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.

My body, your body, and the availability of it.

So Medusa was negotiating the crowds and the buses, in front of the busiest railway station of them all. She wasn't looking forward to the long walk home- at a time when everyone was getting out of Calcutta she was trying to walk in, and hence going to be faced with masses of humanity, but still the prospect of the walk made her feel virtuous, because as usual, she had not been exercising, like she ought to, for the benefit of the self and research project.

As she was about to cross the road, a stray hand grabbed her left breast, and then let go. Medusa could not turn around fast enough to conclusively ascertain which balding man it was, but she let out a snarling "fucker" and wondered whether to lash out at the nearest guy, but then decided against it. Instead she crossed the road, hugged one side of the bridge and inched her way forward, thinking about the stray hand.

Its not like she was shocked and exceptionally upset, she was pissed, and also surprised. It had been couple of weeks since she was groped last, and she had managed to not have the thought of being groped upper most in her mind. And also, she was wearing a salwar kameez with a dupatta and the hand did manage to negotiate the dupatta. So much for dressing modestly, appropriately. She was thinking about the dexterity of that stray hand- when did those pair of eyes spot her, when did the hand decide to make a dash for it, and where did the pleasure go to, the loins? If yes, did the man then proceed with an erection? If yes, how long did it last? Longer than the contact with the unknown woman's body, surely?

And then some guy passing her from the opposite side, hit her so hard, she cried out in pain. The small voice in her head chastised her, for once again foolishly walking in the crowd, when she could have easily gotten into a bus. But what about the time when Medusa and her friend were walking on the empty-ish road in front of the university, and a biker hit her friend really hard and zoomed away? Where was the crowd then? And what is the pleasure that people get from hitting unknown women, is it the same pleasure that one gets from grabbing the breast and the bum? Or is it something else? After this pleasure, do the men gloat for the rest of the journey, or do they promptly forget about it, and look for the next person to hit?

Idle questions all. 

what do fucking fitness advice columnists know?

Now, everyone knows that Medusa is addicted to women's magazines, and she justifies her daily devouring them in the name of archival research.
what everyone might not know is, medusa also believes in them. every trick that will make one lose weight, or make one's skin glow or turn the frizzy mess on her head into soft and alluring curls, medusa believes. the emphasis in the previous sentence however, is on the word "trick". anything that requires hard work or repetition, medusa steers clear of. after all, reiteration has produced gender, medusa can't possibly take on something as powerful as that! what attracts her are the quick fixes, and easy DIYs.
so, there was this piece in the magazine today, called "climbing workout". which basically promises that climbing up and down stairs is the best form of workout one can have, and that running up the stairs can make one lose 1000 cal in an hour!
medusa quickly did some mental math and lured by the promises of a non-bulging belly, forgot all her pledges to the fat pride movement (fat pride is only present in capitalist countries after all- she told herself, us below poverty line losers have to deal with other more "real" stuff) and put on her walking shoes.
yes she does have them, two pairs, and walking music too.
having thus prepared herslef she climbed 54 steps down, and climbed 54 up, and 54 down again and then 54 up again.
and then she came indoors and lay on the floor panting for dear life.
what do these fucking advice columnists know? do they know that it is impossible to run up stairs, and that to do so for one full hour is bloody unimaginable. and that it is better to cuddle up to a person with some flab, that the stick thin insects that must be dying from a lack of calories in their systems.
fat pride, here we come!

trendsetter medusa!

Did y0u, dear readers know, how well versed Medusa is in the fashions of the years to come? in fact, so well advanced she is in matters of fashion-to-be, that during the moments of trendsetting, her fellows consider her to be a mad hatter, a kind of a modern day mohamed-bin-tughlaq, visionary, yet misunderstood.
anyway, to prove that medusa is not bullshitting as usual, she will present her case point by point.

Point one: The curious case of the pants with their crotch at their knees


Everyone knows what Medusa is talking about, because everyone has either owned/ worn/ or at least seen someone wear them- they are Harem pants!

But when in the 11th std., in the year 1998-99, Medusa used to wear a pair of black and white striped ones to college, her pater and her sister used to cringe at the mere sight of it, begging her to change into something more suitable, and not quite baggy. being the visionary that she is, medusa never obliged, and ten years down the line, the same sister is now begging for Harem pants!

does medusa gloat? no she doesn't, because her revolutionary vision doesn't stop with this single instance!

Point two: The case of the black nail polish!


When in college, Medusa and the one who taught her to smoke, discovered the joys of black nail polish- and how did the revolutionary left-leaning intellectuals inhabiting the canteen make fun of them? reared on safe browns and pale pinks, black was beyond their imaginary, it destabilized the norms of beauty and desirablity- and what more proof of the historicity of such norms, than the fact that black nail polish is now, a decade later, flaunted by the sexiest heroines ever?


Point three: CHICK LIT!


So, while in M Phil, she had to explain to the omniscient supervisor of hers what chick lit meant, and how there was an Indian version of it that she was interested in looking at.
Now in her Ph D, everyone is either working on it, has read one or the other, and in some cases, is even writing it! Didn't Medusa know that angst over love, fat and shopping will eventually bring in even those with the unbearable lightness of being?

So, what do the above mentioned three things prove?
Not merely that Medusa is ahead of her time, but that for their own good, the people of the world should recognize her as such, not simply to boost her ego, but also to prepare themselves for the years and fashion to come.

Hot tip for the next decade: waist chain!

slight nagging thought brought on by the statistician: the gap between medusa's pioneering acts of fashion and when the rest of the world finally catches up with her seems to be decreasing. form 13 years to 10, and in the case of chick lit- only 3. if this continues, will medusa one day follow fashion trends and not set them?

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.

count the number of bangles in medusa's collection while she goes and wrestles the heat!

Nail polish of the week

Thanks to complete and utter joblessness and acute, all-consuming boredom, medusa has fashioned a new weekly blog post which promises to consist of the outrageous colour that medusa and her sister wear on their nails that week.
So here you are, dear reader, the nail polish of the week:

A lot, and medusa means A LOT, of people ask medusa, now that she's rich and still living off her parents, what does she do with her money? How come she has no savings, no bank account and no properties? In the following few lines, medusa attempts to offer a few explanations.
See, the primitive place where she works, medusa gets paid in cash in a brown envelop, in cash. she brings it home, all 159 kms, and puts it on the top shelf of her parents' almirah. then, as and when she needs money, she takes money out of that envelop.
and buys:


or:
or:
untill the envelop is empty and its time for the next pay envelop.

fat flat feet

its time to be brutal with herself.
for the past six weeks, which have been the busiest in her life, alternating between the industrial wasteland and weddings, either starving or over eating delicious fatty food, medusa has been diligently trying to shop for the perfect pair of shoes. actually, the perfect couple of pairs. one has to keep her feet covered (given the sticky nature of the red, heavy dust that settles over everything in the industrial wasteland) and the other has to make her feet look elegant, to go with the very expensive sarees she was to be wearing at the wedding.
in the process, she has bought four pairs in the last four weeks, and tried on several of the sixteen pairs she brought back with her from the university. but each one of them, with the sole exception of the oshos, hurt her feet.


The very expensive woodlands floaters hurt both her little toes, the almost as expensive bata sneakers hurt her big toes, some weird colour comes off everytime she tries to wear the cheap khadims slippers, and the very cheap bata slippers that she bought from the men's section hurt the top of her feet. they were also responsible for her spraining her ankle the day before the grand wedding reception party of her cousin, in which medusa had to lug a 6kg heavy saree with a sprained ankle. the very pretty slippers that kaatib gifted, alas do not fit her anymore. and today, medusa went out and bought yet another pair, before hitting the weighing machine near the shoe shop.
and that's when the realization hit. the shoe shops haven't all become more insensitive to bigger women, they continue to be as insensitive as they used to be, medusa has only gotten bigger. her feet have gotten bulkier, the ankles now resemble those of a football player- so much so that her pretty anklets now resemble ankle-cuffs. her cheeks have been bugling for quite sometime, but medusa thought that was because her eyes had been sinking inwards, and she has taken to really filling out all her clothes, in fact filling them so much that bits and pieces, more like lumps and bumps, have started sticking out.

with great sadness medusa announces that she's try to lose weight, from tomorrow.

this hopefully wiil be the first in what proposes to be medusa's maiden (couldn't resist the alliteration eh? ) venture into food blogging. the reason: since reading about food is so delightful, couldn't it be equally awesome to write it too?
kidding! medusa likes to take pictures of food, and relive moments of gastro-visual delight, an what better way to put it up on the blog?
this is a shot of biscuits piled up in one of the back lanes of New Market, the place medusa goes to burn money.
some thoughts on biscuits: medusa doesn't like them, unless they are covered in/ filled with chocolate or some salty-spicy mixture that rubs against the upper palate and after 500gms or so, causes medusa to wince with every bite. medusa just doesn't get the whole coffee/tea +biscuit in the morning deal. medusa's family acts as if they'd get heart attacks unless medusa takes a bite of some tasteless marie biscuit and burn the tip of her tongue sipping some heavily sugared tea.
medusa insists, what is the big deal? why is it difficult to wake up/ take a crap/ speak/ and even at times, brush, without the tea and biscuit. there is something seriously warped in the socialization of these people whose parents did not think twice about getting them addicted to such warm beverages while morally scoffing at far more exciting counterparts like a fag/ booze.

wishes

If wishes were horses....
Medusa doesn't know this end.
What she does know, however, is that she wishes for a food blog. especially after a daily diet of TFP and Piko, she also wants to do the kind of service to the world of gluttons/ food aficionados that these wonderful women do day after day.
But, medusa lacks two very important things:
1) A camera
2) Nice looking food to take photos of.
However, when Medusa goes to her favourite restaurant in hyderabad, and eats her favourite food she borrows crumbs' phone and takes a photo.
Her favourite food at this restaurant is pepper chicken, and it looks like this

chicklitorama-extravganza-bonanza

what our responsible lecturer/researcher has been up to lately.

new life

its been a month since medusa stopped being a full-time student and made the transition into part-time student/ full-time teacher hood.

ewwww!!!! the very thought of it makes her want to throw up.

thankfully in the last two weeks, she has gone to college exactly four days, long live highly paid and poorly managed government service. but the very very long distance that she has to travel (three and a half hours each way) make up for the ridiculously great amount she is being paid.

but is it worth it? does she really want to give up the pretenses of intellectualism, spend hours chatting with like minded and equally jobless individuals, and actually become responsible for the production of knowledge in innocent minds?

the more she thinks about this, the more scary it seems.

more on the trials of medusa in this far away land, tomorrow.

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.