Reply #288: Oy.

[noamnety]

Your first point is a logical fallacy called a false dichotomy. There's a middle ground between disgusting and glorified - that's what I was talking about elsewhere in this thread, things aren't by default one extreme or the other. Some of us are capable of peeing without being all squeamish about it, for example. It's urine, I'm not gonna glorify it, but if my kid when she was small and being toilet trained had an accident, well, you know, the sheets or pants or whatever go in the washing machine, and life goes on. I swear that doesn't mean I was lighting incense and dancing around hanging crystals in honor of some peegod. No angels sang. It's just work, like millions of women around the world take for granted every day.

Second. I don't know what you are on about with your resources rant. We do laundry anyway. It doesn't cost more or use more resources to put a few extra rags in a load that I'm already running. I find the rest of that part of your post unnecessarily thickheaded. If you had been listening to women here at all, you'd have seen that the majority of the women talking about the divacup or reusable pads were saying it was MORE convenient or more comfortable for them, that they had complaints about commercial pads or tampons, and that they wish they'd found out about it sooner. Not all of us like running to the store, we don't all like having to pack a hundred disposable products for a long trip, running out of them and not having a way to buy more, etc.

And if you add up the cost over the lifetime of all the disposable products a woman would use, it's expensive. Most of us have to work for that money. Free tampons and pads don't just fall from the heavens into our pockets when we need them. So when you are figuring out the inconvenience of one method over another, don't forget to figure in the inconvenience of working about a month solid or more, depending on our wages, to pay for that "convenience." I'd rather throw an extra few rags into the wash when I am doing laundry anyway, or just empty the cup and reuse it, rather than working a few hundred hours serving cranky customers and taking crap from an ignorant boss. (Not that that represents my current job, but that's the reality for a lot of working women. It's a privileged position to think that it's more "convenient" for us to throw several thousand dollars at a problem that can be solved with $30.)

Third, that's another of those false dichotomies. It's not an either/or situation. This is one way to reduce trash and help the environment. It's obviously not instead of other methods, it's in addition to.

Four, I feel sorry for your daughters if that's the message you want them to learn. I think it's sad that you are okay with your own fluids enough that you are okay putting them inside another person, but you want women to be so disgusted by their own fluids to the point where they are repulsed if their own fluids touch them in any way. That's a bit of learned male supremacy, and contempt for women's bodies, and shaming. It's not necessary or healthy, cause that same fluid is in us, all the time in some form, you know? What's the point of teaching us to be repulsed by our own bodies? That's not cool. That's dark ages stuff.

Lastly, if women are "afraid" to post that they find the stuff that comes out of their body repulsive, I'm okay with that, in the same way that I'm okay with a racist not feeling comfortable posting racist stuff here. They weren't going to serve humanity in any way by contributing that to the discussion here. Nobody is twisting their arm to use these alternatives. It's pretty freaking rare that women even find out the alternatives EXIST. One thread telling us these things exist, here's how to make them, and here's how you help the environment by using them, is something they ought to be able to tolerate. The rest of us deal with their message (women's bodies are gross) over and over and over again. If we don't get it from men, we get it from other women, and lord knows if they fall down on the job we got corporations more than willing to step in and remind us. If they thought it was some new earth shattering perspective they were going to share with the world that we'd never heard, they were mistaken.

I don't know what the problem is with your "fans" that they'd be offended by somebody stating that alternatives are out there. What's in that for them to argue about? What the hell is the problem with that? Is that something that needs to be censored in some way so it doesn't offend their delicate sensibilities? Message to your fans: If you don't want to use these things, DON'T. We don't have a squad of menstrual police coming to your house to inspect the products you use. Hide the thread if the thought sends you into a tizzy, for fuck's sake. Meanwhile, allow other women to share useful information with each other without barging in to make it about you, and about how you would never use these things because you find women who don't use disposable products to be disgusting.