The P Word

     This week, after losing a match at the Australian Open, tennis player Heather Watson alluded in an interview that she was having her period, which had a negative effect on her performance. People. Were. Shocked.

     Almost all women experience 12-13 periods a year for something like thirty years of their lives. In developing nations, lack of access to menstrual supplies and cultural taboo play an important role in the continued subjugation of women. So why is it still such a big freaking deal to talk about it? And why can't we admit that, yeah, our periods affect our lives?

     I've never understood the weird way that our culture thinks about and reacts to menstruation. How many times have you heard/seen the dumb trope about a dude who's embarrassed to go buy brand new, wrapped in plastic, unused, sanitized pads or tampons? How many of us, as girls and women, have felt embarrassed ourselves about having our periods, terrified that someone might see we've pulled a tampon out of our bag before headed to the bathroom? It's ridiculous! It's insane!

     And the cramps? The headaches? The crying? Please! It's the worst. After starting my period at 10, I was blessed with cramps that would keep me on the couch for days, unable to move. I'd get clammy and pale, looking like I had the flu. My dad, being obviously concerned, took me to my pediatrician one month. "It's just cramps. Some girls have periods like this. Take Tylenol and drink water. Some women find that exercise helps," she told me. Just cramps?!??! Exercise?!? I can't even stand up, lady! Thankfully, my parents are rational people who allowed me to go on birth control to take care of it. By the time I stopped taking the pill years later, my period had apparently settled down and I was no longer laid up for 5+ days every month.

     I was lucky. But what of the women for whom the debilitating pain never ceases? Those who can't just go on the pill to make it better. Those for whom the pill doesn't even work? How do we acknowledge their very real suffering and move to fix it without accidentally making the case that women are by nature of biology physically inferior to men? If we're out of commission once a month for thirty years, how can we be expected to hold positions of power?

     Obviously, this is untrue. Women are equally capable of leading, period or not. But it's one of the reasons I think we're afraid to talk about menstruation on a broader, more visible scale. Admitting that periods suck and that they can affect other aspects of our lives seems almost like a betrayal. We've spent so many decades fighting to prove that our uteruses don't make us second class, unfit weirdos that saying out loud that, hey, actually sometimes our uteruses are totally shitty, feels an awful lot like womanly treason.

     All of this circles back to an idea that has been very present in my life recently. I mentioned it in my previous post about cohabitating with my boyfriend: sometimes "fair" and "equal" are two different things. We do have different anatomy than men. That fact doesn't indicate anything more than just that. Our bodies are different, and sometimes we need different stuff to get us to an even playing field. Call it genital affirmative action, if you will (which you won't, because that's a terrible joke). I don't know what that looks like in practice, but I do know that we've been playing the game under men's rules for far too long. As long as maleness is considered the default, we'll be struggling to catch up. The cards are stacked against our bodies, because our bodies have long been considered deviant. So I say it's time to lift the veil around menstruation. Our bodies and experiences are valid, true, and important. Period.

I'm Afraid

I'm afraid to walk alone at night.
I'm afraid of poverty.
I'm afraid to be a parent.
I'm afraid I'll regret not becoming one.
I'm afraid to be vulnerable.
I'm afraid to be emotional.
I'm afraid of keeping my feelings inside.
I'm afraid you'll stop loving me.
I'm afraid I love you too much.
I'm afraid of being inauthentic.
I'm afraid that makes me an asshole.
I'm afraid I'll never do anything great.
I'm afraid of losing the people I love.
I'm afraid of being judged in the court of public opinion.
I'm afraid I'll make the wrong choices.
I'm afraid I'm bad at my job.
I'm afraid that I'm uninteresting.
I'm afraid that I'm a bad host.
I'm afraid they'll know I'm only pretending.
I'm afraid.

Moving In (Fairness, Equality, and Gender Roles)

Moving in with my boyfriend has given me a lot of time to think about heterosexual relationships, shared living spaces, and the gendered division of housework (because I didn't get an expensive Women's studies degree *not* to over analyze mundane life events). A lot of interesting (and surprising) things have come up.

First, some non-domestic personal context:
I am a sign language interpreter. I work part time at a local community college and take occasional freelance work on the side. On a very busy (and atypical) work week, I'll work 25-30 billable hours.
My boyfriend, on the other hand, works full time in a management position in retail. He loves it, is good at it, and is definitely able to support himself on his salary.

So, what does this mean for us in a domestic it context? It means that a lot of the trajectory of our relationship has been determined by his job over mine. It takes him longer than me to get ready in the morning, so we'd stay with him most nights. Because of that, we eventually moved in to his place. (Granted, it was a bit more complicated than that--he has more space, too--but his job definitely played a role.)

His job also means that I am responsible for more than half of the household upkeep. As a sincere feminist who understands the realities of unequal distribution of housework, this is not something I ever thought I'd suffer quietly or (Friedan forbid!) willingly!

This is where we have to have a sidebar about fairness and equality. If we were operating under the assumption that the ultimate goal in our relationship was equality, then we'd do equal housework. But that wouldn't be fair, considering that I work outside the house only about half as many hours as he does.

The flip side of this arrangement is that I don't earn as much money as he does. That means that if we were splitting bills 50/50, I would be unfairly burdened financially. So, while our input into bills and housework are unequal, they are fair. Or will be fair. This is all a new arrangement that still needs to be fully hammered out.

So here I am, sitting on the couch in the house that I don't own where I now live, justifying why I have fallen into the same old rut of unequal division of housework. Am I living in a fantasy world? Am I becoming the woman I swore I'd never be? Who knows, but if this is what it means to be a feminist in her twenties in love, I think I'll take it.