I wanted to tell you how impressed I was with your "museum"! I've spent a couple of hours here and found it to be intelligent and inspirational.
I found you because I was looking for ideas of ways to celebrate my own daughter's beginning menses. It would add a lot to your site to suggest ways to introduce menstruation in a positive light to young women, and to encourage the celebration of that important transition in a young girl's life. I did find lots of positive ideas here!
Thanks!
I thought you might find this story interesting: "Guinea Pigs Should Not Use Tampons"
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=9120
[Read even more about menstrual products health.]
Hello,
I hope you are still taking comments on Instead.
I found a few things that no one else has seemed to mention. I also reuse mine (after washing of course). I also use mine during ovulation. Some of us have a "flow" during that time. It is not as messy as the red stuff, but it is still nice to feel clean during the day.
Also, I have used tampons forever and have one problem in particular with them. They can not pick up the small pieces of "tissue" and small clumps. Instead has no problem with these. And, I don't feel "plugged" up either! Instead is awesome.
Thanks
P.S. I recently visited their Web site http://www.softcup.com and found it up and running. However, when I sent them an email, it was sent back to me as invalid address. [I have found that to be true, too, and I called them about, but apprently they didn't get the message. They should!]
Harry,
I spoke to you a couple of years ago about my business Full Bloom. [If you click back many news pages you will find an item and picture about Lunatic Pants.]
We now have a Web site www.fullbloom.com.au and we make underpants designed to celebrate the menstrual cycle . . .to howl at the moon in style. They are are called the Lunatic Pants and they are leopardskin and have a naughty red gusset. Anyway, I thought you might like to check it out.
Wishing you many good things,
Emily Simpson
Dear Harry,
Benne Rockett at Opening Closed Doors put me on to your site. Oh, dear Goddess. After picking myself up off the floor laughing at your humor section, I do have a few thoughts. Have you seen Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues"? It's a performance piece and also in book form, a worthy read. [No, but I know the wife of Rudy Guiliani, the mayor of New York City, was to perform it in New York before the latest turbulence in their married life. The Mayor apparently is having a dialogue with someone else's vagina, as he allegedly is running around on his wife. The Washington Post newspaper had a very good review of it - the "Monologues," not the dialogue.]
Much as I understand your desire for a brick-and-mortar museum, the Web is not a bad location, in some ways a better one. [Read about the future MUM.]
I am finding it the ultimate tool for women's issues to get heard, seen in a way that they can't be shoved in a closet, which is truly fantastic.
I am attaching a picture of a new piece that I am doing, a wreath made of tampons.
Would love to have you post it. [See more menstrual art.]
I would also like to invite you to visit my site http://viragogallery.webjump.com, which features my work on female images. I also have a Web shop at http://artmamagalleryshop.webjump.com where the wreaths can be purchased. If you can post links to either or both, that would be wonderful. I will be updating my sites this summer and would love to add a link to your site as well.
Benne tells me you are jurying a show for OCD, which I hope to submit to, so you'll likely see my work again.
Anyhow, I think your site is fantastic, and that a guy is doing it is even more fantastic. [Thanks for the support! For a different opinion of a guy doing this, see the next e-mail.]
Sincerely,
Lucinda Marshall
I read about this Web site and museum in [the Canadian] Chatelain magazine, and I thought it was very interesting. [See who else has written about the museum.]
BUT . . . the one thing that is a bit strange is., well . . . the person who started this museum is a man??? Sorry, that is a bit too much for me.
But it was interesting.
[I've posted many e-mails in past news pages with people's various views on my doing the museum. Just click back.]
Dear Harry,
Recently you wrote that "toilet" was a euphemism for "lavatory." [Actually, I said lavatory was a euphemism for toilet, at least in the U.S.A., but read the following interesting letter, which may just apply to England]. I had heard something about this before, so I checked it out, and the real story is quite interesting.
Back in the last century - the 19th, of course! [Good for you! See below] - in England, train carriages had a cubicle containing a W.C. [water closet], with a sign saying "Lavatory," and one facing it containing a wash basin, and bearing the sign "Toilet." When train travel became popular, it did not take long before railway officials worked out that if they put the wash basin and the W.C. in the same cubicle they could make more room for passengers.
So the single cubicle was called the "Toilet." Is "toilet" a euphemism for "lavatory"? Well, yes, up to a point. Don`t forget that "lavatory" is itself a euphemism. It comes from the Latin "lavatorium," a washing place. In England, upper-class folks still refer to the "lavatory," while "toilet" is regarded as rather lower class!
["Toilet" in the U.S. almost always refers to the porcelin device itself, rather than the room containing it, which is called usually the "bathroom" {!} or "restroom" {!} or "men's room" or ladies' room." Americans baffle Germans when they refer to the room housing the toilet the "bathroom," a reaction that endears them to me because of its directness. The "bathroom" in an American house usually contains a bathtub, shower, wash basin and toilet, and a "restroom" in the better restaurants often has a place to rest, like chairs or a couch, so there is a sense to the euphemisms.]
In recent years the word "loo" has come over as a more universal word. This comes from the anglicised phrase "gardy-loo!" from "gardez l`eau!" the phrase the French used to shout, before emptying their chamber-pots out of upstairs windows in days before inside plumbing!
What do the Royal Family use? I (almost) hear you ask. They wash their hands!
I hope this is of interest. [Yes! Many thanks!]
I am a 34-year-old housewife from England.
I just thought I would write to tell you of a brand of washable menstrual pads called Indisposables available over the internet from Babytown ClothDiapers. They are a little different frm the pads on your museum site, being plain creamy cotton. They have carriers which fasten around your own panty gusset with a choice of velcro or snap fasteners. The biggest difference between the pads and other pads are that the nighttime pads are MUCH longer and are very good for heavy flow.
My mother was born in Yorkshire (England) in 1930 and shared a house with her two sisters, two brothers and parents. Although she died some years ago I can vividly remember her telling me about having to use cloth that she made herself to deal with her period.
She was not allowed to make them whilst her brothers or father were around and had to get up in the middle of the night to wash them out when the male members of the household were asleep.
She then had to get up in the morning before her father woke (early; he was a miner) and take them down from wherever they were hung to dry. (This was pre-washer and dryer time. Their laundry was done once a week in a copper).
I sometimes wonder what she would think of her daughter rejecting modern disposables for washables. [Me, too!]
[Hiding menstruation and associated gear is, of course, still practiced in America and elsewhere. See two ads, for a pad and a tampon, emphasizing secrecy - and shame.]
Hi.
This email is to let you know your Web site has been mentioned in "Lost in Cyberspace," a weekly column written by me, H. B. Koplowitz. The columns are printed in a weekly in Los Angeles called "Entertainment Today." I also post the columns at my Web site, http://onyx.he.net/~hotmoves/LIC, and e-mail them to hundreds of newspaper and magazine editors across the country, so sometimes one gets published somewhere.
If you are receiving this e-mail, there is probably a link to your Web site from one of my Web pages. If I have "borrowed" a graphic from your site, I have given you what I call "link credit," which means that if any of my readers click on the graphic they will be sent to your site.
Questions, comments, corrections, subpoenas to: hbk8@earthlink.net
[See who else has written about the museum.]
Hi,
My name is [deleted], I am 23 years old, and I live in [deleted], Oklahoma. I was home sick from work today, and while surfing around looking for an online pharmacy that carried my birth-control pills I somehow stumbled onto your site. I wish that I could remember the site that I was at the linked to you, but right now I can't seem to remember at all. I'll look through my Internet Explorer history after I finish with this letter, and maybe I can retrace my steps then. Anyway.
First, I wanted to tell you how happy I am to have found your site. For as long as I have known about periods, I have always wanted to know what women used for "protection," and people have always said that I was weird to worry about it. But I was really curious! Just telling me that "They used a rag, enough said," was not enough. So thank you! I have looked at your site three times today, each for 40 minute intervals. I've pretty much looked at the whole thing. And it is all wonderful!! [Many thanks!]
Secondly, I want to say that I am sorry that you have had such a painful family history. You seem very, very nice, and it is beyond me why some lady hasn't fallen in love with you. [Aw, shucks.] You really do seem like a kind, sweet soul [this is too much] and I am glad that your Web site has directed you to meeting so many neat-o people. I hate it that your family disapproves, but I'm glad that you have made MUM. [My family seems to be reconciling itself to the museum and Web site, and it helps that Britannica.com and the New York Times praised MUM. One of the harshest critics even said to me, "Well, maybe there should be a museum of menstruation."]
Well, I really have to go . . . it is 4:41, and my husband will have a cow if I don't clean up this room and get dinner started.
Sincerely,
P. S. We have three kitties. Just thought I would drop that part in there. :) [See more about cats.]
You can get the correct information if you go to these pages published by the U S Naval Observatory:
http://psyche.usno.navy.mil/millennium/whenIs.html (that`s a capital "i" in
"whenIs")
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/AA/faq/docs/millennium.html
A comprehensive site from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich will put right any doubts:
http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/leaflets/new_mill.html
Irregular menses identify women at high risk for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which exists in 6-10% of women of reproductive age. PCOS is a major cause of infertility and is linked to diabetes.
