Mother Dominique Cristina responds to a tweet her daughter sent her about a guy breaking up with his girlfriend because her period started while they had sex. (x)
i bought the maia from lunapads and i really like the base underwear but i'd say get the pads with wings because the wingless inserts slip around. pros for me were no stickiness from throwaway pads and no leaks, cons are difficult to change away from home especially as the pads soak up a lot more odor than throwaway pads. i ended up mostly using it only at home, the base underwear as a backup with a tampon, or while doing strenuous physical activity bc maia base is impossible to sweat through
oh worm is the base underwear like special period underwear? bc i’ve thought about trying those Thinx ones or smth similar
With all this ‘white feminist playing and making art with their period blood’ on my dashboard, I did some research and came across this South African artist who uses hers own menstrual blood to address the queerphobia and violence she has experienced with being a South African lesbian, Zanele Muholi.
Through her use of menstrual blood in her show Isilumo siyaluma (Period Pains, 2006-2011) in Cape Town, Muholi sought to tell the story of black lesbians in South Africa and represent “curative rape.” She wrote of the project in a press release for the exhibit:
Isilumo siyaluma is a Zulu expression that can be loosely translated as “period pains/ periods pain”. Additionally, there is an added meaning in the translation that there is something secretive in and about this blood/“period in time.”
At one level, my project deals with my own menstrual blood, with that secretive, feminine time of the month that has been reduced within Western patriarchal culture as dirty.
On a deeper level then, my menstrual blood is used as a vehicle and medium to begin to express and bridge the pain and loss I feel as I hear and become witness to the pain of ‘curative rapes’ that many of the girls and women in my black lesbian community bleed from their vaginas and their minds.
Between March – May 2011, three (3) young black lesbians under the age of 25 were brutally murdered in various townships [….] As we continue to live and survive in troubled times as black lesbians in South Africa and within the continent, where rampant hate crimes and brutal killings of same gender loving women is rife, this ongoing project is an activist/artist’s radical response to that violence.
why is it not more wellknown that women can have an actual literal disorder that not rarely makes them literally suicidal for up to 10 days every month before their period lmao like… teach this in class? it’s not a joke?
Wait what??
hereherehere (there’s more sites saying the same thing)
it’s called PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder) and it’s basically PMS but make it Super Hardcore, it’s a hormonal disorder and to my knowledge they’re not exactly sure what causes it - there’s theories tho - but there seems to be little research on it anyway. As I said it’s similar to PMS in terms of symptoms [mood swings, lethargy, cramps, changed sleeping pattern, libido, appetite] but the symptoms get so severe that they are interfering with your daily life and impacting it negatively. Especially in terms of psychological symptoms, while it doesn’t go that far for everyone who has it and also not every month, a lot of the people who experience it are sent into a severe depressive episode beause of it and it’s really not rare at all for them to experience legitimate suicidal thoughts that go away the second they get their period (or up to two days in from what I’ve read).
I’ve read different claims on how many people it affects, some sources say 5%, others 8%, others say 2% so I don’t know about that, but menstruating people need to know this lmao. Not knowing that your suicidality is caused by a literal physical disorder that you have can be so dangerous, especially when you already struggle with such issues anyway or are trying to recover from mental illness and don’t realize that your “relapses” are symptoms of an actual disorder.
also I originally said women but of course this applies to menstruating trans men and nb folks too.
