The Scottish Parliament just voted (unanimously) to make tampons and other period products available for free to those too broke to pay for them. It’s a big victory for the campaign against “period poverty.” Now no one in Scotland will have to miss school or work because they can’t afford sanitary products.
Naturally, the fellows in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit have reacted to the news with their customary good sense.
“Sanitary products” are free, EXCEPT THEY’RE PAID FOR WITH MEN’S TAX DOLLARS, blared one headline in the subreddit. And the assembled MEN waxed furious about this terrible new financial burden. (The cost of the program is estimated to be roughly £8.7 million a year, or less than £2 for every inhabitant of Scotland.)
“Every time I see the word free I know it means some man or group of men are paying for it,” complained one commenter.
“Guys in Scotland, including bachelors, asexuals and homosexuals, are going to be paying for vaginas that they dont care about, regardless of their financial status,” charged another.
“The only thing free for men, is dying,” still another commenter moaned.
Several MGTOW Redditors fantasized about ways to sabotage the program. Wrote not_a_beleiber:
If I was Scottish, I’d buy a woman’s pant suit, put it on, then demand free hygine products. Increase the cost, the commentary, and hence the regulation on this.
“No need,” replied Miserable-Lemon.
If I was scottish I’d immediately open a drug store that only offers feminine products. You hand them out like candy, charge like 50$ a pop to the government and buy as much stock as you can store it. You’ll make a hundred times your investment on a monthly basis
(In fact, the products aren’t going to be available at stores bur rather distributed by schools and other public facilities.)
The-Rover-666 demonstrated his keen grasp of period products and their use, writing “[s]o their whymin are that smelly they had to give them free…”
Replied Legs2Big:
They’ve always spent so much of their time hiding their true appearance from a young age, they act like their lives depends on it.
What that has to do with sanitary products is anyone’s guess.
Non-w0ke offered this perplexing political program:
Because single moms are pure toxic cancer for children it makes sense to let those independent to go their own way and provide free stuff only to those who are willing to care for children. It includes a stress free home, food, housing, full family and adequate attention.
Cant provide for a kid? Fuck off, buy your own tampons.
What any of this has to do with sanitary products is also anyone’s guess.
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To note, to anybody, if you really have blood in your urine, consider going to see a doctor. May be a problem with your kidneys or your bladder, and it must not be taken lightly.
This is definitely our seagull eating 300 year old engineer friend. I remember last time he was here whinging about periods, he got a sad from this gif
@ dumbass
I’ll let my marine husband know he doesn’t actually want to be around me and eat my pussy out with as much gusto as he normally does. The blood has never bothered him. He’s tried to do that while i was bleeding. I’m sorry your so sad in your life and you can’t handle a little blood because your so pathetically weak lol. But that’s for the good laugh before going to bed. Have fun going your own way and continuing to be so lonely you spend a holiday about togetherness on a feminist blog where no one likes you and you obviously hate being here. So sad and so pathetic. Good luck with that sad little life little man.
Sure would hate for Depletionist to get a sad boner from bloody women.
I think we should all just talk about periods in details for all of those here who have them and watch him explode. It’s really funny. He’s like a 5 year old that doesn’t want to touch a worm to put on a hook.
My periods are usually pretty light and short, but boy do I get some terrible cramps and period shits!
@Wwth
The period shits are probably one of the worst things. I use to not have the bad cramps cause the birth control, but those will probably come back when I get my birth control removed to start trying to have a baby. That will be fun. Oh and the mind splitting migraines. My boobs swell up like balloons as well
My friend once got out of a pool where she’d been swimming for an hour when her period started. The water pressure had been holding everything in, but as soon as she got out, the pinata burst (so to speak) and goo slid down both inner thighs. It was a long walk to her towel.
To her surprise, three beta orbiters offered her diamond rings and everybody applauded! Then they threw her a parade, with uterus balloons and floats glorifying the endometrium.
I don’t know why Depletionist is acting so shocked about people being “uncivilized”. It’s just locker room talk. I’ve been told that disgusting things can’t be held accountable when they’re locker room talk.
(And personally, while I won’t bother about describing menstrual discharge, I find it much preferable to talking about sexual assault.)
Eesh, some people are just too sensitive and easily offended. I might even say hysterical.
Victorious Parasol says:
My go-to term for heavy days is “panty massacre.” Said with pride, of course.
@The Depletionist
That’s a…very specific fantasy. Also, aren’t you the one who just argued to keep women from working while menstruating? Can you at least make up your mind?
You can leave whenever you want. I think I speak for all of us when I say we don’t want you around us.
Are you a believer in the “zombifying vagina goo” theory? Also, what the hell are ideological viruses?
@Penny Psmith
Same here. I really don’t have any issues around description of menstruation, it’s a completely natural process and Mr. Depletionist is being very unreasonable. He also seems to be projecting a lot of insecurities and acting with the assumption that women want him around.
SRLO? Is that you?
Oh hey, other period-havers – anyone else gets sore thighs? Like, for me, I don’t really get bad stomach cramps or anything like that usually, but early on my period my quad area always feels sore (I’m guessing those are connected to the stomach muscles somehow, so get affected), and that’s annoying as hell. There’ve been a couple of times when I actually had a hard time falling asleep at night because my thighs wouldn’t let me get comfortable.
Don’t know about other miggies, but you’re fucking weird.
Not in the good way, either.
@Buttercup, your take on lion-sleeps-tonight on the other page made me laugh out loud and has visibly brightened my work-day, ta 🙂
oh, and to the infantile troll – whatever you do don’t start thinking about all the urine constantly present in your bladder, the faeces in your large intestine, the chyme in your stomach, the mucus in your mouth and nose, the bile in your gallbladder or the vastly more unpleasant bile in your brain.
Ignorance of biology I can understand – what’s been weirding me out about Depletionist is that for his arguments to make any sense at all, he has to believe that menstruation is a *moral* fault – he seems to think that we do it on purpose just to be difficult (or as an excuse to get our hands on those sweet sweet cardboard tubes and paper products); or possibly he believes it’s *caused* by promiscuity, which… is sort of the reverse of how it works?
Is he also furious that public washroom stalls provide toilet paper? I mean, even if I cared absolutely nothing for other people, on a purely selfish level I’d still be in favour of any policy that makes it easier for everybody to keep themselves clean, because I have to be around them.
(reading further) OK, so he seems to be angry as us for menstruation/other biological stuff, but *also* angry at us for doing anything to clean it up, because that’s deceiving men? There are medieval ascetics who’d take a look at this one and tell him he needs to chill (at the least the desert fathers, afaik, *did* go their own way).
@Vicky P, @Alan Robertshaw:
Someone also did a Once In a Lifetime fanvid for one of the plot threads in the Twin Peaks revival a few years ago:
https://youtu.be/QpKhjc2p3_w
@Moon Custafer
That’s something he had in common with Semen_Retention_Lieutenant_Officer, who believed that menstruation was equivalent to masturbation and therefore sinful to him, and somehow could be shut off through spiritual practices. I don’t think they’re the same person because the writing styles are different, but I’ve seen that view before.
The thing that sticks out most about him is how he doesn’t seem to realize he’s the joke. He just keeps coming back and getting mocked each time. I feel like he thinks he’s dealing crushing blows to teh womz when really he’s just a whiny boy getting his ass handed to him over and over again.
Speaking of tampons … ask a military nurse (such as Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, writer of The Healer’s War, who served a year in Vietnam) about how tampons would get, ahem, repurposed by their fellow (male) soldiers. Apparently the tampons issued to women in the US Army were also the perfect size for cleaning out the barrels of rifles. They even had that handy string on the end for easy retrieval on those deep-dive cleanings! So the tampons got nicked a lot by the men, which annoyed the women to no end.
There’s an odd sort of symmetry at work here, given that modern menstrual products (particularly pads) were developed around the time of World War I, when nurses noticed how efficient cellulose was at absorbing blood. It didn’t take long for us to get menstrual pads made from surplus high-absorption war bandages, first available in 1918. (Is this where MGTOWs claim we’re stealing from men? Note to any MGTOWs: Please look up “surplus” and use it correctly in a sentence that demonstrates you have understood the definition.)
@ Vicky P
Yup.
Tampons were also carried in med-kits during the Vietnam War (and apparently even in the Gulf Wars). The theory was that they were handy for plugging bullet wounds. The contemporary advice though is that that’s probably not a good idea. But we have those crystal things now anyway.
This seems to be a very common belief. First, it’s in all the Abrahamic faiths: flesh as corruptible, just about anything done with it a sin. But a lot of the more techno-utopian modernists seem to have, at the very least, a loathing for part of the human condition being to be biological. Everyone whose ideal for an advanced future society is to upload into a computer, or to have robot bodies, so, most of the singularity believers in particular.
Eastern religions are not exempt, with the spiritual goal in many being to stop getting reincarnated … i.e., to stop having biological bodies. Again the needs and desires of those bodies come in for a thorough lambasting.
There seems to be a widespread desire to somehow become, variously through religious or scientific means, beings of pure intellect … with a problem. Without a body that had needs, what would motivate this pure intellect?
My own suspicion is that if we came across super-advanced aliens tomorrow, they’d look biological. They might well have artificial, designed bodies, but I expect these would resemble biology far more than they do our typical machines. They would likely be cyborgs, but it would also likely be the case that where the technology ended and the biology began would not be a sharp, easily seen demarcation line. No clunky robot bodies, or clunky machine parts like on Star Trek’s Borg sticking out. Not “pure energy” or purely living inside computers either.
One thing to consider is: what makes something seem “like biology” rather than “like a machine” to us? Biology is not made of fundamentally different stuff. It’s built with the same chemical elements. It has recognizable mechanical parts, such as joints; the heart is a pump. It’s just … squishy and gooey, with lots of fluids inside, can heal but also become ill, and isn’t made mostly of rigid, metal parts.
Much of this is a function of the size of the smallest moving parts of specific function. We are not yet very good at making parts much smaller than millimeters at scale, except for etched-on circuit elements which necessarily are parts of much larger rigid objects, so, not moving parts. Once we are (nanotechnology), we’ll be building with the smallest available components: atoms themselves. The results will have smallest meaningfully functional moving parts of sizes comparable to proteins, which are biology’s smallest such parts. And the macro-scale appearance of something built of such components will likely be similar: squishy and gooey, with lots of fluids inside as a lot of nanoscale stuff will likely work most efficiently in solution rather than in air or in the solid state. Maybe some alternate methods relying more heavily on surface catalysis and stuff could work in air rather than water, but the results still wouldn’t look like traditional machines with large moving parts; more like bark, cork, sponge, spiderwebs, fungus, and other such things of biological origin.
Many more of biology’s traits result from sheer system size and complexity. To manufacture machines with Avogadro’s numbers of moving parts pretty much requires them to grow or to make each other rather than be hand-built by humans or even manufactured on macro scale assembly lines. The more moving parts, the sooner something fails, too, so unless you want your future-widget to need fixing every ten minutes it will need to be able to fix itself, at least up to a point. More generally, smaller moving parts are more vulnerable if cut or impacted by fixed-size objects in the world, so the thing will have to be able to tolerate some level of damage and still function. It will need resiliency, rather than the brittleness of most typical modern machines, through redundancy and distributed functionality. It will be most useful if it can obtain energy and raw materials for self-repair autonomously, as well. So an advanced whatsit can be expected to be a robot that looks biological, can be injured and heal, and even seeks out and eats some kind of food … sounds a lot like it will be more like an animal than a crane-arm or a factory machine.
This applies especially to any artificial “robot” bodies. They might be ground-up redesigns but they will probably be, in effect, animal bodies rather than “machines-as-we-know-them”. And that means they will eat, excrete, leak various fluids at times, and all of that messy biological stuff. Where does the cyb end and the org begin in these cyborgs? They’ll just be better animals than we are, with enhanced senses and cognition, built in wi-fi, and greater resiliency, plus likely some way to download the mind for backup purposes and to load into a fresh body when needed.
We won’t look more like our tech. Our tech will look more like us, and the other animals, plants, and fungi with which we share this planet. Our factories and shipping infrastructure will look like an ecosystem, extracting and distributing elements around. The only major departure relates to that last bit of what non-biological machines look like, “rigid and metallic”. Well, biology has plenty of rigid parts: bones, exoskeleton plates, tree heartwood for bigger, thicker trees. It just doesn’t lavishly employ metals in bulk.
There are two reasons for this. For one, to lavishly employ metals in bulk you need a dense source, like an ore body. These are scattered haphazardly about the planet. Most places lack dense iron ore. Any life form that became dependent on such an ore body to supply a key nutrient would be limited to a very small, patchy habitat and would be very vulnerable. So this has been selected against. Life has made do with trace quantities of things like iron, rather than bulk amounts, sufficient to build macro parts with.
The other reason is that often, with advanced control over placement of atoms, you can do better for many applications. Hair has more tensile strength than steel. Bone is about as good as concrete for compression strength. (And chemically not even all that different: both use predominantly calcium and carbon.) The major uses for metals are where density is desired (kinetic weapon projectiles, radiation shielding, armor including against accidental crashes as well as weapons) and where heat tolerance is desired (furnaces, aerospace applications). Perhaps, if metals were sufficiently abundant, life would have invented metal armor and nitrocellulose-propelled bullet weapons eventually, but it wouldn’t have likely flown itself to the moon.
The one area of advanced tech that might look especially cyborgish, besides weapons, is likely aerospace tech, and high energy physics stuff (whether power reactors or for other purposes). There we might see metals and other exotic materials employed to tolerate extremes of temperature (hot reactor, cold cryogenic pipes to cool the magnets, reentry plasma) and extremes of pressure (vacuum). Even then, nonmetallic materials will likely predominate (shuttle tile isn’t metal, precisely because all known metals melt at temperatures that high).
One more thing: I would not expect humanoid robots to predominate, even in the nearer future. Robots suited to versatile functions on land will resemble spiders; in the air, balloons and birds with retractable dangling tentacles; in the water, squid and jellyfish; and in space, urchin and anemone like things with the ability to grip and sometimes harpoon to surfaces for locomotion, plus gas thrusters for maneuvering in open space. The most familiar-looking machine-like one might resemble a bundle of Canadarms growing out of some central nucleus rolling over the surface of a shuttle or an asteroid before leaping off and jetting itself around in space, and even that will someday also be able to graze on asteroidal materials to repair itself, as well as to unfold a big disk of photovoltaics for energy when it needs a recharge.
So, our troll who dislikes biology a great deal is not much going to like the future. Right now we might actually be at “peak sterility” in terms of how much of a typical person’s environment is full of right angles, smooth surfaces, and machinelike machines. Our origins were the forests and floodplains and our destination is likely to be even more jungle-like, or reef-like. Perhaps the most technologically advanced world ever depicted in science fiction was not Coruscant, the glittering city-world from several Star Wars films, but Pandora, the jungle in Avatar. The people there, after all, had “bones of carbon-fiber” and other advanced materials in their bodies, plus a neural link that allowed them to upload and reincarnate, as well as share knowledge and employ a variety of animals as tools and vehicles. The only thing really odd was the absence of wireless communications in all of this, but perhaps that gets abandoned as a security risk, to limit the ability of viral software to infect people and tools without physical contact with a source of infection. Quarantining a virus gets a lot harder if it can spread through the air, as we’ve all noticed this past year.
@ surplus
There was a scripted, but not filmed, scene in the first Terminator film where the T-800 eats a Mars Bar, complete with wrapper still on, so as to keep its organic parts functioning.
In the third Terminator film you can see the eponymous cyborg buy some Austrian Manner-Schnitten chocolate wafers.
http://www.factfiend.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Mannen-700×424.png
Thanks, Surplus – That was hugely thought provoking.
I think a major reason we don’t have metal skeletons is that metals and most other super hard substances are chemically difficult to process. Most metals and their alloys aren’t that hard anyway, and as you noted, many of them require elements that aren’t super common. Plus, as you said, there’s limited use for macroscale rigid parts in machines made of nanocomponents.
There’s a few material options that have been accessible and worthwhile for biological evolution when building hard body parts. These include certain proteins (ceratin, chitin, maybe others), carbohydrate polymers (cellulose, lignin, some others) and minerals (calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate, in rare cases some iron-based mineral).
Meanwhile, early human hard material development has been first focused on physically processing rock minerals and abovementioned plant and animal body parts, then chemically and physically processing metals, then chemically and physically processing hydrocarbons.
@The Depletionist, you do notice that working women don’t take a week out of every month off from work, right?
Because we don’t just stay home on our periods. We keep working like reasonable, responsible, self sufficient adults.
Also, the majority of people with periods don’t free bleed. That’s the whole point of free and low cost menstrual products – so you don’t have to free bleed. It also allows us to walk around and “covertly” menstruate around you. You probably don’t notice all the people currently menstruating that you interact with on a daily basis (when we’re not in the midst of a global pandemic).
And unless a person is willing to deal with the side effects of hormonal birth control (and is lucky), it’s not actually possible to control whether or not they have a period.
On the topic of makeup, I actually know few cis women who wear daily makeup. And none of the ones who wear makeup wear a “full face”. Usually it’s just some eyeliner, some lipstick or some tinted moisturizer. But almost all the cis women I know are in long term relationships. And they are, in all but one case, either an equal or the main earner in their partnership.
So, with a rather small sample size, I see no correlation between makeup and relationship status. Nor do I see a correlation between the ability to menstruate and earning potential.
@Lumipuma
Silicates too. Know some sea creatures use those – their “skeletons” are very beautiful.