The Good, The Bad and The Burning
Warning: This post is mostly about “lady parts” and “lady problems.” If the words vagina, menstruation, bleeding, tampon, pad, and/or urinary tract infection or any variation of the previous words offend you, it would be wise on your part to cease reading the following post.
I had always loved that Renee over at Womanist Musings posted monthly about getting her period. I think these posts were especially important and made an impact on the people who had the opportunity to read them because she combined sarcasm with common sense, that she was a crazy, dangerous menstruating woman–a jab men so very often can’t help themselves but to take. She also assured those who were reading that when a woman menstruates her vagina is not unclean; it is not vulgar, nor is it disgusting; it is merely a bodily function that is completely normal. I am willing to bet that every single woman who has hit puberty has been asked if she was PMSing if she had the audacity to speak her mind. So I had always loved these posts and although I haven’t seen one in quite a few months from her, you should really sift through the archives if you hadn’t yet had a chance to read one.
I had always toyed with the idea of either writing my own monthly period posts on here or guest posting over at Womanist Musings every once in a while with one, but by the time I had remembered that I wanted to do this every month, it was usually by the end of my period and it isn’t necessarily newsworthy to me anymore. Until this month. Oh, this month is interesting in Holly’s world of menstruation.
I woke up with cramps on the morning of October 26th and started bleeding shortly thereafter. While I like to use reusable cotton and fleece pads because they are extremely environmentally-friendly and also a great deal healthier for women than disposables, I didn’t have any readily available because that’s just how it is when you live in an apartment building without a washer, yet there is a dryer available–weird, but anyway, I broke into my backup disposable products. When I go with disposables, I’ll opt for a tampon over a pad, but I never use a tampon the first day of my period because my cramps are so intense that it ends up causing me even more abdominal pain, so I put a pad on and went on my merry way like I do every other month. That night I felt fine so after taking a relaxing bath, I put a tampon in. Again, I went on my merry way. About an hour later and I noticed something was wrong. Very, very unpleasantly wrong. So I take the tampon out, go to the bathroom and the burning! The intense burning sensation that came absolutely out of nowhere that I could not understand for the life of me. It was as if I just decided to pour an entire gallon of hot sauce in there just to see what would happen. That’s the kind of burning we are talking about here. The hottest hot sauce in existence was obviously coursing itself through my vagina and the evil, evil tampon is what caused it! So now we’re two days into my period time and it has only gotten worse. I’ve had my fair share of urinary tract infections but usually they just disappear after a few days of downing as much cranberry juice and Alka Seltzer my body can hold. So my very first ‘Hey everyone, I have my period and it’s completely normal’ post is more of a ‘Hey everyone, I have my period and oh yeah, I feel like I have to pee every 36 seconds!’ Because yeah, we didn’t even get to the urgency part of this yet. The urgency to pee is so strong that by the time I flush the toilet, pull my pants up, walk downstairs and sit down at the computer, I have to turn around and go right back up the steps and into the bathroom again so my bladder can empty about a half a teaspoon of urine and then feel the agonizing burning of the fire of a thousand suns…in my vagina. In fact, when you have a urinary tract infection, there is not much more to your daily routine than constantly running to the bathroom to expel a half teaspoon of urine per every 20 minutes you sit there thinking that there must be more inside of you that needs to come out, but to no avail. When this happens, it seems you can be more efficient if you just took your laptop into the bathroom with you so you don’t have to keep running there while in the middle of doing whatever it is you’re doing, so that is exactly what I have done…and I think I am the most productive while sitting on the toilet, laptop on lap, waiting for the urgency and the burning to subside.
Friends Don’t Let Friends Fat Talk
Considering my last post, I probably could not have found out about Fat Talk Free Week at a better time!
Check out this awesome video from Tri Delta’s Fat Talk Free Week:
Fat Talk Free Week is an international body activism campaign spanning over five days (October 19th-23rd) that draws attention to the damaging impact of the thin ideal on women in society. It is so easy to look at yourself in the mirror and think that your thighs are fat, that you have fat rolls, that you’re too fat to wear something (even though it may look amazing on you!) and saying things to your friends and family members like ‘You look great have you lost weight?’ is all damaging to yourself and to the women around you.
If you haven’t already, promise to eliminate Fat Talk from conversations with friends, family and also with yourself! Strive for the healthy ideal without focusing on weight or size. Make the promise today!
Fat: Masculinity & Sexist Put-Downs
I probably should have prefaced this post with an earlier one containing a more detailed explanation of where this post originated, but just bear with me for a bit here. Over the past few days I have been marinating on a series of complicated, highly-stressful, mind-boggling, eye-roll-inducing, leave-you-utterly-exacerbated events. I have been compelled more-so now than ever before to get all of these feelings that have stemmed from this series of events out of me but have been hitting a great amount of roadblocks every time I come here to get everything out because sure, day-to-day observations and questions we have that stem from our daily lives in a particular society or culture are often put on public display for open discussion, but when you truly need your blog and need the comfort that comes with blogging, which before I started running Menstrual Poetry more like a news aggregator plus my particular views and input on current events is what I used this website for, well that’s when it’s the hardest to get all of your mental ducks in a row, for lack of a better term. For me, and for I’m sure a lot of other bloggers out there, my personal life has often come up on my blog which is what we agree to when we start blogging in the first place. Personal views on society and politics are often a direct result of our personal lives. Many bloggers refuse to put their family life on display, which until now I have always respected because while I have a blog and while I will write about my own life, my family did not sign on for their personal lives to be on display just because I have a blog. But when does the time come where we simply must nudge that ‘rule of blogging’ aside? For me, that time is now.
I have always had a very unique relationship with my younger sister. Due to our childhood I had been forced to look out for her well-being before my own; I made sure she had enough food to eat even if I did not, I made sure she had clean clothes to wear and that she had a bath as often as possible. That in itself is the life of abused and neglected children. Given this upbringing at the hands of our mother, we grew up relying on each other very much, so when she was 16 years old and had started acting completely erratically and not making the best life choices, I chalked it up to teenage rebellion; hell, me and teenage rebellion had a very strong, one-sided relationship. To say the least, I know it well. But this behavior came to a head when she wound up in a mental hospital for a week after divulging self-harming tendencies and a transfer to a much smaller school that incorporates therapy into their daily curriculum. She was put on medication after being diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and for a little while, she was doing perhaps even better than she had been years earlier. My family thought that they had finally seen the end of behavior that wasn’t just hurting her, but also the entire family. They thought this because anyone would and finally she was on the right track. She was getting straight A’s in school, had goals to graduate and then go to college to become a nurse and she had big plans for her impending future, until maybe two months ago when it all picked up again and this time, it was worse.
To make an incredibly long and painful story short, she’s a runaway and all of the services and people who are put into place to help children have stopped trying to help. She has been staying with her boyfriend (of a month and a few days) in a hotel/halfway house where convicted felons and sex offenders reside. Not the best housing arrangement in the least. So I spoke to her on the phone earlier this week and I went to this place she has been staying to pick her up because staying with her sister in an apartment in a place that I can only think to compare to Pleasantville is a lot better than the previous. Me and my partner were greeted by her “boyfriend” who is not a minor and who I had initially suspected was making her stay with him against her will due to the fact that he had met me at the door, the inside door of which locks and needs a key to get past due to the fact that once word gets out to a community about sex offenders cohabiting their space are never too thrilled with the arrangement. So this kid (who is not a minor, but is younger than I am and has no idea what the word ‘respect’ means, which makes him a kid) refused to let me pick my sister up and who thought the best and most logical way of going about getting rid of me was to call me a cunt and crazy.
I did get my sister home to our family with the help of the police and after she adamantly refused to come to my apartment for a few days because it would put her a reasonable distance away from her boyfriend. As it turns out, she was staying there of her own free will, she is just not functioning with a sane mental capacity and is the utter definition of an out of control teen, which is why a day later she was back with her boyfriend and she had signed online with the sole intention of letting her boyfriend harass me via instant message.
So, to the actual point of this entire post (yes, 1200+ words in…) is the word ‘fat.’ Sure, feminists all across the blogosphere as well as anyone who knows the name Kate Harding knows that we are very accepting to body image and also of the word ‘fat’ itself. So why is it in the mass populace of boys and men alike, do they immediately start to hurl the word fat at women who they are trying to piss off? My sister’s boyfriend IM-harassed me for over a half hour, at least, about me being fat and when I stopped typing back (and didn’t block the screen name in case my sister did actually need to get a hold of me at some point when the shades of grey and clouds that Bipolar Disorder infects people’s minds with faded away) actually said that I wasn’t typing back because my 3am pizza had arrived and I was eating since I’m so fat. Now of course this is so ridiculous that all you can do is laugh and brush off your shoulder as an ignorant boy’s banter but it does have something with the initial reason why the word ‘fat’ is used as a slap in the face to women by men who feel they are the epitome of masculinity. It is socially acceptable for women to fear that they are too fat, that their ankles are too big, that their asses are too wide, that they have cellulite and stretch marks and it’s all repulsive because we live in the land of ‘you can never be too thin.’ The more we push back against this social normality, the less we will hear the word fat being used as a put down that is supposed to make women run to their treadmills and starve themselves so they can look like the women on the airbrushed and photoshopped covers of magazines. Masculinity should never be about how bad you can make a woman feel about themselves.
And hey, if he thinks my size 12 figure is fat, what exactly does he think my sister will look like in a few months, since she is now a pregnant, unstable, runaway teen?
Another lesson in why immature teens and young adults who are unable to take care of themselves should be educated in the importance of responsibilities, birth control, condoms and respecting women.
Oklahoma Will Soon Start Publicly Shaming Women Who Have an Abortion
On November 1st, a new Oklahoma law will go into effect that will collect personal details about every abortion performed in the state and post the information collected on a public website for every person with an internet connection to access. The information that will be asked of women who have an abortion includes:
1. Date of abortion
2. County in which abortion was performed
3. Age of [woman] (the law’s wordage is ‘age of mother’ but I find this extremely offensive so I will not be spreading this offensive language)
4. Marital status of [woman] (married, divorced, separated, widowed, or never married)
5. Race of [woman]
6. Years of education of [woman] (specify highest year completed)
7. State or foreign country of residence of [woman]
8. Total number of previous pregnancies of the [woman] (live births, miscarriages, induced abortions)
While some (meaning the anti-choice) will undeniably argue that the questions asked of women who seek abortions does not identify any single one woman for public prosecution by her peers for having a completely legal procedure, as Feminists For Choice points out, the information collected could easily be used to identify any member of a smaller community, especially if that woman’s race is a minority in a specific county.
Information regarding any person who seeks medical attention for any reason falls under medical records and medical records are, under the law, to be kept confidential. This is nothing but an anti-choice extremist tactic to publicly shame women and put their medical history in the hands of potentially violent extremists; people who are to blame for not-so-peaceful protests, vandalism, death threats and murder. People who will stop at nothing to outlaw a woman’s law-given right to an abortion. People who have obviously pressured Oklahoman law to obtain information that frankly, is no one’s business other than the doctor who performs the abortion. What also troubles me about this law is the fact that women will be forced into divulging the total number of previous pregnancies she has had in the past. Anti-choicers and also those who technically classify themselves as pro-choice but think that women are only entitled to one abortion in their lifetime will undoubtedly begin passing judgment on women who have either had an abortion before, or, as people’s privilege has taught us, begin passing judgment on women who have several children at home. People will begin wondering if the abortion they are reading about online is the abortion had by the 24 year old woman who dropped out of high school living down the street with three children she’s already struggling to take care of; because they have narrowed down the “suspects” and she is the only 24 year old woman who dropped out of high school who has had three previous live births in the community. We know that anti-choicers believe that they have the right to publicly question the morals and principles of those who do not carry around the same belief system as they do and we know that they think nothing of publicly shaming that woman in a community atmosphere; so what’s to stop an angry anti-choicer who is taking stock in how many abortions were performed in their counties and going to pass their judgment and hatred on that woman living down the street from them?
This law is only the beginning of the “final product” anti-choice Oklahomans have in mind–to outlaw abortion and to publicly prosecute any woman who has one, plain and simple.
Luckily, the Center for Reproductive Rights is challenging the law on the grounds that it “covers more than one subject.” This argument has worked before to strike down an abortion ultrasound law and hopefully will work to the advantage of Oklahoma women again.
Late Memo: When a 43 Year Old Man Drugs and Rapes a 13 Year Old Girl, That’s Called ‘Rape-Rape’
In March of 1977, Roman Polanski, who was 43 at the time, invited a 13 year old girl to pose for pictures in a magazine he was guest-editing. He gave this 13 year old girl champagne and a Quaalude. He knew that she was 13 years old and even called her mother to tell her that they were running late. The man knew very well what he was doing and apparently “running late” means ‘Hey, I gave your 13 year old daughter a roofie cocktail and once I am done violating her in any and every way I can and get what I want, I’ll return her to you.’
Trigger Warning! The following contents of the post may be triggering to some. Please read with caution.
According to the 13 year old girl’s grand jury testimony, Mr. Polanski proceeded to instruct the girl to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged him to leave, he began kissing her, even though she said no and told him to stop. He then proceeded to perform oral sex on her and then vaginally and anally raped her. All the while, she was telling him no and telling him to stop. For the record, this is an unlawful, non-consensual and prosecutable violation of a child. This is rape. ‘Rape-rape,’ if you will, Whoopi Goldberg.
End of Trigger Warning
Since news broke of Roman Polanski’s arrest, many people have come out to defend Polanski; saying that he is an old man now who has lead a rough life and who had a 13 year old girl thrust upon him by her mother, and therefore, he isn’t to blame for what he did. As Kate Harding reported, Joan Z. Shore of the Huffington Post thinks that because she had once met Roman Polanski and was “charmed by [his] sobriety and intelligence,” that obviously puts him above the law; in fact, she claims that he is the victim of this situation. She wrote, “The 13 year old model ’seduced’ by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies. The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It’s probably 13 by now!) Polanski was demonized by the press, convicted, and managed to flee, fearing a heavy sentence.”
There are many mind-blowing, ‘I can’t believe I just read that’ parts of that small paragraph. So let’s start.
The age of consent in California at the time was 16; not 14, but 16. And it is also worth mentioning that Polanski’s victim was 13 and even if the legal age of consent in California was 14 at the time, which it wasn’t, a few weeks means nothing from a legal standpoint; almost does not count. The legal age of consent currently in California is 18, for anyone wondering. Also, according to grand jury testimony, the girl’s mother did not “thrust” the girl onto Polanski, since testimony says that the mother was unaware of the photo shoot to begin with. As Jeff Fecke points out, regardless of the mother’s actions at that time, no parent can consent to their under-aged child having sex; which is why parents who “sell” their children to their rapists are subject to prosecution, we don’t see the parents in court and their lawyers defending them by saying “But her/his mother/father gave him permission to be raped by that person,” because that’s ludicrous.
Polanski being “demonized” by the press is also laughable. Polanski pled guilty to unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, a deal was struck in the courts so he did not plead guilty to his actual crime–drugging and raping a child. First of all, money and fame had already put him way above the law and because he fled, that makes him a fugitive and all back-door court deals, as far as I’m concerned, go right out the window. I also love the wordage “managed to flee.” Would we still find this word usage acceptable in any other child rape case? Would we find Roman Polanski’s actions acceptable if this was any other person, or any other crime, for that matter? Again, no. What this comes down to is the fact that Roman Polanski is a wealthy, well-known and somehow respected man and the fact that he had drugged and raped a child has not been the focus of much of the media coverage that has been circulating about him; the media has done their part in protecting a pedophile and a great deal of people have sided with that coverage. So let’s just all say it together and let it sink in–Fame, money and power should never put someone above the law and the fact that Roman Polanski is a pedophile, a rapist and a fugitive, makes him subject to even harsher sentencing than he would have encountered when these charges had first been filed.
Sure, we can continue to use the absolutely astonishing and grotesque buffer that Roman Polanski has had a rough life, but then we would also have to give the same leniency to other people who have been forced to overcome tragedy in their lives. Would we be willing to release any and all criminals currently serving time in prison for crimes they have committed if their childhood or young adult lives were tough? No, because no one cares about criminals currently serving time in prison because they don’t have bottomless pockets and they are not directing movies that people happen to like. While it’s true that Polanski is a survivor of the Holocaust and lost family members and it’s true that his first wife and unborn child were murdered by the Manson Family, but Mr. Polanski also has quite the collection of achievements, including being able to work as a director, owning multiple homes in Europe, getting married and being the father of two children (which I’ll also be the first to say he should not have been able to father children, being a convicted child rapist and all,) and Polanski even won an Oscar. The only privilege Polanski did not have access to is being able to enter the United States. Yeah, poor him.
There are several filmmakers who are demanding, yes demanding Polanski’s release. A petition has even been making the rounds to Hollywood heavy hitters. The petition is backed by France’s Societe des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers) and currently has about 138 signatures, including Woody Allen (surprise, surprise,) Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese, Monica Bellucci, Tilda Swinton, David Lynch, Jonathan Demme, John Landis, and many, many others. Harvey Weinstein is also currently trying to recruit more supporters for Polanski. To all of these people attempting to use their power to convince others that a man with a tremendous amount of power on his own should be exempt from the law I have to ask, ‘What are you on?’ This is complete and utter bullshit and it’s interesting to know what proud, petition-signing, rape apologists we have in Hollywood who are so willing to attempt to protect a child rapist.
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Out Campaign
The OUT Campaign allows individuals to let others know they are not alone. It can also be a nice way of opening a conversation and help to demolish the negative stereotypes of atheists. Let the world know that we are not about to go away and that we are not going to allow those that would condemn us to push us into the shadows.
