifesaver. But for the majority of us, for whom the period is a monthly inconvenience, a pain to deal with on vacation, it is a natural process. We've lived with it as long as we have existed. It tells those of us who don't want children that we're not pregnant. It can let us know when we're ill, if it's not regular.
And it is part of what makes us so different from men. And that seems to be a threat, and has been so historically. The curse, it has been called. How obscene is it that the process that makes us able to bring forth life is branded so? From the days that menstruating females were banished from society for the duration of their periods, and before, it has been patently obvious that our natural capability and difference has threatened men. Today we have devised myriad means of masking the curse. It's no longer taboo in America to talk about menstruation, but we still refer to women who are being difficult as "on the rag." Femininity is still shameful, despite our openness about it. We can bleed when we are cut, but the regular bleeding of our cycles is a threat.
So now we're offered a way to erase this most potent sign of our fertile nature. It might not be a conscious, studied attempt by the masculine elite of the pharmaceutical industry to eliminate the feminine mystique. But the no-period pill only exists because enough people believe menstruating is bad. The pill seems to be an attempted annihilation of scary femininity. It's a small, light pebble, like the heavier stones hurled at poor Dua Kalil. Unlike Dua, though, we don't bleed.
We don't bleed.
So, why the show tune title?
There are times, often separated by about 21-25 days, when being a female is not my favorite thing in the world. It hurts, it's inconvenient, and it's messy. And the world certainly doesn't look as lovely from the angle of doubled over in pain. But there's no escaping the warm, chromosomal fact of my distinct double x-es. Outside of those several days out of the year, many times it's an awful lot of fun to be a female.
The other day my boyfriend thought he'd let me know of an option out there for women, like me, who find the glow of feminity dims considerably several days out of the month. He's understandably concerned when my vocabulary narrows to moans and mumbled requests for Advil or a mallet strike to the head.
So, he sent me a link to an article in the UK publication The Telegraph about a one-pill solution to all your menstrual ills. For about 30 seconds of reading, it seemed like a good idea. No more periods, ever. How clean! How convenient! Think of the money I could spend on things other than paper and cotton disposables!
Then I was overcome with a visceral disgust. I don't think it was all from the very popular Joss Whedon post on the murder of Dua Kalil. But I'm sure his rant of brililance brought my feelings of feminine outrage to the fore, not to mention visuals of blood.
I don't think Western Medicine has come up with a good solution in the no-period pill. On longer reflection, it seems extremely misogynistic to me... ill-informed, at least. I even question the health of being on the pill, actually. But there is a certain degree of body rhythm syncopation I'm willing to engineer in order to choose when and if I reproduce.
But menstruating is not a disease that needs to be cured. Many people still view an essential part of being female as inconvenient or shameful, even. So why not get rid of it, without any long-term studies of the long-term physical ramifications. I may complain about it and not feel well when it's going on, but I'd rather have a natural process occur than... not.
Bleah.
What if there was a pill that made men not produce Precious Bodily Fluids, even if they could still "arrive" coitally... you think that would go over well? Nope. Even though it's not everyone's favorite substance, stains like crazy, and no one wants the "wet spot", getting rid of it isn't anything that has crossed anyone's mind, at least not to the point where it's been addressed medically. Men get medicine to enhance their masculinity, making it last longer (to the tune of priapism).
Yes, there is pain associated with menstruation. But we live through it, and childbirth, too. People are so discomfort-adverse, they use that aversion as an excuse to make this kind of "medicine." The avoidance of discomfort, mental and physical, is a different discussion altogether, and Pema Chodron has done it far more eloquently than I can, through her wonderful books and essays. But Western medicine addresses our aversion to discomfort as a marketing opportunity. Little pains? Don't feel them any more... even if the underlying cause isn't addressed in the slightest by that pill. Pop a pill, get a woodie. Pop a pill, lose weight. Pop a pill, relieve your chronic pain. Pop a pill... defeminize yourself.
Now, I've had many opportunities to benefit from Western medicine. It has been a huge boon to many people I've known. I'm not ignorant enough to write it off, because it does extend and enhance human life (to quote the Bristol-Myers Squibb statement). However, in some cases it ignores the bigger picture, treating the symptom rather than the underlying cause. And then, there are the vanity drugs.
Vanity drugs are those treatments (I hesitate to call them medicines) that play into our insecurities, laziness and fears. We don't need them. Yes, the morbidly obese man needs the pill to lose weight in some cases, but many who would benefit from a lifestyle change and are unwilling to give up their Snickers bars and sedentary lifestyles ask for that pill. I would argue that the no-period pill is a vanity treatment, even more so than the weight-loss pill. I wager that the number of women whose health is threatened by menstruation is vanishingly small. For them, yes, such a pill would be a lifesaver. But for the majority of us, for whom the period is a monthly inconvenience, a pain to deal with on vacation, it is a natural process. We've lived with it as long as we have existed. It tells those of us who don't want children that we're not pregnant. It can let us know when we're ill, if it's not regular.
And it is part of what makes us so different from men. And that seems to be a threat, and has been so historically. The curse, it has been called. How obscene is it that the process that makes us able to bring forth life is branded so? From the days that menstruating females were banished from society for the duration of their periods, and before, it has been patently obvious that our natural capability and difference has threatened men. Today we have devised myriad means of masking the curse. It's no longer taboo in America to talk about menstruation, but we still refer to women who are being difficult as "on the rag." Femininity is still shameful, despite our openness about it. We can bleed when we are cut, but the regular bleeding of our cycles is a threat.
So now we're offered a way to erase this most potent sign of our fertile nature. It might not be a conscious, studied attempt by the masculine elite of the pharmaceutical industry to eliminate the feminine mystique. But the no-period pill only exists because enough people believe menstruating is bad. The pill seems to be an attempted annihilation of scary femininity. It's a small, light pebble, like the heavier stones hurled at poor Dua Kalil. Unlike Dua, though, we don't bleed.
We don't bleed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)