Is Eliminating Periods the Best We Can Offer?
Some big assumptions about what needs fixing about women
Next weekend, I’ll be speaking at the 2022 Effective Altruism for Christians conference. The whole thing is online, and my panel is “Is EA too utilitarian for Christians?” You can find more details and register here.
I call this newsletter Other Feminisms for two reasons: I want it to be a fruitful conversation space for people who feel like they don’t fit naturally into mainstream feminism. And, a little more specifically, I’m interested in examples of where a problem women encounter is acknowledged, but we’re offered a bad solution to it.
The Atlantic had an article a few years ago about chemically eliminating periods, which I feel falls into that second category.
The core claim made by Sophia Yen, a pediatrics professor at Stanford Medical School, is that periods are for pregnancy, and if you’re avoiding conception, a menstrual cycle is only a handicap.
Yen sees a future in which many more people know they can opt out, and do—in which no one menstruates unless they’re within two years of their first period or are trying to get pregnant. “In my ideal world, it would be about 28 periods over the course of a lifetime,” she said. Right now, that figure is in the hundreds. For Yen, a mother of two daughters—a 10-year-old who hasn’t gotten her period and a 13-year-old who has—that rebalancing would place her own children on a more level playing field with boys. Without periods, she says, they won’t miss two days of school or work each month, or get cramps during the SAT or swim meets, or deal with any of the other related stresses. “I want them to be competitive against those who don’t have uteruses,” Yen said. “Teenage years are so turbulent and horrific as is. I don’t want them to suffer unnecessarily—and I can alleviate this for my child.”
Difficult menstrual periods are a heavy burden for many women (not least because the menstrual cycle is under-researched). Already, hormonal contraception is offered as a fix for problems like irregular periods, heavy bleeding, or intense pain.
Treating the symptoms without being curious about the underlying problem can lead to greater difficulties down the line. The pill can cloak medical issues like PCOS or endometriosis for a while, but time spent simply treating symptoms with no follow-up care is time that pushes back a diagnosis and treatment of the real issue. (The median wait from symptoms to diagnosis of endometriosis is around seven years).
More than that, I’m troubled by the way that Yen’s perspective treats being a woman as too much of a disadvantage to tolerate. It’s true, the world tends to be built around a male default, and, in the short run, it can be helpful to have ways to better fit that mold. But, in the long term, it concedes too much to ask women to be better men.
And when it comes to Yen’s examples in particular, I’m troubled by the drive to eliminate interruptions; to make sure that we can always be going full tilt. I don’t want to help women “catch up” by eliminating the parts of our life that call for a pause. I want to work to build a gentler society that accommodates a range of reasons people can’t (and shouldn’t) go 24/7.
As I wrote in a piece on snow days and slack for Breaking Ground:
The enforced pause of a snow day is celebratory, but it’s also a stress test of our ability to weather the interruptions that are not shared. If our society can’t handle a snow day, then how will employers be prepared to be compassionate to the worker who has a burst pipe or a child with the flu? If the loss of a day’s wages sends a family spiraling into poverty, we have already left them too close to the brink. Their lack of breathing room was already suffocating them.
Hey Leah! I'm so grateful to you for writing about these topics- discussions around periods, the reality of embodiment, and culture change are beyond welcome. I see this week's conversation so clearly in my experience as an athlete, prompted perhaps by Sophia Yen's reference to cramps during "the SAT or swim meets." I ran Div. 1 cross country and track in college, and I spent well over 8 years of my life wishing ~not~ to have a period (and being jealous of the "simpler," faster bodies of my male teammates). Our training, racing, and academic schedules were already so demanding, and starting your cycle on the eve of a major workout or competition (or exam) felt more like a liability than a signal of strong, healthy womanhood. I remember celebrating when I skipped my cycle for a year, thinking that it said something about my fitness (which couldn't have been farther from the truth). Looking back--especially now that I'm a few years out-- consistent cycles and a few "slower days" would have likely been beneficial for all of us. Maybe we would have had fewer injuries, fewer broken bones, fewer heartaches.
Female athletes (and thinking particularly about female distance runners) are often placed on an accelerated, shortened timeline: the idea that they will peak athletically in college, at 18, 19, 20, 21 years old (unsurprisingly, this is a timeline built around men- Lauren Fleshman's letter "Dear Younger Me" states this so beautifully). If you lose your period in the quest for (short-term) greatness, so what? This culture needs shifting- and there have been a lot of hopeful developments here, especially over the last five or so years. The victories of Kiera D'Amato (who recently set the American record in the marathon at 36), Sarah Hall, Shalane Flanagan, Sara Vaughn, and so many others have proven the value of cultivating a long-term approach to women's health and athleticism. Women's bodies are amazing- especially when we allow them to be women's bodies.
Of course, there is another discussion here about the importance of valuing ourselves and our bodies for what they are, not because of what they can do (or can't do). Rooting our identity in a sport or a record or the ability to "go 24/7" is a dangerous and dehumanizing (and very tempting) thing. Maybe the vulnerabilities of our bodies are a shadow of a beautifully inefficient God, one whose time and measure of value/worth is not our own. But that's a conversation for another day. So many thanks!
Not period-related, but around the time COVID-19 vaccines became available, I was working on a production team on a film shoot with an incredibly busy schedule (6-day weeks, 12- or 14-hr days). My team's leaders gave us days or half-days off for vaccine appointments and recovery from side effects if necessary. No paperwork, no formal requests - I just let them know which days I'd booked my doses, and they arranged our team's schedule so that we could easily cover for one another getting vaccinated. This kind of improvised accommodation made me feel supported by my team leaders and coworkers, far beyond the matter of vaccines. When other health issues came up on our team (migraines, allergic reactions, doctor's appointments), we were ready to step up for one another because our team leaders set a precedent for support.