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

This is an older post that I’m reposting from my personal blog.

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I spent some of my break-time reading this post over on Alas, a Blog, ostensibly on the concept of “Choice for Men” (i.e., the choice of men to decide post-conception not to support children they participate in creating). I’d be more in favour of something like this if they were asking for the ability to officially declare this preference prior to having sex, and back it up with sterilization, and then not pay child support, but hey, that’s me. Regardless, the vitriole and fuzzy logic can be interesting and instructive.

Here’s how choice regarding conception and birth go for men and for women, ‘kay? And I dig that I’m talking about ideal human relationships where neither party is being coherced into sexual activity, people actually think about this stuff instead of just rut like bunnies, and both parties are respectful of each other.

First off there’s the near infinite time period prior to engaging in sexual activity for both parties to decide a) whether or not they want to have sex with someone of the opposite sex, b) what sorts of sex (vaginal vs. non-vaginal to have) and c) what sorts of contraception to utilize. They can also meet each other and talk about these issues together.

Men and Women have equal potential ability (in a relatively perfect world without abusive relationships/etc.) to choose not to be responsible to a child during this time period. Men and Women do have different options for contraception which is caused caused by both biology and politics. However, they do have three options to choose from in common which virtually guarantee a lack of responsibility to possible future children in this time period: not having sex, not having vaginal sex, and being permanently surgically sterilized (tubal ligation and vasectomy).

Then there’s the time period of the sex act itself. Men and Women have different choices that they can make during this time. Women get to choose whether to have vaginal sex, whether to have vaginal sex during what may be a more fertile time for them, whether to have vaginal sex with a fertile man (vs. a provably sterile one), whether to use condoms or a diaphragm or another barrier method, whether to use spermicides, whether to have the male ejaculate in her vagina or not, and so on. Men get to choose whether to have vaginal sex, whether to have vaginal sex with a fertile woman (vs. a probably sterile one), whether to use condoms or another barrier method, whether to use spermicides, whether to ejaculate inside the woman’s vagina, and so on.

Of course, all of these choices have varying degrees of risk for pregnancy, and the people involved in the act choose their own level of risk. Obviously, a man and a woman relying on the withdrawal method alone for contraception have a higher acceptable level of risk than does a couple relying on oral contraception, condoms and withdrawal together. Ostensibly, this means that one couple is demonstrating greater reluctance to support a child.

Post-ejaculation/sex, the man no longer has any options for whether or not he’s willing to create a new life. Sorry, it sucks, but hey, that’s how biology works. Pregnancy is a thing that occurs in a woman’s body. Men don’t get to say what happens in/to women’s bodies.

Post-sex, women have the choice (at least in Canada) to use at least two varieties of morning-after pill, if they feel their precautions weren’t sufficient or broke down at some point in the process.

They can also, should they end up pregnant, choose one of several methods of abortion (if it’s accessible/affordable/safe in their area) should they not wish to carry the pregnancy through to term for any reason. I’m not sure when their legal right to do this ends in all areas, but in North America it’s usually somewhere between three months and just pre-birth.

Yup, this is a choice that women have that men don’t, but then, men don’t get pregnant. This doesn’t mean that in this ideal and respectful situation men can’t talk to women about what choices are and so on. But as one man said, men can only really be pro-support, not pro-choice. This means they can only choose to either support a woman’s decisions either way, or not, because the choice isn’t theirs to make.

This means that women have a longer period of time to make a choice about whether or not to support a possible child. Please note that this longer period of time is really only three to nine months longer. Considering that both parties have the near-infinite period of time prior to having sex in common to make that choice, and that this longer period of time is based in the reality of biology - women get pregnant and men don’t - this isn’t really unfair.

And yes, women can choose to give babies up for adoption post-birth (which requires the father to also give consent for this, if he can be found, usually). Realistically, this doesn’t often happen, just as abortion doesn’t often happen. Most unexpected pregnancies become births and babies, not abortions.

When I was young I was brought up with the general idea that that whole sexism thing was over and done with and we didn’t need to worry about it anymore. This left me pretty unprepared for and ill-equipped to deal with the misogyny inherent in North American popular culture. Every time I ran up against sexism I just chalked it up to some kind of bizarre holdover from a previous era, and thought that likely the person just didn’t realize what they were saying or hadn’t meant it or that they were isolated in their sexist beliefs.

Like many young women of my generation I was indoctrinated by my peers and by the social atmosphere of schooling into believing that “feminist” was practically a dirty word and an insult. This wasn’t entirely conscious, but I do remember being tauntingly asked if I was one of those feminists and defensively declaiming the possibility; “Me? No! Of course not… I just believe that… *insert blatantly feminist belief here*.”

I was raised by two parents who took a mostly egalitarian (and in fact feminist, though they wouldn’t have called it that) view of gender relationships.

In our household and on the farm we lived on, my mother did the things she was good at and enjoyed, like gardening, cooking, mowing, irrigation, fruit picking, canning, preserving, childrearing, sewing, and knitting (she’s an incredibly talented knitter and sewer).

My father did the things he was good at and enjoyed, like chopping firewood, fruit picking, cooking, car repair, vacuuming, dusting, childrearing, pruning, and plumbing.

The necessary tasks that nobody enjoyed, like dishes, were split relatively evenly (though perhaps a little heavily on my mother’s side, because hey I’m not trying to pretend I lived in a feminist utopia). The most important thing in all of this is that I never got the idea from them that things were divided up the way they were because that was the way it had to be. While it’s true that many of my parents tasks were divided along traditionally gendered lines, they never communicated to me that this was why they were divided that way.

Then I went out into the so-called “real” world.

And you know, it wasn’t quite the egalitarian utopia I’d been brought up to expect. I met people with such complicated ideas of gender relations that I felt completely out of place and confused. Why on earth should this or that be true of me just because I am biologically female? It made no sense. But because I wasn’t brought up with the language of feminism I didn’t even have the tools to express what I was experiencing.

For example, when I was in a relationship with a man who insisted that having sex at a certain frequency (defined by him) was pretty much his right and my responsibility, I couldn’t figure out how to express what was so wrong about that. The thing is, when he wasn’t bullying me about his sexual needs and actually acted in ways more in keeping with his ideals (which were definitely proto-feminist, though he preferred the term “egalitarian”), neither could he. Yet, at some level, we both knew that it there was something wrong with that dynamic, even if we couldn’t express it or figure it out.

No amount of discomfort stopped the bullying from going on, of course, though only for a couple of months because I broke up with him soon after that began. It occurs to me now that the hardest bits of privilege for men to let go of sometimes seem to be the ones related to being able to treat sex with women as an inherent manly right. Frankly, coerced sex with a less-than-willing partner certainly seems pretty unattractive to me. Perhaps it is only in comparison to the perceived possibility of no sex at all that this sounds good.

I’ll leave the journey here at the point of confused non-comprehension, because after all, it’s late, and I do have work tomorrow. But I promise promise promise (mainly to myself) to continue this very soon indeed.

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.

Check it out over at Bitch|Lab.