The Guide to Getting It On (102 page)

Coming Down

That does it for our trip inside Amber’s vagina. Hopefully, the next time you see Amber, or any woman for that matter, you will appreciate what an incredibly wonderful and complex world exists between her legs.

Special Thanks
To Jacques Revel, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Greg Gloor, the University of Western Ontario, and Jeanne Marrazzo of the University of Washington.

CHAPTER

51

Surfing the Crimson Wave—From Period Gear to Period Sex

I
f guys had periods, you could tell when by looking at the color under our fingernails or the stains on the top of our socks. That’s because we’d either be checking out our vaginas like they were the Stargate, or because no one’s going to stop a game of Halo or basketball just because he started bleeding sooner than planned or his flow was a tampon’s worst nightmare.

So it’s the strangest thing that so many men act awkward when dealing with their partner’s period, or why everyone gets quiet and pretends to ignore it when an ad for tampons or pads is on TV.

Part of the strangeness has to do with privacy because periods are private and that’s not a bad thing. But there are ways of respecting a woman’s privacy without acting distant or like you’ve just encountered an alien with a slime disease. And there are ways of dealing with tampons and pads without behaving like a dork.

Hopefully you’ll find this chapter to be a squirm-free alternative to what you might have been told about periods in a health or biology class—where talk of eggs and Fallopian tubes ruled the day instead of information that might actually be useful in your life and relationships.

In this chapter we’ll talk about bleeding, leaking, cramps, period gear, stain removal, menstrual cups, period panties, and more than you’ll find anywhere else on the planet about having period sex, including why a lot of couples say it feels so good.

Nearly 20% of the Women You Know Are Having a Period Right Now

At any given time, nearly 20% of all non-pregnant women between the ages of 15 and 45 are having their periods. That’s nearly one-fifth of the women who are skiing, running, swimming and playing baseball, basketball or soccer—women who are students, office workers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, mothers, dancers, actresses, waitresses.

One of every five girls between the ages of 15 and 45 is oozing period flow between her legs at this very moment. When you put it in that perspective, it’s hard to understand why people think there’s anything unusual or embarrassing about periods.

And more to the point, there is no evidence that a woman’s intellectual or job performance is affected by her menstrual cycle. Plenty of women have won Olympic medals and recorded platinum songs while having periods.

The Pad and Tampon Wars

Two young boys walk into a pharmacy one day, pick out a box of Tampax, and proceed to the checkout counter.

The man at the counter asks the older boy, “Son, how old are you?”

“Eight,” the boy replies.

The man continues, “Do you know what these are used for?”

“Not exactly,” the boy says. “But they aren’t for me. They’re for him. He’s my brother. He’s four. We saw on TV that if you use these you would be able to swim and ride a bike. Right now he can’t do either one.”

Not too long ago, people believed that women needed to rest during their periods. (Today’s females would love the luxury!) The wisdom of the day had it that ladies of the better classes shouldn’t exert themselves with strenuous activities or sports during that time of the month. Not so for the maid or cook who was expected to work a full day regardless.

The experts who championed these theories in the late 1800s believed that women were the more delicate sex and that their bodies were more frail than men’s. They were sure that women didn’t think about sex, and that the female brain was too small for the demands of college and higher education. Then came the first pads (aka “sanitary napkins”) and the first tampons, and the “frail woman” nonsense started to get flushed as fast as a used Tampax.

While today’s academic feminists are correct to be cramping in disgust at the way women’s periods have been portrayed since the start of the pad and tampon wars, they miss a salient concept that a number of these ads championed: that while a woman’s period might be annoying and distracting, it isn’t debilitating. More importantly, copy from the ads like those below reminded people that the modern woman had social and economic opportunities that her mother didn’t:

“Old-Fashioned ways cannot withstand the merry onslaught of the modern girl...”
Modess, 1929

“The Girl of Today demands perfect freedom and comfort. She wants the best and will not tolerate the drudgeries that held her mother in bondage.”
Modess 1929

“Every Day of the Month Is a Day of Freedom.”
Tampax, 1936

“Don’t Give Up Athletics Any Day of the Month.”
Tampax, 1939

“You’re the Fun in His Furlough... Why let trying days of the month rule your life? You don’t need time-out... that is, if you choose Kotex sanitary napkins.”
Kotex, 1942

And what about this over-the-top text from the 1929 Modess pad campaign that championed self-reliance and rejection of old-fashioned ideas:

“Life is so much more fun when one is not afraid. It is her happy courage—the zest with which she welcomes every new delightful freedom—which is the charm of the modern girl... In a gloomier age, women were resigned to drudgery. Today, young womanhood does not permit drudgery to cloud her joy of living.”

These ads refuted ideas from the 1800s that women’s bodies and brains were inferior. They took the onus off of the body and put it on the pad—a woman wasn’t the slave of her period as long as she bought “the right” tampon or pad. Long before the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, these ads were telling women that they could pretty much do anything that men could, with smaller strings attached.

At the end of this chapter, we return to the very first Kotex ad from 1920, and look at how the name “Kotex” came to be. But there’s a lot of other things to look at first, from period gear and removing stubborn blood stains to period sex, breast tenderness, period suppression, and a whole lot more.

• Women are told that the normal time for a cycle is 28 days, with the duration of bleeding from 4 to 6 days. That would be fine if one size fit all, but for many women the time from the start of one cycle to the start of the next ranges from 21 to 32 days. The time between periods can be the same from cycle to cycle, or it can be all over the place. The duration of bleeding can vary as well.
  
• The total amount of flow during an average period is about 1/4 of a cup or between 4 to 6 tablespoons. This is WAY less than most people think. However, women don’t calculate period flow with tablespoons or cups. Women usually quantify their menstrual bleeding with how many tampons or pads they use. They have no idea how many tablespoons that may or may not be.
  
• Oh joy! Period cramps are related to labor pains. Both are mediated by prostaglandins. This is why prostaglandin inhibitors like Midol, ibuprofen, ponstel and celebrex can help if you have cramps. The trick is in taking as little as one ibuprofen a day or two BEFORE you think your cramps will begin. Birth-control pills can also help because the progesterone in them can quiet the roar in your uterus and might help even you out hormonally.
  
• For pain relief once your period starts, orgasms can help. Orgasms pump powerful pain relievers into the body and the contractions can help push accumulated fluids out of your uterus. In spite of the benefits, can you imagine a mother telling her daughter, “Honey, if you’re having cramps, why not masturbate?”
  
• The faster period blood drips out, the more red it’s going to be. The slower it drips out, the darker it might be. That’s because when it flows more slowly, it spends a longer time in the upper part of your vagina and becomes oxidized, which can result in its turning brownish. The reason why period blood often looks brown on pads is because it has mixed with oxygen and has oxidized. If period blood comes out really slowly, it might look like a dark, tar-like paste.
  
• The clumps in your period flow are from your body’s clotting mechanisms. Our gyno consultant said that when there’s heavy flow, she likes to see clotting, because it means the body is working to decrease the amount of bleeding. It concerns her when there’s a lot of bright red blood that is thin like Koolaid and has no clots in it. She also said that as a woman gets older, “she’ll start to shed tissue from the lining that looks like ‘strings’ of tissue.”
  
• After a woman turns 40 or so, the volume of blood flow might seriously increase, but for only 1 to 3 days rather than the whole time. There might be more clumps, as well.
  
• If you are concerned about any of this beyond the basic annoyance that it has to happen to you, please ask your physician!
  

Why Guys Freak Out

There are two things about women’s bodies and their periods that have freaked men out (and women, as well) over the ages. First is how a woman’s vagina, ovaries and uterus are on the inside. Ergonomically, this isn’t nearly as bad as having your balls and penis hanging on the outside, but we still tend to fear what we can’t see.

Second issue: blood. We humans are one-tracked when it comes to bleeding. We see it as a sign of injury or disease.

So if you combine monthly bleeding with where the blood drips from—you start seeing cultures throughout the ages that have come up with rituals regarding menstruation to help deal with their fear of the unknown. Some of the rituals were sadly isolating and punitive, while others appear to have been empowering for women.

Women, too, must have wondered about the strange spirits that took over their bodies and made them bleed every month.

From Evil Spirits to Eggs & Fallopian Tubes

Unless she is seriously late or is trying to get pregnant, the last thing a woman thinks about when she’s having her period is an egg dropping down her Fallopian tubes. Yet that’s pretty much what periods have been reduced to in the way we teach about menstruation in school.

The story of how monthly bleeding relates to reproduction has become the new mythology to help allay our fears about menstruation. Even the Biblical Snake of old makes an appearance in the form of the sperm-spewing penis. It’s a scientific narrative that helps reassure us that periods are really OK. But given the silence in the room when a tampon commercial comes on TV, you can’t help but wonder about it. Is the silence because the ad is a reminder that a woman has a vagina? That it bleeds? Are people as uncomfortable when an ad comes on for Viagra?