Women's nonprofit in New Zealand sells washable pads and educational material
Dear Mum,
Our names are Hester Phillips and Marie Merrilees. We are members of the "Luna Collective," a nonprofit organisation run by women dedicated to promoting a positive awareness of menstruation and associated issues among women and society at large. To assist in meeting this objective we sell Moontime Menstrual Cloths. These are washable, organic menstrual cloths. [See examples of other washable pads, past and present.] Women who choose to use our cloths do so because they reduce waste and are therefore environmentally friendly, they are comfortable, they are cheaper, and they are safe. Women also buy Moontime Menstrual Cloths because they wish to support the collective in raising awareness of menstruation as a significant event in women's lives. We also sell educational sheets about many aspects of menstruation and a calendar for women to record the ebb and flow of their cycles.
We think a reciprocal link between your Web site and ours would go very nicely. Please check out our Web site on www.luna.tasman.net and get in touch. Our email is: lunacollective@ts.co.nz.
We look forward to hearing from you,
Hester Phillips and Marie Merrilees
Her Greek grandmother, menstruation and going to church
I was looking through your site and noticed the little bit on the Muslim beliefs and menstruation [in the religion section].
It reminded me of a conversation I had with my grandmother. Basically I grew up with my old Greek grandmother who was brought up in a small village in Greece. I am not quite sure how we got onto this topic but somehow we did. She was shocked to find out that I went to church while having my period back when I was forced to go to church, and I of course got very upset!
I hated going to church but she went on about how if you were having your period you were not supposed to go into the church! If only she had told me all those years ago I think I would have menstruated on a weekly basis! But she was very upset to find out that I went to church while menstruating.
She then asked me if I every kissed an icon while menstruating! She was also upset to find out that I did! Apparently it is considered dirty and girls are supposed to not go to church or kiss icons, according to an old Greek woman.
I have talked with friends in Greece now and they all laugh but the older generations actually still believe in this! My grandmother told me stories about how boys would make fun of girls who stayed home on Sundays! Because they all "KNEW"!
Once again, if I had only known then I would have had a period every week!
"Beach whistles"
From Web site of Clean Ocean Action: http://cleanoceanaction.org/AboutCOA/Year/1985.htm
1985 Timeline:
COA (Clean Ocean Action) attempts to ban plastic tampon applicators (a.k.a "beach whistles") through state legislation. The bill is defeated by a powerful plastics lobby.
Brazilian doctor agrees about cultural importance of menstruation
Dear Sir,
I am a gynecologist especially dedicated to clinical and psychosomatic gynecology, always interested on interdisciplinary approaches to women and gynecology. I agree entirely with you in that the phenomenon of menstruation is not only a medical subject, because of its enormous cultural, mythological and archetypal importance - an importance which medicine and gynecology urgently need to recognize properly. [I talk about this when discussing my ideas for the future of the museum.]
Congratulations for your Web site, it is really wonderful! [Many thanks!]
The subject of menstruation has always been fascinating, being one of my favourites (obviously including all aspects of the ovarian cycle and the cyclical nature of woman's physiology - of which menstruation is the final result).
I live in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and I am the author of two gynecology books, "Novas Perspectivas em Ginecologia" ("New Perspectives in Gynecology") and "Os Órgãos Sexuais Femininos: Forma, Função, Símbolo e Arquétipo" ("The Female Sexual Organs: Shape, Function, Symbol and Archetype"), respectively published in 1990 and 1993.
[Fellow Brazilian Prof. Elsimar M. Coutinho wrote the book Is Menstruation Obsolete? (Oxford, 1999) - read some excerpts - that has caused excitement. Its premise is drawing interesting responses to this Web site at Would you stop menstruating if you could? ]
Unfortunately, my books have not been published in English yet. Nevertheless, some of their topics are translated to English in my Web site www.nelsonginecologia.med.br , since it is a Portuguese-English site (actually almost all topics are translated, with special links to the English parts). The site is also illustrated, and I would like to invite you to visit it. There are special topics just about menstruation, as "Premenstrual Syndrome" and "Psychosomatic and Symbolic Aspects of Menstruation," and I hope they can be of interest.
In the next E-mail, I will send the page www.nelsonginecologia.med.br/orgaos.htm, dedicated to my book "The Female Sexual Organs: Shape, Function, Symbol and Archetype" ("Órgãos Sexuais Femininos"). I am doing it just because a special emphasis to menstruation is given in this page.
I thank you very much for your kind attention.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Nelson Soucasaux
Website: www.nelsonginecologia.med.br
Why would people want to dilate their rectums?
Hello,
My wife and I were looking over your interesting Web site. The page on the rectal dilators was interesting. However, I think that it might not quite be right to entirely dismiss them in the quack medicine or anal erotic realm.
Apparently legitimate physicians were prescribing their use for constipation and hemorrhoids up to the early 1960s and dispensed through major pharmacy chains. If you would be interested, I might be able to relate some things that I discovered from my Ex when we found a set cleaning my mother-in-law's house as well as another interesting bit on their use for anxiety/nervousness gleaned from my current wife's attempt at becoming a masseuse.
Let me know if this interests you [Yes! I asked the writer to send what he knows],
She's looking for the Instead menstrual cup [read an incomplete history]
Dear Finley:
I have been on a search for Instead insertion cups [picture] for 2 1/2 years now, ever since I saw an ad for it in a Cosmopolitan magazine. I am sadly disappointed to read that I may never get to use one let alone find out the current price. [Visit their Web site.]
I am from a tropical island (Barbados) and pads are out of the question for me, since they offer no comfort or protection, but contribute to the feeling of being "cursed." Tampons, on the other hand, seemed like the best alternative until I began to wonder how healthy they really are.
I am always looking to make my life as a woman much more enjoyable especially around that time. I am now in New York State and I would really like to know if there are any places close by where I can get some Instead cups.
Maybe there are some merchants who have not dumped their stock.
I am quite desperate to try something new and possibly better.
So where's the picture of Kotex?
Dear Harry:
First, congratulations for your lovely and interesting site, lots of info. I really enjoy looking at it from time to time.
I'm just surprised at one thing. Kotex and Modess belted pads were virtually the only product on the market for decades and as a museum you don't have a single full-size picture of these pads? Well, don't tell me about the pad wrongly attached on the mannequin and the 1930 Modess gauze version - these are not good examples.
I would have expected to see more like the one I was using back in the 1970s. They were SO SOFT. You have so many pictures of tampons, you have a picture of an old Stayfree and New Freedom pads, I'm sure you can add a full-size picture of a Kotex and Modess pictures and I'm sure Kimberly-Clark and Johnson & Johnson gave you boxes of them. [Neither American branch of the companies has given anything to the museum, but many other companies have, plus many individuals.] Oh, well, maybe I'm just too nostalgic for these pads!!!
Thanks,
[from] Montreal, Canada
[To satisfy the writer, on Saturday I imaged Kotex from 1974, as well as 1959 and probably the 1930s - all from the MUM archives - but on Sunday my computer went bonkers and wouldn't start until evening, so I couldn't surprise her with her favorite pad. I'll finish the pages for the next update. Name one person who REALLY understands computers!]
Stopping menstruation; read Malcolm Gladwell's article
Hello,
We were doing a project for a human reproduction course and found the comments on your site (mum.org) very interesting. (Our project was speculating on a device to stop menstruation while still allowing pregnancy to occur.) Thanks for the great site.
As we were researching further, we came upon an article that may be of interest to you and your site devotees.
It is about how modern women menstruate about four times as much as women did a few hundred years ago (350-400 times vs. 100 times) and how this may lead to some cancers.
Thanks again for the site!
"Do you get many E-mails from men?" is the subject line of this e-mail
Harry,
I stumbled onto your Web site via the "weird earl's" link at the straight dope (http://www.straightdope.com/). Usually, weird earl's is truly weird, but I didn't find your site weird at all - in fact, I enjoyed it. I must have been captivated because I looked at your collection of menstruation information for about an hour, and I'm a guy. I think that you would be successful producing television documentaries.
[Maybe five percent of my e-mail come from men, about the same proportion as visitors to the physical museum when it was open. I had the impression that most museum-visitor men served as bodyguards for the women who accompanied them, since visitors didn't know what to expect.]
Underpants, or lack thereof, through the ages
Just found this:
"Samuel Pepys's diary, written 1659-69, records that his wife wore drawers.
"One of Janet Arnold's books, Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd, has photos of two pairs of late 16th-century drawers, one or both of which may have been women's. And Ruth Anderson's Hispanic Costume 1480-1530 states that Spanish women of this period wore drawers." The information is from an e-mail I [the male writer] received in 1994.
See the movie "Sgt. York," about 8 minutes into it: "Women in rural regions of America were still going bare-bottomed under their skirts until the WWII era, and in much of the world they still go without underpants."
[Read a discussion of what women wore, or didn't wear, and how this might relate to what women used, or didn't use, for menstruation.]
Book about menstruation published in Spain
The Spanish journalist who contributed some words for menstruation to this site last year and wrote about this museum (MUM) in the Madrid newspaper "El País" just co-authored with her daughter a book about menstruation (cover at left).
She writes, in part,
Dear Harry Finley,
As I told you, my daughter (Clara de Cominges) and I have written a book (called "El tabú") about menstruation, which is the first one to be published in Spain about that subject. The book - it talks about the MUM - is coming out at the end of March and I just said to the publisher, Editorial Planeta, to contact you and send you some pages from it and the cover as well. I'm sure that it will be interesting to you to have some information about the book that I hope has enough sense of humour to be understood anywhere. Thank you for your interest and help.
If you need anything else, please let me know.
Best wishes,
Margarita Rivière
Belen Lopez, the editor of nonfiction at Planeta, adds that "Margarita, more than 50 years old, and Clara, 20, expose their own experiences about menstruation with a sensational sense of humour." (Later this month more information will appear on the publisher's site, in Spanish.)
My guess is that Spaniards will regard the cover as risqué, as many Americans would. And the book, too. But, let's celebrate!
Two weeks ago I mentioned that Procter & Gamble was trying to change attitudes in the Spanish-speaking Americas to get more women to use tampons, specifically Tampax - a hard sell.
Compare this cover with the box cover for the Canadian television video about menstruation, Under Wraps, and the second The Curse.
An American network is now developing a program about menstruation for a popular cable channel; some folks from the network visited me recently to borrow material.
And this museum lent historical tampons and ads for a television program in Spain last year.
Now, if I could only read Spanish! (I'm a former German teacher.)
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.
