The Guide to Getting It On (105 page)

If you do use tampons, please try to use OBs or tampons without applicators. Nature gave you your own applicators—your fingers. If they haven’t met your vagina, what are you waiting for?

Also, it wouldn’t hurt to investigate using menstrual cups rather than tampons or pads. Women who use them often rave about them for reasons other than having vaginas that are kinder to our landfills. While the learning curve is higher than for using tampons, it is possible you will have a better user experience.

Menstrual Cups—A Cross between a Diaphragm and A Shot Glass

A menstrual cup is a soft, flexible container made of soft silicone rubber or latex that is inserted into the vagina to collect menstrual fluids. It looks a bit like a small, upside-down funnel, although the stem is not hollow and the body of the cup is more rounded than a funnel. There are a number of different brands of menstrual cups, such as the Lunette, Diva, Moon Cup, Lady Cup, Femmecup, Miacup Keeper and and Pink Cup. Most are made of medical grade silicone, with each having a slightly different length, softness, rim, stem and color. (See “period gear” in the links at GuideToGettingItOn.com.)

Once it’s in place, a menstrual cup forms a seal against the wall of your vagina. This allows it to collect the blood as it flows from your cervix. Unlike a tampon which also absorbs your vagina’s natural secretions in addition to your monthly flow, a menstrual cup holds only your period flow until you remove it and wash it out. As a result, it won’t dry out your vagina.

Menstrual cups hold enough flow for most women to handle a light day without emptying it until evening, although you might need to empty it a couple of times a day when you are flowing like the Mississippi. Menstrual cups last for appx. 10 years. They are a little spendy to begin with, but quickly amortize with each new period, as you won’t have to buy pads or tampons.

Some women worry that a menstrual cup isn’t sterile, as if a tongue, penis, fingers or a tampon are. Depending on the manufacturer’s instructions, some women clean them with soap, soak them in hydrogen peroxide, or use other solutions before storing them until their next period. Unlike tampons, they have never been linked to TSS or Toxic Shock Syndrome.

In order to insert a menstrual cup, you need to fold it and then push it up your vagina just below your cervix. Different ways of folding them are called the c-fold, origami, “7” fold, and punch-down fold. You can certainly wear a menstrual cup if you are a virgin or if your vagina is on the smaller side.

A lot of women who are now devoted users say they thought the concept of a menstrual cup was gross or disgusting at first. But they experienced so many advantages in using them that they wouldn’t think of going back to pads or tampons.

Some women get the hang of using a menstrual cup the very first time, others require a few efforts. Since menstrual cups don’t dry out your vagina, you can practice inserting them before you have your period. According to users, here are some of the advantages of using a menstrual cup:

• Tampons can seriously dry out your vagina. Menstrual cups don’t. They are soft, flexible and don’t absorb your natural moisture.
  
• Once they learn how to make it sit right, a lot of cup users say they don’t get the kind of leaking that they did with tampons. With less leaking, the chances are lower that your favorite underwear will be stained and have to become period panties. And some cup users say they experience less cramping than when they used to use tampons.
  
• No more late-night runs to the store to buy tampons or pads.
  
• You will contribute approximately 10,000 fewer pads, tampons, and their wrappers to the landfills, sewers, and beaches that the average woman uses during her period years.
  
• At the time of publication, there were two excellent websites for women who are thinking about trying menstrual cups: http://community.livejournal.com/menstrual_cups/tag/faq and
  www.ecomenses.com
  

Period Suppression

Period suppression refers to a woman preventing her period from happening by doing things like ditching the placebo week of birth-control pills or keeping her NuvaRing in for all four weeks instead of for just three. (You should never attempt this without discussing it first with your gynecologist. It will work with only certain pills or other hormonal methods and there might be health concerns that could make it a really bad idea for you to try.)

There is still a lot of debate, which has become quite heated at times, about the safety of period suppression. There are some theories that nature never intended women to constantly have monthly periods and having as many as women do today is not good for you, while other theories claim that the monthly fluctuation in hormones that happens with periods is actually quite good for your body and is one of the reasons why women outlive men by a good five years or so.

While menstrual suppression appears to be quite safe, we don’t have the kind of long-term studies yet to prove that it is or isn’t safe.

The Female Athlete Triad

It is not uncommon for women athletes to stop menstruating or have irregular periods. This is because the woman does not eat a sufficient amount of food to make up for the energy she is burning. It can result in brittle bones and is part of what’s now called The Female Athlete Triad. It tends to be worse in sports where being thin is an advantage. It can also be a problem for cheerleaders. Please visit
www.Guide2Getting.com
for more information.

(It is with restraint that your author tells about the time during his freshman year of college when he lifted weights with the women members of the Soviet National Shot-Put Team. He never thought to ask Olga, Svetlana, and Georgia if they menstruated regularly.)

Tipped Uterus Considerations

Some women with a tipped uterus experience period pain more as a back ache than a pain in their abdomen and they may have diarrhea as well. Some women with a tipped uterus know when their period is coming because they start having loose stools that might be caused by a release of prostaglandins. (See Chapter 7:
What’s Inside a Girl
for more on tipped uteruses.)

PMS

PMS is short for pre-menstrual syndrome. It refers to period-related mood fluctuations. To this day, PMS remains such a loosely defined concept that most men qualify as having it.

During World War II, when the bulk of American males went to war, millions of American women manned the nation’s industrial-war machine. Our female-dominated workforce turned out an armada of planes, tanks, ships, and guns that was unprecedented in history. It wasn’t until the men returned from war and needed their jobs back that the myth of women’s so-called hormonal instability began to rear its head. It fit well with our society’s need to get women out of the workplace and back into the home.

An entire PMS industry sprung up during the 1990s that attempted to turn hormonal mood fluctuations into a disease. This helped fuel the notion that women as a group are flakier than men. Just as flaky, absolutely; flakier, no. While period-related mood fluctuations can certainly result in mood swings, this usually doesn’t make a woman emotionally unstable unless she’s emotionally fragile to begin with. Studies show that men have as many monthly mood swings as women, but there’s no psychiatric diagnosis for that.

Something that might help women who have severe period related mood swings is birth-control pills. However, while some pills help even out mood swings, others seem to make them worse. Depends on the pill and the woman.

Brief History of the Napkin and Tampon

Kotex, the first widely marketed sanitary napkin, was invented shortly after World War I. Before that, women used rags that they wadded up and pinned to the inside of their underwear.

The ad shown above was created in 1920. It is a prototype of the very first Kotex ad ever done.

Kotex had its origins during World War I. Since cotton was in short supply, companies started to make bandages from cellulose. Army nurses found that the cellulose bandaging made an excellent substitute for the menstrual rags that they usually wore. It was cheap, absorbent, and they could throw it away.

As soon as the war was over, Kimberly-Clark, the company that made the bandages, looked opportunity in the crotch and created Kotex, which stood for KOtten-Like-TEXture. They hoped that by using a cryptic name such as “Kotex,” women would be able to buy the product without the embarrassment of male clerks knowing what it was. Sure.

Another challenge for the Kotex people was to create an ad for their new product that magazines in the early 1920s would run. We’re talking advertising for a product that went between a woman’s legs at a time when this kind of item was still new and possibly scandalous.

Look at the headlines that went with this ad. Can you see a similarity with the way we sell products today by claiming that they were “Developed by NASA for our astronauts.” Also, whatever the nurse is handing to the wounded officer is about the size of a Kotex, and it is placed in the illustration in front of her crotch. (Thanks to the Museum of Menstruation:
www.mum.org
, and the Wisconsin Historical Society for permission to use the Kotex ad.)

The modern tampon was born in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It was called an “internal sanitary napkin” because nobody knew what a tampon was. It did not have an applicator or a string. It was wrapped in gauze, which a woman pulled on to remove the tampon.

Another early tampon was called Paz. In 1936, the Tambrands company bought the Paz company and started selling Tampax, which was the first tampon with an applicator. It’s interesting that they changed the name of the Paz tampon to Tampax, when Tampaz (TAMbrands + PAZ) would have made more sense. Perhaps it was because the very first tampon was made by another company and it was called FAX. “Tampax” includes Tam+Paz+Fax.

One early problem was that using tampons required women to touch their genitals. There were widespread fears that this would lead to wanton immorality. There were also fears that tampons would devirginize teenage girls. As late as the early 1990s, Tampax ran ads to help dispel this fear. After then, even the people at Tampax gave up the virginity ghost.

As for newer technology, a few years ago we heard about a new menstrual product called the “inSync Miniform.” It was about the size of a tampon but fit between your labia. It was supposed to be used on light days, but who reads the instructions? Our research assistant volunteered to try it out. This nearly resulted in a worker’s compensation claim against Goofy Foot Press.

NOTE:
According to Publisher’s Weekly, the classic period book “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” by Judy Bloom has sold roughly 7 million copies since it was first published in 1972. It continues to sell more than 100,000 copies each year. This makes it one of the best-selling books of all time.

Highly Recommended—
Be sure to check out the amazing
Museum of Menstruation
website:
www.mum.org
, which rates
Two Tampons Way Up!
or would that be 5
Panty Liners out of
5
?
It includes anything you would ever want or need to know about menstruation. Also, if you are doing research on menstrual products patented in the United States from 1854 to 1921, get a copy of a paper of the same name by Laura K. Kidd and Jane Farrel-Beck, published in
Dress
, 1997 Vol. 24 pp. 27-41.