Mermaid Musings

i’m reading about menstruation.  just when you think you know all there is to know…

it’s amazing to me how something so mundane, so ordinary can be so political. I just finished a book called “The Curse” which is essentially one woman’s reflections (and substantial research) on why we don’t talk about menstruating. why is menstruation such a taboo subject?

the book really raises more questions than it answers, but it is so interesting!

Personally, i think the taboo is about sex.  Menstruation is an obvious physical manifestation of a woman’s sexuality and women in our culture are not supposed to be sexual beings (they are supposed to be sexual objects). I’ve been working on a curriculum for middle schoolers on the menstrual cycle (because it is a crime that most women don’t really understand their cycles, nevermind being able to chart and know when they are fertile and when they are not) and I want the curriculum to be used, so I find myself having to be really careful about not letting it be to overtly sexual, but how can you talk about periods without talking about pregnancy?

how do you talk about possible pregnancy without talking about sperm?

how do you talk about the presence of sperm without talking about how it got there??

and apparently, most pubescent curriculums on the topic just don’t bring up how a sperm gets into a young woman’s fallopian tubes.

not that young women aren’t figuring this out, teen pregnancy rates clearly show that youngsters don’t have to be told in school how to get sperm into the fallopian tubes - they figure it out all on there own…

and this is what i don’t understand about abstinence only education:  we know teens are having sex. they are.  giving them the information they need to have sex without spreading disease or becoming pregnant seems to me to be necessary…they are having sex whether we like it or not…