I work at a book store. I am surrounded by books and many, many delightful little distractions that keep me busy while I probably should be, oh I don’t know: cleaning something, or paying attention to customers.  Anyway, while I was making myself look busy, I ran across this book: Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation. Needless to say, it kept me adequately distracted for most of my shift this week.

Flow, explains centuries of practices surrounding the PERIOD. It also highlights the most crazy and scary products marketed to women I have ever seen. For example: Did you know that Lysol used to market itself not only as something to freshen your bathroom with but also as a douche/form of birth control? Yeah! Wrap your head around that one.

What really blew me away though was, after reading through the section on the invention of the adhesive strip (Thank GOD for that little piece of technology) I realized that feminine hygiene products,  somehow set apart from other hygiene products like toilet paper, paper towels and hand soap, are seen as “luxury items” and therefore subject to tax.  If you also hadn’t noticed, they are not given out freely like other hygiene products in public bathrooms.

I have to wonder why? How is a period , different from any other excretion of the human body? It happens less often than most of the other ones, but it happens to nearly all women, more than half of the population of the earth might I add, and yet the availability of products that assist women in staying clean and healthy are select and are overall, more expensive than their urine and feces cleaning counterparts. (Run-on, deal with it. )

It angers my slightly.

It angers me even more though, that this points out that we still, as a society, have not come to grips with the idea of the period. It happens people, get over it. If it didn’t you wouldn’t be reading this.

Two bitter posts. I must be getting my period. :)

Lindsay