Eliminating menstruation
Christine Hurt responds to a question by Eugene Volokh about menstruation – do women really bond over menstruation? (Christine says yes, sort of, I say that if we do, I missed the bonding – maybe I was just too introverted in middle school to be in the crowd that shared this sort of thing.) Would our lives lose some shared meaning if many of us took a pill to eliminate our periods?
5. Much conversation has asked “why not” eliminate menstruation, but I’m not sure I’ve heard a great reason for “why.” Although some women have very painful periods and would have a medical reason for eliminating menstruation, I’m not sure why the average woman would. Breakthroughs in menstruation products have substantially decreased the muss and fuss of menstruation. I would suspect that for most American women, their cycles come and go without much thought.
Christine may be right that for most American women, their cycles come and go without much thought. She may be right, that is, if “most” means “any amount greater than 50%.” But the way this paragraph is worded, it sounds as if she’s saying that only a small minority – some very few women who have very painful periods – would have much reason to want to eliminate them, and a much larger group don’t see much muss and fuss at all. I think she’s way underestimating the number of women for whom menstruation is a problem. Add together:
- Women who have serious cramps.
- Women who have very heavy flow, requiring (sorry, guys, for the graphic image) extremely frequent changes of those menstrual products Christine mentions.
- Women whose favored forms of recreation are at odds with said frequent changes (not all sports are equally compatible with frequent interruptions).
- Women who both have heavy flow and borderline anemia.
- Women with more than usual moodswings from PMS.
- Women with extremely irregular periods, so they have no idea when it will show up (although, I suppose some of these might be satisfied just using the regular Pill to trade their irregular periods for a withdrawal bleed at a known time).
These things add up; even if it is a minority of women, it’s probably not all that small a minority.
6. I don’t think this pill is really about discomfort, hygiene or convenience. I think it’s about casual sex. There, I said it. My co-bloggers can kick me off, and I guess my tenure clock is stalled now. Menstruation doesn’t get in the way of many daily activities any more, like sports or swimming, but it may get in the way of casual sex with people you don’t know well. Who will benefit from this pill? Not the eighth grade girls of the world who suffer supreme embarrassment by Aunt Flo coming on the days they wear white capri pants, but the grown men and women of the world who may meet each other later that night. So let’s quit couching this pill as “unchaining women from the bathroom.”
Wow. Casual sex never occurred to me as a reason a woman would want to take this pill. Some women in the comments suggest, reasonably enough, that more frequent not at all casual sex with your spouse is just as good a reason to want to eliminate your period. But I have to admit, I didn’t think of sex first at all, when I heard of this product; I thought of heavy flow and anemia. So now I’m wondering how many people had the same thought as Christine, and whether this linking of “no period” with “ease of having casual sex” is behind some of the more abstract reservations people have been expressing about women losing something essential if many of us choose to eliminate menstruation.
For me, the main thing that keeps me from going out and getting a prescription for this product is the fact that, being childless, I like to hang onto that tiny symbolic shred of fertility by not actually having a birth control prescription (even if I’m not otherwise still trying to have kids at my age). Otherwise, I’d probably go for it; I don’t get any larger meaning from menstruation than “there might possibly be an extremely long shot that I’m still capable of having kids.”
The Well-Timed Period on FDA approval of Lybrel.
While I think Ann Bartow is harder on Eugene Volokh than he deserves, she has a nice round up of responses to his post.
May 31st, 2007 at 7:18 am
I’m always impressed with what a wild promiscuous life I should be leading, according to conservatives. While I am not always totally opposed to them, the chastity, celibacy, and no-sex-without-the-possibility-of-live-babies crowd strikes me as weirdly obsessive in their eagerness to interpret all motives as centered around an unquenchable desire for free and easy sex.
Sometimes all I want out of life is a good cup of coffee, a decent parking space, and a chance to concentrate on my work. Sometimes the crazed mood swings and exhaustion that PMS triggers interferes with that. Actually, casual sex interferes with that too, so I also avoid casual sex. Is that really too hard to imagine?
May 31st, 2007 at 9:54 am
No. 4 would have been the top of my list. Somehow I never associated gender with mentruation or being part of some group. It was dreaded, the products were not good enough in my day. The early embarrassments. Before I has completed memopause I had breakthrough periods which lasted almost 18 days. It was suggested that I have a DNC. Had only one period after, but my male gynecologist wanted to know if I wanted my period back. No, was my answer and I thought he must be crazy to ask me.
May 31st, 2007 at 10:11 am
As a woman with both 4. and 6. on your list (and historically 1., although that’s improved with age), I would love to get rid of my periods. I’ve been hesitating, though, out of the increasingly common American problem that I seem to be piling on the long-term medications. I already take four pills a day for different things, although I suppose without periods I might be able to drop the iron supplements. If I were on the Pill anyway, though, it would be a no-brainer.
Incidentally, all this reminds me of an article in the New Yorker some years back arguing that women should eliminate their periods because they encourage breast cancer. Although I haven’t read every piece on Lybrel, I’m surprised that hasn’t come up. Did that theory get disproved in the meantime or something?
May 31st, 2007 at 10:48 am
The notion that the desire to stop one’s periods is all about casual sex makes me want to laugh, cry and tear out my hair by turns. Thus far I haven’t even *had* sex, but for me problems 2 and 5 make saying bye-bye to Aunt Flo very attractive indeed. For me, not only does the PMS make me irratible, but for a week prior to onset it puts me in a state indistinguishable from depression when I’m not otherwise depressed and has made me damn near suicidal when I am. I wish the commentators who are so quick to leap to judgment would at least consider slipping into somebody else’s shoes for a spell before making their grand pronouncements about everyone else’s supposed motives.
May 31st, 2007 at 10:55 am
There was certainly no bonding as far as I was concerned, no way did I join a “club” and I certainly didn’t think anyone else wanted to follow suit. That all sounds as though they have been reading The Red Tent too much – I thought that was pretty weird. Starting to have a period was a big deal for me and I didn’t enjoy it at all.
I’ve been reading all this about Lybrel with interest and some surprise. When I first started taking the pill a great many years ago, I found that I had terrible headaches and some nausea on the days when I stopped, so I took them non-stop. I was delighted with feeling better and the lack of a period. My doctor decided it was an acceptable thing to do, though felt it would be more “satisfactory” (what exactly he meant I couldn’t determine) if I had a period from time to time. So, there you are, I invented the forerunner to Lybrel.
June 3rd, 2007 at 12:18 pm
There’s another symptom you didn’t put on your list. Recurring thrush infections, every single month.
I cannot wait before they authorise it here too!
June 4th, 2007 at 4:24 am
I know exactly *one* woman who say she actually likes getting her period. Almost everything on breastfeeding cites delaying the return of one’s cycle as a benefit (didn’t work for me, though, in that regard). I used to _throw up_ when my period started. I have missed work a couple of times because of it.
I think it’s quite likely that whatever the health benefits of having a period are, that having one every 3 or 4 months instead of every single month would be enough to maintain them.
I have *never* been in a situation where menstruation of the lack thereof was the only factor determining whether I had sex. If there’s someone out there having enough casual sex that it is, does giving her a few extra days of opportunity really make any meaningful difference?