and your medical charts, and when you start

This post is about menstruation. It's not an apology or even a warning, it's just a notice. Menstruation, below.

I know I'm risking losing my credibility as a reasonable feminist (street cred, yo) to say this, but dood....having periods is like....ovulation and being fertile and part of some sort of womanly bond...and like....the moon. For realz.


But then, well, then there's the blood.

(See first line above)

Okay, I know it's not really blood, it's lots of things that make up the lining of the uterus, that like...drips out of you. But like...despite how easily all the absorbent cotton products on TV make it seem, well, it's not always well-managed. Amitrite, ladies? Sometimes it's like WWII down there and you just want to throw your hands up and wave that white flag. Or well, it probably wouldn't be so white anymore, but....I digress.

Us modern women have lots of choices, both for controlling the length and flow of our periods and managing to not walk around covered in blood once a month. It's pretty amazing to think about what kinds of products and options we have today compared to what our great-grandmothers did or didn't have. But sometimes I think way way before that, back to a time when humans were just evolving. I assume that women passed along to each other that they would get this thing occasionally and that it didn't mean they had a wound, but was there ever an early time where they just didn't know what was going on? Did they ever think they were ill or did they just know it was part of the life cycle? These are the kinds of things I wonder while curled up in my sweatpants shoving a chocolate bar into my mouth. I think about cave women trying to figure out what periods were. #mylifeissad

The other thing that I find absolutely fascinating is the whole ovulation cycle. Now, I know my heteronormative is showing a little here but HOLY CRAP did you know that women's bodies were like...meant to conceive by making them the rowdiest right at the time where they're most likely to conceive? It's how we're still alive and the Dodo Bird is not. (I only assume that the female dodo birds all got "headaches" when they were the most fertile.)

I mean, check this out.

From Wikipedia

You see that purple line go up right around day 21? Yeah. That's your lady boner. Basically, God puts on a Barry White record to make little babies. It's absolutely genius. No wonder feminists are always blah blah blahing about how amazing periods are. They ARE amazing.

In today's world of Seasonale and Mirena and tampons in neon colored candy wrappers, I just didn't want y'all to forget that even though you have the incredible option of not being a baby making machine, your body is totally designed to get you off the couch every once in a while and into bed to do the nasty. That, ladies, is intelligent design. ;)