Cleaning Alternatives for Reusable Pads

The ladies at the Be Prepared Blog sent us a link to their new post discussing alternate cleaning products for reusable pads. They talk about H20 at Home's Eco-Clean Laundry Ball as well as a couple of organic washes. I personally never thought about using a different soap for my pads; usually I throw them in with my regular laundry loads. Yet they bring up a good point of the chemicals in laundry detergent sticking to your pads after you wash them (and who wants that near your ladyparts?). While we're on the subject, I have to give a plug for the Forever New wash. It's branded primarily for washing lingerie but I've washed some of my homemade pads in it as well. Are there any other products or methods you use to clean your reusable pads?

Separating the men from the boys

The other day, I read an excerpt from Mindy Kaling's new book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Mindy Kaling's hilarious, so of course the excerpt was good. In it, she talked about the importance of dating a man, rather than a boy.

Until I was 30, I dated only boys. I'll tell you why: Men scared the shit out of me. Men know what they want. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn't on the floor. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they're thinking of kissing you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else before. ...Men know what they want, and that is scary. 

What I was used to was boys.

Boys are adorable. Boys trail off their sentences in an appealing way. Boys get haircuts from their roommate, who "totally knows how to cut hair." Boys can pack up their whole life and move to Brooklyn for a gig if they need to. Boys have "gigs." Boys are broke. And when they do have money, they spend it on a trip to Colorado to see a music festival. Boys can talk for hours with you in a diner at three in the morning because they don't have regular work hours. 

But they suck to date when you turn 30.

So the concept of differentiating men from boys has been in my mind a lot lately. Cue the latest post by The Frenemy, who is also hilarious and good.

There’s this guy standing in front of me right now-adult, able to buy his own toothpaste, knows his jeans size in inches. This guy has totally lost his shit somewhere on the corner of Metropolitan and ‘maybe we should have taken a left’, and it’s technically something I said but not my fault. I’m standing here, looking around frantically at the six-pack of the kinds of hipsters that say they’re hipsters, so are therefore just dudes wearing hats. I’m eyeing them like maybe I’m the one that should be embarrassed, because my friend is going LA LA LA I don’t want to HEAR you and I have to keep on moving, coaxing him out of the moment like a dog.

Okay! I won’t bring it up anymore. Can we just get our hands on some ‘artisan what the hell is artisan’ burgers now and you can stop singing?

All I had said was that I was on my period. This is around the time that he started acting like a child, and it’s not his fault. 9 times out of 10 idiots, it’s this: you tell any adult man that you’re on their period/he’s got the maturity level of Dave Coulier in Full House, he can react in the ‘nana nana poooopy’ kind of way and we just accept it. He’s a baby, we think! I better stop being such a lady and shut my mouth!

...For the men- if you want to be an adult about it, you nod when I say that I have my period. You nod like an adult and you move on. Once a month, blood is shed from my uterus because I am not pregnant and I’m not having a baby squeeze out of me any time soon. It does not pour out like the river.It does not shoot out of my vag like a squirt gun filled with Kool-Aid, and it A THING THAT HAPPENS and you shouldn’t be grossed out by... Do not look away at tampons, do not wince at the word uterus. If you’re a grown-ass man who wants to stick his grown-ass parts into any woman, you better be respectful enough to acknowledge that the things her body does are normal and fine and not gross. I know you’re not all like this, because I know some real cool guys. I tip my hat off to you and your uterus respect.

I mean, I don't want to hog all the good quotes here, so go read the whole thing. I have yet to read a Frenemy post where I didn't LOL at least once.

Personally, I remember one of the first times I told a guy I had my period. He was my boyfriend, and I'm pretty sure I told him straight up. He was like, "That is awesome! I couldn't even tell! This is one of the many reasons why I love you--you're exactly the same when you have your period! You're not even grouchy or anything! That's awesome!" Ahw. <3

The Power of the V?

I've posted about Summer's Eve's "Hail to the V" commercials before, but they've reached a whole new level of ridiculousness with their latest spot: I never realized all the great battles in history were fought over getting some pussy. The whole epic set-up to advertise for vaginal cleansing products is both laughable and in my opinion rather offensive. Depicting men fighting over a woman (or more specifically her va-jay-jay) is objectifying rather than empowering. I guess it's impossible to fathom that men would want a woman for anything other than the power of her lady parts, like her personality. So I guess the lesson here is to keep your vagina clean and you'll have men fight epic battles over you. Or something.

What's that tampon doing next to your penis?

So on the Ms. Blog, I came across this new machine that simulates the pain and bleeding of menstruation.

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/09/26/if-men-could-menstruate/
http://www.sputniko.com/works/sputniko/menstruation-machine

The inventor of the machine seems to be posing the question, why should women menstruate at all anymore. To me the question seems less cultural and more biological. It's true that it's a womanly thing to have, you know those menses, for me however, the pills that down play your menstrual cycle seem biologically bizarre and I don't trust them.I'm probably completely wrong, but it seems unhealthy to me to NOT menstruate every month. Also, I really really appreciate my body telling me for absolute certain that I am not having a baby right now. It's almost like a courtesy call from my uterus. "*Ding* Not this month". I don't feel I am culturally attached to having my period, and I think it's something that should be discussed freely and openly without people being embarrassed, but I don't know if that extends to having a machine that simulates the process.

I find the idea of this machine really bizarre as well. Not that I think it's necessarily a bad product and don't mean to blast it at all. I find the idea of it intriguing. But it seems to make menstruating into a novelty, which is not an experience that goes along with female menstruation. It's something that happens all the time, whether you like it or not. Is there any real reason for someone to wear this machine? I can't see a real justification. Because it's not like it can possibly simulate ALL of the symptoms of menstruation. Example: I get itchy during my period because of my hormones, does this machine make you itchy? I think that claiming that it simulates menstruation as an experience is a little misleading. I love my period and all the things that go with it (even the bad ones, because when they go away it's all the better) but I don't know if I would want my boyfriend walking around thinking he knew what menstruation was like because of a machine that he wore for a week or so.

The thing that weirds me out the most is that it actually bleeds as you can see in the video on both links. Where is the blood coming from? Who/What's blood is it? What if the blood touches me? I mean, I'm okay with my own blood, but mystery blood, not so much. And if it is your own blood (which I think would be better) how do you get it, is there a needle like a diabetes finger pricker? I guess this machine leaves me with more questions than answers ultimately.  I do think it's an interesting idea as I said, and can certainly help get discussion going, which is always a good thing.

Real quick round-up

• Are you more creative while menstruating?
• A post on Amplify about the Nepali tradition of chaupadi--isolating women who are on their periods:
  In this superstitious logic, if a menstruating woman touches a tree it will never again bear fruit; if she consumes milk the cow will not give anymore milk; if she reads a book about Saraswati, the goddess of education, she will become angry; if she touches a man, he will be ill.
• Similarly, Jos at Feministing writes about the attitudes and beliefs surrounding menstruation and sexuality while growing up in an Eastern Orthodox Christian church.
  Every sperm, and egg, is sacred. Wasting either, through masturbation, a wet dream, or simply having your period, is a sign of our fallen state, our unclean-ness. Even though a woman’s period is also a sign of her one real purpose: to make babies. So women are baby-making factories, that’s what God made them for, but their ability to fulfill this purpose makes them unclean. So women are inherently unclean, or a failure at being women.
• Jezebel posted a trailer for the new movie Hysteria, about the invention/development of the vibrator. Actually, it's a rom-com that happens to be based around the development of the vibrator. It looks pretty feel-good, so to speak. Don't expect a documentary, people!

In which I am an agent of social change

This is a bragging on myself type of post. If you are not interested in that, skip down and read Jamie's post about RePhresh tampons.

...I'll wait...

Carrying on. After numerous phone calls and letters to many of the major retailers in the area, one has finally answered my call to start carrying Softcups. If you are in the Fayetteville, AR area and are interested in giving these a try, the Wal-Mart on Martin Luther King is now selling them. I have to admit that after Jamie sent me a sample pack, I absolutely fell in love with this product. Though not as friendly to the Earth as a Diva Cup (someday!!) I really enjoy them. I can't feel them at all, and it's nice to not have to worry about getting up in the middle of the night to change a tampon. I still frequently use tampons during the day, but the Softcup has become my go to night time protection product.

So to wrap up: I like Softcups, they sell them in my town now, I want a Diva Cup.

The End.

In which I am skeptical once again

FACT: The insides of your vagina are a chemically delicate ecosystem. It's no big though, because mostly, your body regulates this itself.

FACT: If this pH balance gets messed up, you may get a yeast infection.

FACT: One of the ways your pH balance can get thrown out of whack is by using tampons. Tampons are up in there indiscriminately absorbing not only blood, but your other lady-fluids as well.

Okay, so. It seems to me that if using tampons is messing up your insides, the most straightforward/logical solution is to stop using tampons.

But I guess in our wacky medicalization society, another viable option is to just treat tampons with even more chemicals to help "regulate" your vaginal pH balance. Introducing RepHresh, "the first and only tampon clinically shown to reduce the usual vaginal pH increase during your period."

I get that yeast infections are annoying. And that tampons are convenient. And so if there's a way you can have your convenience and not be itchy, that sounds great. But is it really so smart to keep absorbing more and more chemicals into our bodies? My complaints are along the exact same lines as Aana's when she writes about scented tampons. To me, this is just another quick fix that treats the symptoms of a larger problem without even recognizing that there is a larger problem. 

Thoughts?

h/t to EmpowHER