Sunday, May 27, 2007

You take the good you take the bad you take them both and there you have...

Hey, remember how I said I liked to talk about lady problems? Thought I was joking? WRONG.

There's some talking 'round the way about a new pill, Lybrel, which is intended to be taken continuously so ladies skip their lady time. (Also, of course, William Saletan, who for some reason got put on Slate's lady problem beat and also who my dad thinks he knew in high school (coincidence?) weighs in). This is like, the biggest non-issue in the world to me to the extent that:

a)pills make you skip your lady time anyway and replace it with a fake one, so can we please go back in the past and bicker about this when it mattered, if it did.

b)it is like, not important to me whether people skip their lady time or not. I happen to be kind of attached to mine for completely sentimental reasons, but I'm not interested in condemning anyone who is eager to rid herself of cramping and ruined undies and general inconvenience. I guess if I kept mine and everyone else got rid of theirs and my relative productivity was thereby reduced by like, my having to go to the bathroom more often than everyone else, it would be a problem for me in the modern market economy. But somehow I can't get worked up about that. (also, consider that perhaps the reason I am able to be attached to mine is that it is not all that crippling, and so keeping it, even as gals with more badderer periods ditched theirs, would not really have an effect on our GNP. I can craft widgets and bleed at the same time.)

b1)though I should register my opposition to any paradigm shifts that result in the choice to maintain lady time being received as peculiar and gross like not waxing, eew. Ok? Great.

Anyway, this is old news, but it got me thinking about some even older news, PMS. I suck at PMS. I get sad and mean and pimply and tired. It is real, I mean, those hormones get up in my brain. At the same time, woe betide the person who suggests that perhaps I am not stabbing them for A Perfectly Good Reason and that maybe I am PMSing. I think what I resent here is the insinuation that what I am experiencing is not within the scope of Normal Human Variation. I think this speaks to the nature of my feminism in general - the idea that yes, sure, the lady stuff is real and different from some of the man stuff, but the idea that it happens on some exclusive spectrum of experience, that it's not all part of the same stupid human soup, that it's not just a fact, but a THING chaps my ass. And that is why it chaps my ass super duper when people get fussy about parents working, and how much time they do or don't need off and how should they be accommodated. People, particularly ladies, have kids. They just DO. It is just a thing that happens. Maybe not to you, but to humans as a species. And yes, sure, it is a big deal and they need taking care of, but it's not really that big a deal in the sense of anything exceptional happening that should be outside the realm of what our institutions and models are constructed to deal with.

Anyway, I'm PMSing, so I don't think I am making sense today.

Updated to note that the fact of pregnancy confounds a lot of things.

Double updated to note that I am not pregnant, just saying.

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