When Medusa met the menstrual cup

It was a match made in heaven! (Like other marriages are!!!)

If Medusa is now asked to rank five of her favourite inventions of the recent past, the menstrual cup will easily come out on top. A decade ago Medusa had similarly been amazed by the neatness of a tampon, but had then been deterred by the price and the frequency of replacement, but this, the menstrual cup, has left a love which started at first use, and will last for as long as Medusa will have the agility to fit it in, and the need for one.

Many have written paeans to the menstrual cup (read this and this), and Medusa is longing to join their ranks, by reminding herself that most women in South Asia do not have access to the amount of water it takes to clean a menstrual cup, and definitely not the money to buy. In fact, and this Medusa learnt only this year, apart from torn rags, women use SAND, ASH, PLASTIC and Paper, due to their absorbent properties and their availability -- and here Medusa has been cribbing about her super expensive sanitary pads, available in four kinds of sizes, three kinds of thicknesses, five smells, and a million brands. Medusa heard a lot about the damage to the environment that tonnes of used sanitary napkins and their packaging make- and also just recently heard about the various ways in which rural women are encouraged to use incinerators to burn the used napkins and then to eventually use the ash as fertilizers, but incinerators are in short supply, taboos around menstruation entrenched and multifarious, and napkins difficult to come by.

Most of the month Medusa is happily oblivious of her uterus, but once it starts acting, and it has been acting up off late, it brings all kinds of pains and aches, emotions run high or low, but more than the physical discomfort which Medusa has learnt to bear with copious amount of fluids and pills at the right intervals, the logistics of it all end up being mind boggling.

Would an XL suffice or should she scout the shops of an XXL or even a XXXL? Which shop is likely to have them? How can there be only three XXXL pads in one packet? How much do they cost ? A LOT.  Should she lie down straight or sit up straight? Should she move from a supine to a standing position now or later? Can she turn to her side? Does she need to change her clothes and wash her sheets right away? Will people notice?

Will she have to go to work? Will she go out afterwards? Will those spaces have bathrooms that work? Will there be gaps between classes to change the napkins? Where will she throw them? Can she talk about her discomfort to the people around her? Will they hush her up every time she opens her mouth because, well, just because.

All of these issues haven’t been resolved with a menstrual cup, but most have. It is a one time only investment for many years to come, it completely takes care of the mess and the attendant worries, it needs to be emptied much less frequently, perhaps thrice a day, and once inserted, can more or less be forgotten about. No disposal, mere cleaning with plenty of water, some amount of dexterity with one’s own body and a ten-hourly (on average) access to a clean bathroom.

One needs to have just ONE menstrual cup, it can be washed with water and put right back in, It costs approximately 600/- online, which is one third of what Medusa spent in the past two months, between XXXL and different brands. 

So no wonder, at this ripe old age Medusa is finally waking up to the possibility of that oxymoron, “A happy period”.

For most other people who menstruate, across the world, the menstrual cup remains a near-impossibility. It’s expensive, not easily available, requires a lot of water, a clean place for using it (although for people who do not have a clean toilet at their disposal, what extra hurdle can this pose) and a complete removal of the myriad menstrual taboos that Medusa doesn’t even know about. But even for them, surely, the menstrual cup will make things a wee bit better. So if there are people distributing menstrual cups and educating people about it, you have an eager volunteer here!

In which Medusa proved the body- image theorists wrong.

So all this while, when Medusa had been asked whether she is concerned about women’s body images for her research, she had noncommittally nodded her head, thinking body image to be some sort of a subjective category of how people think of their bodies.

But she was wrong, oh so wrong. Did she know that it is not subjective at all, it is good and true science, calculable and quantifiable at the same time? No she did not.

There are several other things that she found out, in trying to understand this nebulous ‘body image’:

1.   Body image, an important concern in experimental psychology, assumes that a person (and since all the experiments in this context are always carried out on women, here, a woman) should be able to perceive her body objectively and more or less accurately as she would some inanimate object.

(Because bodies are just that- inanimate objects)

2.    Accurate perception means perception in terms of metres, centimetres, inches etc. So basically, if one can look at a book and say that this is six inches long, one should be able to say that her calf is twenty inches wide.

(So, those people who can not objectively perceive lengths etc., can not have a body image?)

3.    ‘Body image’ is usually suffixed with disturbance or problem- it is diagnosable and therefore treatable by a change in individual attitude.

(Yes of course.)

4.    There are complex experiments carried out to diagnose body image disturbance and build generalisations around them. These experiments include: having a woman measure the approximate width of her thigh/ shin/ stomach along with the lengths of a slant of light gradually reducing. Looking at distorted mirrors, or feeling up oneself in front an observer, constitute this very scientific and highly complicated experiment.

(Not something one can easily understand.)

                                                                                                                       

And there’s more, researchers have concluded that there are certain indices of body image dissatisfaction that can tell the experimented-on subject exactly how unhappy she is with her body.

They are:

∞Body image perception index:  perceived size (multiplied by) 100 / real size.

(So, if one thinks one’s waist is 36 inches while in reality it is only 34 inches, then one should be able to calculate exactly how dissatisfied she is.)

∞Body parts satisfaction scale,

∞Body image avoidance questionnaire, etc.

Hence, one could potentially have a negative or a positive body image perception rating, but in this case, both negative and positive would be negative, right? PLUS,  these highly sophisticated researchers have also concluded that almost all women suffer from body image disturbance- in terms of overestimation (i.e. they think they are bigger than they are). Some overestimate the size of certain sections of their bodies, some do so as a whole.

And this is where Medusa was confused. Because to her, the limits of her body are not necessarily limited, bounded by definite boundaries. It varies from day to day, week to week, mostly unnoticed by her. What she does know, however, is this:

If there is a stool or a chair with legs on the floor that she has to pass by, she WILL stub her toe in it.

If there is a door that she has to go through, she WILL graze her arm or her elbow on its side. And kindly note, not on both the sides, this is not about her thinking herself to be thinner than she is, instead, this is about not knowing where she ends and “inanimate” objects start. The liminal state of her hair is another case in point- its ends get caught in her bag, other bodies on her bed find themselves entangled with it, she herself pulls it on occasions, not knowing it to be her hair. She therefore walks about in the world, in an often painful haze of stubs, pricks, pulls, grazes and shoves- trying to navigate between bodies and beings.

If the body image scientists were right, then, Medusa would have thought herself to be bigger than she is, and would have always managed an area of space between the limits of her body and that of another- the spatial version of her body image perception rating: surely something the scientists could scientifically come up with?

The absence of which, coupled with the fact that Medusa DOES NOT THINK SHE IS ANY THINNER, ever (!!!!!), one must conclude, the scientists, despite their scientific experiments, must have been wrong after all.

On the bus: bodies in the wasteland.

So, there was this one man whose under-belly ( can the word be used to describe the part of the human body, or is it only to be used in sentences like :the underbelly of the society"?) was rubbing on Medusa's bicep. Medusa was trying to cringe further into her seat, but the none-too-thin man on her left sat solidly and stolidly like a rock, so cringing was difficult.

And then there was the other pelvic bone which was poking her shoulder blade. Do remember that the pelvic bone is merely a conjecture, it could have been a phone, a belt buckle, or some other hard thing.

Basically yet another day in the commute to the wasteland. And Medusa was actually thinking about the radically post-modern potentials of such a journey- where the boundaries of the bodies are dissolved, spaces breached, limits compromised.

However, she also felt a knee feeling her leg up, rhythmically. As is her wont, she thought it must be a mistake. And then it happened, again, and again, and again, at regular intervals, till there could be no doubt that this regularity was a matter of design. So she looked to her left, and saw a youngish man holding onto the rails above his head, with both hands, and humping the air in front of him.

Strange though it appeared, the actions had sound logic behind them. By humping the air he ensured that the humping motion continued down his limbs, and his knee in extension humped Medusa's leg. And of course Medusa was disgusted and was trying to figure out the most painful way to hurt, and if possible wound him, but then she saw light.

What if this man was simply carrying out the tenets of Beatriz Preciado's Contra-Sexual Manifesto? Preciado challenges naturalized notions of the body and sexuality that privilege genitals and marginalize the dildo by fetishizing it. She claims that the practitioners of dildotectonics (not an easy science), ought to consider the entire body as a dildoscape, "a living surface where dildos are inscribed and displaced."

So basically, by unleashing the potential of the entire body in as fetishized a manner as dildos are regarded, pleasure ceases to be simply genitally oriented. Isn't that what this man was doing on the bus? His knee became the medium of his pleasure, he radically altered the definition of pleasure, divorced it from reproduction and in general, treated himself to a good time.

Of course, there was the tiny detail that he did not care for Medusa's consent. So Medusa crushed his revolutionary moment, brutally, by bringing her shoes down on his toes, and watched in satisfaction his grimacing retreat.

Reading and reflecting on the fat studies reader- one

Medusa has always been fat. Ever since she can remember, visitng shoe stores and shops that sell clothes have always been the stuff that nightmares are made of. While the polite Marwari shopkeepers would tell her parents that since “baby is healthy, she needs a size bigger than the others of her age”, the not-so-polite Bengali ones will tell her parents that fat children need clothes that fit older kids.

As a result she always wore frocks that reached her ankles, and jeans that had to be rolled up ten times.

Shoes were something else. She remembers walking down the length and breadth of College Street with mater, looking for a pair of shoes that will fit her, and coming up with zilch. Mater screaming and shouting, humiliated by the shoe-store assistants who would either take one look at her feet and claim that they did not have her size, or try and wrestle her feet into impossibly small pairs and insist that they fit.

So, consider medusa’s amazement when she recently went back to photos of herself when she was at school. She saw a young girl who was no-fatter and no-thinner than most of her peers, a very active young girl who used to dance and debate, take part in every damn thing that happened at school, found the time to study and fall in love repeatedly, play games and often win races, and fill notebooks with gibberishes of an average teenager’s life.

So what happened? How did this active young girl make herself believe that she was the fattest of everyone she knew?

At this ripe old age, medusa has been advised by all medical practitioners, starting from the GP to the gynecologist, the endocrinologist and the dermatologist that she needs to lose weight, ASAP. The first thing that most people say to her when they meet her is either “you’ve lost so much weight” or “have you put on a bit of weight”?

But do they know of the conspiracy that they are part of, that is driven by the multi million dollar weight loss industries and pharmaceutical companies, that tend to look at fat as merely a health hazard and not a fact of life?

Have they ever heard of “Health at Every Size”? Truth be told, Medusa hadn’t either till this day, but now that she is reading the Fat Studies reader, many more such awesome things are waiting to be found out.

So, more on this, as Medusa continues to find out fascinating stuff.

bribes

these may not look like much, but these are indeed the most comfrtable pairs of shoes that medusa has ever worn, or owned.

when younger, medusa heard/ read stories about children being bribed with promises and gifts so that they fare better at school etc. thank goodness medusa's parents never tried such tactics, not that it would have mattered, or that anything could have shaken the procastinator inside her.

however, at this ripe old age of 27, medusa seems to have arrived at her childhood and prenthood.

she bought herself these somewhat expensive shoes with the express intention of bribing herself to take care of her feet and otherwise ageing skin and body.

needless to say, she failed.