Being on the rag again, I decided to sacrifice a pad to science and find out whether, in fact, you do only lose 8 dainty tablespoons of blood.

Pad used: Whisper Wings regular.
# of above already overflowed this month: 3

I coloured some water with grape juice and used a dessert spoon, since I don’t have a tablespoon. There are 1.25 dessert spoons to the tablespoon. The pad absorbed 10 dessert spoons before it overflowed. That’s 8 tablespoons.

So, if the 8 tbsp estimate were correct, the average woman could get through the average period on one average pad.

HA…HAHAH…HAHAHAHA… HAHA…HA… (insert infinite loop here)

Back home, I didn’t have this problem because I used tampons all the time, even at night. But the choice of tampons here is very limited, and the ones available tend to fluff, which seems unhygienic. I also worry about using them for hours on end in the tropics, since it’s easier to catch infections in the heat and humidity here, so I’m too chicken to use them at night. As for overnight pads, they feel like fucking diapers — I don’t see why any grown woman should have to wear such a thing.

Thais apparently use menstrual cups, which are rubber containers you shove up there, and…yeah. I think I’d need Lolrus’s bukkit.

On the upside, I hardly had any downswings in mood this month. But I was busy just before my period, there was the good news of finding the new flat, and I ate chocolate, so all of that might have contributed.

Anyway, I can has Nobel prize for biology now?

Well, that was fun. Three days of biochemically induced depression, paranoia and molehills looking like mountains. That was some of the worst pre-menstrual mood fuckery I’ve ever had. Bad enough to be scary. When it comes in that intensity, I can’t remember what normal feels like. I remembered reading that estrogen and serotonin are somehow related, so I did a bit of searching.

I found this article, which explains that in order to produce serotonin (the happy chemical), the brain needs estrogen — serotinin needs estrogen for its metabolisation in the brain. The pre-menstrual drop in estrogen therefore lowers serotonin levels. It also causes the politely termed “cognitive changes” women experience before their periods (you know, when you lose 100 or so IQ points and feel like the guy in “Flowers for Algernon” for a day or two).

But why was this month particularly bad? My best guess is that it had to do with weight. I lost a couple of kilos when I had my tooth out (it was a very big tooth…). Not only does estrogen help create fat, fat creates estrogen. So I’m guessing that I made less estrogen this month. However, I don’t exactly want to put the weight back on again. I mean, for the first time since I was 17, the gap between my thighs goes all the way up. Which makes me happy in a way that has nothing to do with serotonin and everything to do with socially-programmed vanity.

Another possible factor might be that because I was feeling delicate, I wasn’t doing my morning tai chi. I don’t know if tai chi affects serotonin, but I’ve found it lifts my mood (of course, just going for a walk in the park in the comparatively fresh morning air might have the same effect). I’m now tai chi-ing again, so I’m going to see whether — if I can keep the weight off this month — things are any different mood-wise next month.

If not, I think I’ll just go to the doctor and say, here, I have this problem, give me something I can take for a couple of days each month to fix it.

N.B. The original studies on estrogen and serotonin were done in the ’90s. In 2005, we find a paper whose abstract states that the interplay between the two is still not fully elucidated. All I can say is, elucidate! Elucidate, and don’t spare the horses.

I think I may have grumbled in this blog, once or twice, about being a woman — the fact that I’m not really into it and never have been. I don’t actually want to be a man — I’m no Buck Angel — but I can’t pretend that I’m really at home with either the female body or the feminine gender. I think most of my discomfort is socially derived, not something intrinsic that I’d have felt no matter what society I was born in. As a child I really did wish I was a boy. I certainly looked to be accepted by the boys and men I met more than by the girls and women, and was more willing to alter myself to gain male acceptance than female. Now that I know men a little better, I know I don’t want to be one. They have their own problems, and their world doesn’t particularly appeal to me. But my eyes did prick up when I happened across this thing called “masculine protest“, a concept described by pioneering psychologist Alfred Adler, who wrote: “When a girl imagines that she can change into a boy, it is because the feminine role has not been presented to her as the equal of the masculine role. She revolts against what she believes to be a permanent perspective of inferiority for her.” He says that this is what Freudians term the castration complex. I think Adler’s explanation makes more sense than Freud’s.

He writes of tomboys: “We can understand their preference for manliness when we realise that the striving for superiority is more concerned with the meaning we attach to activities than with the activities themselves.” I think you could almost call it a commodity fetishisation of activity: The thought that “I will use this product and therefore become like the incredibly cool, happy, superior people in the advertisements for said product” is related, I think, to the thought that “I will do what the guys are doing and therefore I will become one of them and be entirely accepted into their world.” Of course, what the guys are doing may just be more fun, full stop, or more profitable; but I don’t think that’s the whole story in all cases.

The book in which Adler describes his theory is called Understanding Human Nature. From what I’ve read of it on Amazon, it’s a little dated (it was published in 1927), but I think the points it makes about the female condition are still valid. Let’s not pretend that our culture has started valuing women. It values pretty girls and women who operate efficiently in the male world. It does not value the mother role, which exists outside these categories, and this, to me, is the most blatant sign that it does not value women.

A woman has much the same brain and the same egotistical drives as a man. She, too, wants to be a success. She wants status. If her biological femaleness is an impediment to those things, no one should be surprised if she dislikes it and disdains — even fears — activities associated with femininity (which may, from the commodity fetish angle, “turn her into” a woman if she engages in them.) I think I will have to buy Adler’s book, or at least give it a good going over in Kino.

Once in a while, you find something fascinating in the newspaper:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/23/europe/virgins.php