A Pig In Lipstick And Satin Ballroom Attire

First off, I'm not even sure pigs look any better with lipstick.

And besides, the name attached to this latest Oregon House Bill goes way beyond putting lipstick on a pig. This is formal satin ballroom attire with pearls, corsetry, cage crinolines and a bustle. Somebody else's whole job is to stuff you into it.

It's not the legislation itself. I'm fine with that. Oregon has just passed a law requiring public schools at all levels to provide free menstrual pads and tampons to students, no strings attached. Plenty of people put in a plug for it. This bill was in the works for quite a while, but then it got wings, and finally gushed out in June. The problem is that many students cannot afford to purchase sanitary products and might even stay home from school rather than leave their home toilets.

All this is well and good. But calling it the Menstrual Dignity Act is just plain trying too hard. Menstrual and Dignity do not belong in the same sentence. I know, I know, every generation since the '70s has seen an effort to dress this situation up and waltz it across the stage, but all such efforts fail in the face of stark reality, and that is that although this biological circumstance should not be shameful, there's really no hallelujah about it either. Period.

The language involved has undergone the usual modern torture. One of the beauties of English, I maintain, has been its spare quality, its efficiency, its flow if you will, such that our pronouncements don't have to get larded up with clauses like we're French or something. Until recently we could refer to "homeless people," for instance, although now that has become "persons experiencing homelessness," which means exactly the same thing, except it purportedly suggests some kind of temporary condition and not an innate character flaw, which (for my money) "homeless people" never implied in the first place.

So now we all have to be French about it and can't get to the end of our sentences in a timely manner without causing an uproar. Sure enough, the text of the Menstrual Dignity Act refers to "people who menstruate," and just as I was getting my eye-roll going, I saw the following sentence from its proponents: "One in five menstruators in the United States cannot afford the price of menstrual products."

Clean, spare language be damned! Maybe the sentence has a certain flow, but I can't say I love the word "menstruators." Like "educators" or "legislators," it suggests a degree of calculation I do not believe exists. Nobody signs up for this crap.

 

Absolutely, we should provide free tampons and pads in schools. Sure, some Republican-run school board in Wisconsin is going to rag on that kids getting free tampons, what a treat, are going to be spoiled. That's a stain on them. But I don't want to call this the Menstrual Dignity Act unless there are reparations involved. In which case, sign me up. As I've mentioned before, this crap was forty years of pointlessness and laundry.

 

"Not so," they'll say, terrified of owing reparations to so many. "There was a point to it. You were being entered into a monthly lottery for a brand new human being." Hell. I've met lots of human beings. They're not all of them the big prize they're made out to be.

Forty Years Of Pointlessness And Laundry

Advertisements are a lot more explicit now. Maybe whatever held us back in the past has long since been rendered quaint by the required recitation of side-effects from the drug peddlers. By the time you've said "uncontrollable erection" and "anal seepage" out loud, a line of delicacy has been crossed.

Even so, Always Maxi Pads startled me with their "What The Gush Moments." You know what? Those ugly technicolor bears with their clean heinies can go straight to hell, but this I love. It's a sly nod to a vulgarity, paired with a 100% accurate, relatable description. Not only that, but when they do the little demonstration of their product sopping up liquid, they use red liquid.

They used to use blue liquid. Mediterranean Blue. Like this is a freaking holiday on the French Riviera. That's how delicate our sensibilities used to be. Pretty sure some men thought even that was gross, and to those guys, I say, button up, Buttercup. At least they're not showing chunks.

Shoot, way back when, "feminine hygiene" ads didn't even really say what they were advertising. You could imagine it was deodorant. Or little white shorts. Or swimsuits. Or maybe they were just celebrating Freedom. Oh, say can you see? Sure hope not!

But the What The Gush Moment gets my attention. Because that is absolutely, totally a thing. You're going about your day and then very suddenly, with no warning, you have a Situation, and you freeze in your tracks to give your mattress-sized pad the best opportunity to Control The Situation and not breach the dike. As it were. Then you're mincing toward the bathroom only moving your legs from the knees down. It's been fifteen years for me, but when I see the faces of the women in the ad suddenly registering a Moment, I know exactly how they feel.

Here's a thing. If you want to see a roomful of women pee their pants laughing--there's Poise for that--just say "The average amount of blood lost during a menstrual period is six to eight teaspoons."

Who were they studying? Disney princesses?

Teaspoons. This is a plug for the metric system if I've ever heard one.

Hey. If they're making something that will handle the Situation without requiring you to tie a sweater around your waist just to make an exit, more power to them. When I was first introduced to the joys of womanhood, my mother set me up with my very own napkin and belt. Which was no doubt an improvement on whatever sorry improvisation she grew up with on the farm in North Dakota. But let's put it this way: when they came out with adhesive strips for your underpants, it had the weight of a technological breakthrough. Because the thing about that belt is you could get the whole contraption centered just so, and five walking steps later it was crawling up your ass and you were backing into the corner of a table to shove it back toward the front. There you are, talking to a nice boy, just, you know, casually backing into furniture with a little humpy-movement hoping you look normal. And you are not. You are embarking on a special Ladies' Cruise with 480 ports-of-call and if you sail out of any one of them with clean underwear, Disney would like a word.

A Rags To Bitches Story

So I found out, and never mind how, there's no reason to get into it on a Sunday, that my fine young friend buys reusable cotton flannel menstrual pads, which I didn't even know were a thing, but they are. And I was grateful yet again for being a post-menopausal liberal.

Because if I were a liberal woman still in the throes of unasked-for fertility, I would then have to go purchase these myself, and use them and wash them out in order to keep yet another single-use throwaway item out of the landfill, because that is the curse of a liberal, to worry about such things, and because it's not as if the throwaway kind ever saved much on laundry anyway, since there wasn't a single month in forty years in which I did not manage to doody on something I shouldn't have, even if I wore two corks and a pad so large it has a tag on it that says DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

If I were a pre-menopausal conservative I wouldn't have to give this a second thought. I would be worried about some colored person breaking into my house or being blown up by a Muslim war refugee or raped by a Mexican or the fact that God is both all-powerful and somehow kept out of the schools or that some liberal is going to force me to use curly light bulbs or some stinking Socialist is going to steal my Medicare or someone is going to call me a racist just for having the guts to call a spade a spade or, and this is the very worst thing, my own husband might some day be accused of something he didn't do, something that totally never happened on account of there being no witnesses except that one really drunk dude who hasn't remembered anything he's done in thirty years. Any woman could accuse him of such a thing at any time and then go cash her check from the First National Bank Of Libtards and it wouldn't matter how many creative explanations my husband made up to explain the naughty bits in his yearbook. And his life would be ruined unless he makes it to the Supreme Court and is right back on top. As it were.

As a conservative woman I would be able to assume that life began when I was born, and being able to wear sweaters inside in the summer and drive my Ford Extortion to the corner store and throw away a plastic pod every time I make coffee is just what the world owes me. Certainly I would assert there was no life before pads and tampons. Just because women survived for a million years without them until a hundred years ago does not mean that we could survive without them today.

They did, though. Admittedly, history has not been overly interested in the concerns of women. Hypatia is an exception. That 5th-century mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher once discouraged an unwanted suitor by smacking him with her menstrual rags, although some scholars dispute this account, pointing out that she could have just waved them around and he'd have dropped dead of his own accord. Unfortunately, Hypatia was a woman of great and beguiling beauty, otherwise known as Satanic wiles. She and her big brain and beauty got into a nest of early Christians and that was pretty much that, for soon enough she was murdered, sliced up, dragged in pieces through the street, and burned.

And for this alone I might have donned the cotton rag in Hypatia's name. But now I don't have to, thank God. Or whoever's in charge.

Curses! Soiled Again

Recently, in a post, I mused about the old manual typewriters I grew up with, and, as I'm sure it did for many of you, it put me in mind of my sex education. Not the segment of it I got from the gutter as God, and certainly, Mom intended, which was fascinating, far-fetched and turned out to be true, but the part I got from Mom. I was nine years old and she was typing out my application for summer camp. She could navigate those forms like nobody's business, barely pausing to readjust the paper so that the typing fit precisely in the little boxes. Her fingers were a blur, and then suddenly she stopped dead, turned to me and said, Mary, do you know what menstruation is?

Well, no. But I could tell by her expression that I probably should, and that I wasn't going to like it.

She then gave me an entirely inadequate explanation that was no explanation at all--just a description, really, and no making sense of the thing. It sounded like a perfectly horrible prospect with no real purpose (and that is, indeed, what it turned out to be), and when she finished with do you understand? I lied and said "yes," hoping it would end the lesson, and it did. She whipped back around to the typewriter, typed three letters in the box, and then rolled down to the next box.

Sisters, post- and pre-puberty: note levels of joy.

There you have it: Part One of my sex education. Let's review. I cannot remember exactly how she transmitted the key information about the bleeding into the underwear region. It had to have been some delicate phrasing; we went years (nine years, at that point) without referring to anything between anyone's legs. Or anything that ever happened or might sometime happen in that neighborhood. Even the phrases "number one" and "number two" were strictly street terminology. We used "piddle," when necessary, and that's as far as it went.

So however she put it, my memory went into the self-cleaning cycle right away, and the words are lost to history. I got the gist. Some day soon some dreadful new hygiene issue would develop in my underwear, and it was completely natural and expected, and when  it happened I should come to her for Part Two, additional information and supplies. Why this revolting development should occur, as well as where babies came from and even came out of, were details I was expected to scrounge elsewhere.

So the day it happened, I went and told Mom, and she smiled and promised to "fix me up" and went to her closet, where she had a sanitary napkin all rigged up on a brand new belt for me, and--aiming for levity--she told me to come to her with any questions because she was an expert. It was excruciating. I took the item into the bathroom with me and never asked her another thing. This was just one more horrible aspect of getting older, among many that were surfacing at the time.

The next day at school I did have a momentary lift and the sense of having joined the maturity club when I asked to be marked down for a "sponge bath" in gym, but that was it for high points. Everything else about the situation sucked. The napkin felt like a mattress before it got compressed into an inadequate narrow log, and the act of walking tended to make it migrate to the rear where it wasn't really needed, and away from where it was. I developed the tactic of nonchalantly backing into the corner of a desk, as if resting, to reposition the thing, a solution that needed repeating every thirty steps or so. Various innovations improved the situation over the years, but there was really no shining it up.

In the seventies it became fashionable to celebrate anything related to being female. Restrictive underwear was discarded, sometimes publicly, pronouns were redeployed, vibrator sales were humming, and, in some quarters, it was considered liberating to celebrate one's menses as the source of some kind of mythic goddess power. Drape yourself in purple, doll up your shrine, maybe do a taste test.

I was no prude. There's photos to prove it. I tried, but you can't polish a turd into a pearl. My friend Linda, who is a mother and in whose life there was at least some point to this disgusting event, once hiked with me on beautiful Mt. Hood. Not that it wasn't a splendid day with much to be excited about, but I was startled to see her chatting away on the trail with her hand down her pants. "What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm checking to see if I started my period," she said.

"With your finger?"

Linda pulled it out and examined it. "What," she said, "you haven't gone digital yet?"

The entire revolting process lurched and skidded to a halt a few years ago for me. It was forty years of pointlessness and laundry. Nothing changed my initial impression of it when I was nine. I guess Mom did a good job communicating after all.

The Case For Undersharing

Mackenzie Phillips is in the news again, which is always cause for alarm. Miss Phillips, by the late Papa John out of Mama Michelle via pharmaceutical insemination, was recently quoted as saying: "I can't be the only one out there. I want to be the face of consensual incest." No, no, no, honey, aim higher. Take up clarinet, how about?

I miss taboo. If "taboo" is no longer operational, why is it still taking up all that space in the dictionary, right after "tabloid?" When I think of consensual incest and try to apply it in any meaningful way to my own family, my brain screen freezes and the cursor shoots out my ear. It's enough to give anyone an ambulance-worthy case of the willies.

We never used to talk about any of this. In my family we were expected to steer clear of a number of conversational potholes; they were well-flagged by the furrowed brow and the sudden uncomfortable silence, and they included anything disrespectful, anything crotchular, and anything involving fluids we produced ourselves. And whether or not I understood any of this, I learned to be a nimble navigator of the terrain at an early age. It worked for us. In fact, I have no recollection at all of ever having passed gas until I was at least sixteen. It wasn't done. Maybe in some other family, but not mine.

The facts of life were no doubt something my parents hoped I would scavenge out of the gutter on my own, but one day, Mom was clicking away on her typewriter, filling out my application for summer camp, tappety tappety tappety. And then she stopped abruptly. "Mary, do you know what menstruation is?" I did not. But something in her voice put me on alert. With a preternatural calm, she sketched out a clinically precise description of the imminent event, linked it implausibly to the ability to have children some day, and indicated this would go on for about forty years. This was disturbing not only in itself, but also because it so clearly seemed to fall into the category of things I'd thought we'd agreed, as a family, never to talk about. "Do you understand?" she finished up. I nodded quickly. The box on the form got filled in, tap tap tap. But I did not understand. The entire business sounded revolting and weird. I wondered what I needed to sign to opt out.

This apple thunked straight down from the tree. It took me years to begin to roll as far away as I have, but I still remember how nice it was in the shade.

When I first got to college, a bunch of us got together in someone's room and spun ourselves into a state of high hilarity by recalling all the dumb things we'd believed or done as kids. And then, surfing a wave of giddy nostalgia, Cindy blurted out, "remember when you were real little, and were in the bath, and you'd take a dump, and float it around the tub like a little sailboat?" The conversation skidded to a halt. You could hear the brakes squealing. Or maybe that was my roommate. There are things that, even if true, must never be said out loud.

So, no, Mackenzie. Your services as a poster child will not be required. And if we should need a face for anything, anything at all, it should be Lauren Bacall's.