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May 9, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant

Coincidentally, I learned about the idea of period leave today and the attendant support/criticism. One avenue of support is that period leave helps women be on the same level playing field as men because a woman with painful periods wouldn’t have to take up her general sick leave. One criticism I saw was that it reinforced the idea that women were less reliable than men, which reminded when I once read the advice on a blog geared at corporate women to never complain about pregnancy (fatigue, brain fog) because it would make employers discriminate against pregnant women and you’d be reinforcing negative stereotypes.

I’d like to see a way to affirm that women are not required to undergo menstrual suffering if they have a way to treat it but also that women are not expected to treat menstrual suffering (or even menstrual inconvenience) by “turning off” their periods or powering through.

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May 9, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant

"How do you work for restoration when you’ve broken the old equilibrium too badly to be able to bring it back? What do you do when you don’t know for sure what the old equilibrium was, what hidden supports it required, or how it was experienced?"

Eden never comes back, does it?

My first though is this is what the Christian life is always like. Pray for salvation, and in the meantime, work to reach new equilibria that are at least tolerable.

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I really appreciate you being transparent about your pushback. I also really appreciate your point about avoiding periods being the default- which makes me think of the question: what is lost and what is gained for women when our understanding of what is 'normal' for women changes? I think this question could lead to fruitful conversation. I have noticed that when avoiding periods is normal, it becomes unclear to people why one might choose to have a period - so that might be something to explore. More importantly, when avoiding periods becomes normal, it also becomes unclear why accommodating women with difficult periods is necessary- because their experiences are viewed as a choice, rather than as a baseline biological reality. I think I am mostly articulating these ideas for myself, and am not sure how much I am adding to the conversation, but I have genuinely never read any conversations about this topic basically ever and certainly not framed so even-handedly and honestly, so I hope you will continue to write.

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founding

I think that period suppression is a tool that can be pro-woman or anti-woman, a good choice for some (including me right now!) and a bad one for others. Leah wrote that she thought period suppression tried to "[solve] women’s problems by removing what makes us distinctively women," and I want to ponder that a bit more. It seems dangerous to frame any kind of physical suffering as something that makes us "distinctively women," and while a period isn't ONLY suffering, there is almost always some suffering involved. How can we understand periods as something that makes us distinctively women, but also withhold that designation from the accompanying suffering, which might with better medicine be alleviated without any sort of tradeoffs at all?

As women, we are used to making tradeoffs when it comes to suffering and our health. Do I get an IUD to resolve period symptoms, but endure a painful insertion and side effects? Do I give birth without pain relief to widen the options for how I labor, or do I instead choose the curtailed birth options and side effects of an epidural? Do I use HRT to relieve symptoms of menopause and endure the corresponding increase in cancer risk, or do I experience the suffering of menopause without relief?

Any framing of these life stages/events as something that makes us distinctive as women needs to hold up to the fact that if there was some sort of treatment that didn't have corresponding tradeoffs, that would be a good thing and almost everyone would want to use it!

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I never used hormonal birth control, so having periods was always a default. That said, I like the idea of being in touch with my body's natural cycles.

Cramps? I learned how to deal with them naturally--berry teas were a favorite.

Menstruation isn't an aberration--it just is--and suggesting they be suppressed is a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist.

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founding

I love the thoughtful conversations Other Feminisms engages in!

When I read the original piece, I read it as a questioning of transcending biology generally. What is a 'good enough' reason to want to skip a period? What is a good enough reason for a doctor to help a patient do so? What is a good enough reason for a researcher to investigate the question in the first place?

This conversation takes on new meaning with Idaho and Louisiana making moves to ban IUDs.

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I found myself thinking about this a lot over the past few weeks - in the past twelve years I've had about ten periods total due to pregnancy (currently on #6) and lactational amenhorrea. In my particular social circles these sorts of numbers are pretty common, though I also know it's very out of the mainstream. To be fair, I'm also dealing with the attending aches and pains of pregnancy and the very real, heavy, and frequently painful postpartum bleeding. But even when the pain is worse from those things than it would be from typical menstruation, I find that my mindset about it is completely different. When I'm healing postpartum, I also get baby snuggles. I know that my body is actively healing from delivery. Once the bleeding stops I know (in my case) it's unlikely to happen again for at least a year. A period, in contrast, feels annoying and pointless even though I can grasp that it isn't. "OK, cool, not pregnant - can we move on now, please?"

I know this is coming from a place of privilege - I have the social support from husband, family, and likeminded friends to be able to commit to large family life, not to mention a body that has been able to do it, and I don't mean to be insensitive at all to people who would like that and don't have it. But the point about historical norms on the previous post got me thinking about it. I'm sometimes annoyed with my body and the ordinary suffering it endures. But I don't feel like I'm at war with it.

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> This is a similar question to the one many environmentalists face. How do you work for restoration when you’ve broken the old equilibrium too badly to be able to bring it back? What do you do when you don’t know for sure what the old equilibrium was, what hidden supports it required, or how it was experienced?

On the one hand, I think this is a very good question to ask. On the other hand, it struck me when reading it that it isn’t actually quite what the original quote was saying:

> Prior to industrialization, women would begin menstruating several years later, cycle less often due to less reliable nutrition, and spend much more of their life pregnant, which means the average woman in preindustrial society would menstruate (and ovulate, and etc) on average 100 times in a lifetime and the average woman in industrial society 400—which is one possible reason why things like ovarian cancer, PCOS etc, are on the rise—but what that tells me is that the thing our bodies do under the stimulus of industrial society, reliable nutrition etc, is already an evolutionary aberration—which doesn't necessarily mean we should run out and throw MORE chemicals at the problem, just that normal isn't necessarily the recourse we might think it is?

I read this as pointing out that “historical” might not actually be a good definition of “normal”! “Reliable nutrition” is an *enormous* factor here, and “industrialization” in *this* case generally means “much lower levels of sustained stress on the body” as well as the chemical contexts we live in. Those things together combine to generally mean better physical health, and *that* results in having—on that estimate—4× as many periods. That’s an astonishingly higher number, and arguably that higher is what is “normal” for a healthy female human body. The fact that historical human female bodies didn’t experience that speaks to the enormous pressures (many of them frankly awful) that people in general but women and children in particular suffered in the past.

To return to your question—

> …what hidden supports it required, or how it was experienced?

—you could add “what hidden costs it represented”.

(All of this, to be clear, is meant as a “yes, and…” rather than a rebuttal or disagreement!)

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