Birthcycle |

Goods 4 Girls.

When I first heard about Tampax and Always donating disposable menstrual supplies to girls in africa who were otherwise using very unsuitable materials or missing school entirely because of their periods my first thought was, “But that doesn’t solve the problem! If anyone’s giving them anything it should be well-sewn reusable cloth pads!”

After all, giving them a tampon or pad here or there doesn’t solve the long-term problem (it’s the old teach a man to fish/give a man a fish problem… kinda), because once used that particular gift cannot be used again. Disposable one-use products keep people dependent on the giver as long as the giver deigns to give, and then back where they started afterwards. They are a problem of disposal in areas without the kind of trash collection that happens here, and even here they’re a problem because they decompose, if at all, only very slowly, and contain chemicals and plastics which are environmentally very problematic. So that seemed to me to be at best only slightly better than no help at all.

Cloth pads seemed like a superior solution, in areas with a dependable water supply for washing anyway. They can last years and years (I’ve been using the same cloth pads for six or seven years now, and I used them travelling in Australia, India, and Japan, soaking and hand-washing as I went and it worked well. It certainly felt more convenient to carry my 6 cloth pads and keeper/diva cup than it did to either carry a pack of disposables (more needed because they’re *not* as absorbent and certainly not reusable) or try to purchase them wherever I was, and then to dispose of them, especially in areas where I knew that the main method of trash disposal was burning.

Well, that’s what Goods 4 Girls is all about - supplying girls with cloth pads. The cloth pads will be collected here in North America (Seattle, WA, actually) and then will be distributed by aid agencies working on the ground in Africa. Check out their frequently asked questions to answer all those nagging questions you have, and then just do it.

There’s a list of pad makers on the site who are eager to help with donations, and a bunch of links to patterns for making them from scratch. After looking through the list, it seems the best bang for your buck for donating is from Dianne’s Diapers. She is local to the main group and will throw in a fifth pad if you buy four for $5.50. That means you can donate 5 pads for only $21 US, no shipping needed. That’s a decent donation!

All of the rest have pads starting at closer to $10-$12, so it costs more for less. Party in my Pants Pads (which name, by the way, I adore for sheer unself-conscious goofiness) will throw in a freebie if you donate two, but with their base price of $12 that means you’re only sending 3 for $24, not quite as good a deal.

Making them yourself would be even cheaper, if you have the time and a good serger and machine.

What I’ve done:

• donated pads via both Dianne’s Diapers and Party in my Pants
• the research to figure out the best deal for pre-made pad donation
• brought it to your attention.

What I’d like you to do:

• tell other folks
• donate, some way or another, if you can ($21 for 5, seriously! How can you go wrong?)
• comment and let me know if you’ve donated or passed it along

I’m attending a three-day scientific conference on Menstrual Cycle Research out at the University of British Columbia. I’m volunteering, of course, because then I can get in for free. The big topic, of course, is menstrual suppression, but there’s papers and studies being presented on all sorts of related topics, including fertility awareness, menopause, and so on. Lots of interesting stuff. It’s probably the first time I’ve ever been surrounded by a bunch of PhDs who are all experts on a topic I actually know a heck of a lot about, and it’s quite exciting to get to hear a lot of high-level discussion of the issues.

I’ll be writing a couple of posts on my palm as I go along and posting them here when I’m done. Today was the opening day of the conference, and I recognize the structure, so familiar to me now from Kim Stanley Robinson’s descriptions in the Red Mars series (he has a love affair with scientific conferences and writes about them in most of his books). There was an opening plenary and a welcome from a local Musqueam elder, and then some breakout sessions. I chose the menstrual cycle topics one, and of the papers presented today, a couple had some interesting insights. One rather large and over-reported study (two groups gave talks on the same set of research data), was, unfortunately, very poorly designed, so they didn’t really get any useful data. What a waste!

They questioned women on their contraceptive usage and their menstrual product usage, and interestingly they included as the only fertility awareness-type option, the rhythm method! Unbelievable, and many in the audience were quick to point out that “the rhythm method” is an outdated term for a very poor form of natural birth control based on the calendar, quite unrelated to the modern practice of sympto-thermal charting which has an incredible success rate.
Anyway, I’ll post more about the conference soon.

So I was catching up on my blog reading after a couple of busy weeks when I ran across this post: Lord of the flies, over at I blame the patriarchy. Yeah, too true.

I remember all too well the near constant sexual harrassment that I and others endured at high school. In the course of my grade 8 and grade 9 years (I was aged 12-14 at this time) I endured the following:

• being touched and grabbed on the bum and the breast by boys I hadn’t invited to touch me there, who were touching me only to humiliate me and make me feel bad and to assert their own power;
• having signs posted on my back in classes and in the hallways, the most memorable of which read, “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw!”;
• general rude unsolicited comments about my body to do with the fact that by god I had *breasts* (A-cup, fer gawd’s sakes) and my breasts *moved* when I walked or ran (like any other normal part of my body), also, if I wore a bra, that I was wearing a *bra* and this meant that I was all ready for sex (hmm, might this have something to do with my dislike of bras? other than the uncomfortableness, of course);
• general rude unsolicited comments about my body to do with the fact that I was wearing a menstrual pad and they could see that through my clothing and did I like having something touching me “down there”;
• general rude unsolicited suggestions that what I really needed was a good fuck, or to suck them, and that would make me happy; and so on.

At the time I walked around in a state of near-constant baffled suppressed rage, ignoring everybody and jumping down everybody’s throat (whether they were nice or not) if they tried to talk to me, because they might just be pretending to be nice so they could get close enough to harrass me some more, as happened when I started receiving “love notes” from a boy, and then a phone call at home which quickly turned to “You have great tits.” and similar not particularly complimentary comments. However true that might have been (and fer gawd’s sakes, I was 13 and had not much in the way of breasts one way or another), it was still unwelcome, and the choice of language used didn’t portend respect or hope for a relationship. I just hung up, and then endured being teased about how so-and-so “liked” me and I was mean not to go out with him for the next two weeks.

I didn’t tell my parents about much of this because I knew that even though they loved me fiercely they were ineffectual on the topic of bullying, having both been bullied as kids themselves, and knowing about my bullying just brought that back for them. Their saddened advice was always just to ignore them and not give them the satisfaction and eventually they’d go away. But this didn’t address the fact that a) it was impossible to really ignore them when they were touching me without somehow giving them tacit permission to do so, b) I didn’t really know and neither, I think, did they what ignoring them really meant (not reacting outwardly? not hearing them at all? walking right past them when they’re taunting you? avoiding the places where they would be and where the harrassment would occur?) and c) ignoring them didn’t work and they didn’t go away. They just tried harder and harder to get a reaction to know that they’d won.

In fact, in putting the pieces together now from a more educated feminist perspective, my weirdness and antisociality in high school is pretty understandable. And you know? I wasn’t over-reacting, or making much of something that didn’t matter. It mattered. It matters now and it’s still happening. The more I learn the more I get actually seriously angry. But it’s a very freeing anger. The anger of my teenage years was often anger at myself for doing something wrong that made the harrassment happen, or for not being able to make it stop, which is a very hard anger to live with.

I just want to add to all of this, perhaps defensively (I acknowledge), please don’t comment with some dismissive comment about how you would have done this or that or the other and the situation would have disappeared *poof* and that’s what I should have done. You know, when I was a shy, lonely, harassed 12-14-year-old. I get that there are reasons I was harrassed more than some people and was more sensitive to it (or perhaps the word is “conscious”) but that doesn’t make it my fault, or okay. The idea that every young woman has to have superior harrassment-evasion techniques mastered by the age of 12 or she deserves what she gets is ridiculous and only comes out of the fact that we take it for granted that young men will sexually harrass them, as unpredictably but inevitably as the rain. This attitude releases them from all responsibility.

*deep breath*

Also, boys, I would just like to give you this gift when wading into feminist arenas/debates/spaces. It will serve you well. Just remember the following: If it’s not about you, it’s not about you.