Some of you young folks who were born in the late 80’s and 90’s don’t know what it was like to grow up with feminism since the 70’s. A lot of articles and studies were published in the 60’s that seemed to prove without a doubt that there was no major biological or psychological difference between men and women that wasn’t socially constructed. These things became a matter of policy in the 70’s.
In physical education, we were expected and pressured to do the same thing as boys. We were expected to run, climb ropes, and play competitive sports. Some of us did better at some things than others, but even we athletic girls had trouble that we shouldn’t have, and paid the price for this. It was not until there were too many lawsuits because of preventable injuries, that they stopped enforcing male physical standards on girls, but the usual response was to end physical education rather than roll back to segregated gym classes. Both girls and androgynes lost out in this. A truly liberated physical education program would offer students a choice.
Aside of physical education issues, girls were no longer able to take sufficient time off for menstruation issues. Unless you were diagnosed with exceptionally bad menstrual pain by a doctor (which almost never happened because doctors were instructed to basically tell us to take a pill or the pill and get back to school) if you missed more than 7-10 days, even sick days, you didn’t get to advance to the next grade. So even some disabled students with other medical issues had to fight.
Where logic failed to teach school administrators and doctors that boys and girls raised, fed, and worked the same would still not be the same, the injuries and shame we suffered made their twisted worldview irrelevant. The anticipated generation of “amazons” they hoped to breed was simply not going to happen.
When the results they expected failed to materialize, they changed their tack, but the objective remained the same. Since it wasn’t going to happen naturally, they shifted to trying to make it happen socially and medically through the use of drugs.
Boys are given drugs to reduce their “hyperactivity”, and girls are given drugs to make them less “hormonal”. 13 year old girls who’ve only been getting a period maybe a year are being put on the pill supposedly to prevent pregnancy since young people are having sex sooner, and “to make their period more manageable” with little or no regard to how this will affect their long term fertility.
My generation was told that it’s okay to purposefully force your bodyfat to below 12% because being “fit” is more important than being fertile. This generation is being told casually that menstruating is inconvenient, so it’s okay to chain pop your pill so that you don’t.
Having been a postergrrl for the attempted amazon generation, I would like to warn the young women of Generation V, that you aren’t being victimized by your period. You can be victimized by “big pharma” if you buy their line of bull that you don’t need your period.
Videos like the one I linked to above are part of an effort to sell you drugs to solve a “problem” that isn’t a problem. They also twist information from anthropological data that would explain why women in non industrialized cultures get fewer periods. It is not because they are always pregnant or breastfeeding. It is because they generally get their periods later because they aren’t carrying as much bodyfat during puberty, are overall more active in the way that women would normally be active, such as tending the family farm and doing errands, don’t eat as much processed food, and a host of other reasons that have nothing to do with constant pregnancy.
On a personal note, since I started eating like an African, I started “missing periods” occasionally. I’m like clockwork most of the time, but occasionally, I’ll have a spot and that’s it, or it’ll re-synch with the moon to come in the last quarter or new moon. Many others who have eschewed processed foods have experienced the same. Their cycles became more connected to their natural environment. There is probably some positive epigenetic effect, as you can pick the nature-kids out of a crowd nowadays…but that’s for another post.
Anyway, you need to keep off the drugs and keep your period for a few reasons:
- To stay conscious of your sexuality and sexual needs during your fertile years.
- To keep your sex drive natural, and get sufficiently wet. The pill lowers many women’s sex drive, and gives them moisture problems when they’re too young to be having those. A dry vagina is a non elastic vagina, and this means a higher risk of lacerations, which means a higher risk of contracting STD’s.
- To ovulate regularly. Ovarian age is an issue, and the last thing you need is to convince your body that your ovaries are dead or dying. Though they say that some causes of premature ovarian insufficiency are unknown, it makes biological sense that one possible cause for some women is long term use of the pill or other hormonal birth control. If a partial hysterectomy can do it, the pill can definitely do it. If being on the pill causes you vaginal dryness, reduced sex drive, or other symptoms like POI, then for goodness sake, get off it…or just don’t get on it in the first place.
- Some may find this gross, but there are stem cells in your menstrual blood. Menstrual blood has all the healing effects of normal blood plus stem cells that likely aid in the healing of your vaginal walls. Lubrication may not cover everything as far as protection from friction and lacerations in and around the vagina. So getting your period helps your parts to “bounce back” and not get flappy. If you’re really adventurous, you can use your menstrual blood for a face mask to slow aging. Much like placenta, the anti aging properties of menstrual blood are well known in the beauty underground. Now scientists know why. Countess Bathory’s collection of female virgins was more likely to harvest their menstrual blood than their vascular blood. Mix it with goat yogurt, smear, let it dry, and then rinse.
There are many other reasons for letting your body do what it does and be fully female. Being on the pill makes you old before your time in a few ways, and only gives an illusion of masculinizing you. It just makes your body behave like a dried up old woman. This is one big reason many moms are hotter than their daughters today. A non pill 40 year old who takes care of herself will, more often than coincidentally, look better than a pill 25 year old. With the reduced sex drive, the pill will demotivate you from taking care of yourself, watching what you eat, and going that extra mile in grooming.
I don’t judge. If you really want to be more dude-like, take testosterone or HGH sanely. Some experienced bodybuilders and athletes can teach you how to go about that with minimal side effects, or at least no worse side effects than the pill. If the risks of the pill are worth it to you then, the risks of taking a bit of juice within reason will be a breeze.
…but if switching bodies with your grandmother isn’t that appealing, stay off the pill and let your monthly flow.
For more on the subject of anti menstruation marketing, Carly S. Wood’s paper Repunctuated Feminism: Marketing Menstrual Suppression Through the Rhetoric of Choice is really good. Give it a read.
