Horrible and Embarrassing "Your First Period" Party Goods
As if puberty wasn't awkward enough, this company sells party supplies for your mom to throw you a party for your first period. If your mom does this, you should be allowed to put
Wednesday, 23 May 2012
Alan Measles ( Grayson Perry )
Red moon : Short Film
Blog of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research
Blood on Screen: Red Moon
August 2nd, 2010 by Giovanna CheslerThe purpose of Red Moon, as articulated by the filmmaker Diana Fabianova in voice over, is to answer this question: “At any given time, 25% of the female population is menstruating. Invisible. Discreet. Why is this normal, biological function taboo? There must be some deeper meaning.” There are problems with this statistical framing device – 25% is an over inflated number that eliminates girls and post-menopausal women as “females”. It also glosses over females that do not menstruate because of gender transformations and amenorrhea. Outside of this statistical malfunction, there are a few other facts provided through voice over which are not supported by specific research or attributed directly to any menstrual researchers. However, beyond these slights, Red Moon has great potential to make a taboo subject approachable.
As it begins with man-on-the-street interviews, the film seems to have interest in addressing men as equally as women. Through interviews with researchers who have written about menstruation in the 80’s and 90’s, the film attends to menstrual taboo historically and highlights menstrual suppression as an issue to address within patriarchy. There is a fantastically creepy interview with Elsimar Couthino, famous for inventing Depo Provera, Norplant and for writing Is Menstruation Obsolete (the book that launched millions of suppressed periods.) In his interview Couthino believes that women should have no more than one period in her lifetime and he likens menstruation to pending death: “First of all, menstruation is incompatible with life and nature, because an animal cannot survive bleeding longer than a few minutes in the forest. Blood, the smell of blood (he sniffs) attracts the predators. This one is bleeding. She is going to die.” Fabianova comically cuts to a hooting owl, waiting for your blood.
Fabianova is critical of pill-popping mentality and finds it better to challenge the negative view of menstruation, and silence around it, rather than do away with the period altogether. While she provides some examples of solutions to painful PMS (a belly dancing class delights, for example) the film does not directly address dysmenorrhea and severe menstrual challenges which have become justification for suppression in the first place. It does however, remind menstruators on hormonal birth control that the blood you see is a fake-period.
In fellow Re:Cycling blogger Chris Bobel’s recently released book New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation, she focuses on the type of menstrual activist stylings akin to Red Moon. In short, feminist spiritualism, according to Bobel, is a narrowly focused mode of menstrual positivism that essentializes the idea of womanhood through menstruation. The movement typically appeals to middle class white women and identifies menstrual change through the self. In feminist spiritualism, political action is limited to the individual menstruator or to the girls the menstruator is encouraged to educate. Red Moon treads in this territory throughout as interviewees speak to menstrual energy, the preciousness of menstruation, and the spiritualism in bleeding. The film ends with this logic as a nude woman walks through city streets, dropping red blobs that spring new trees to life through CGI effects. In voice over we hear about the filmmaker’s changed subject position: “I no longer fight with my hormonal clock, because it is she that reminds me once a month that I have a personal, intimate connection to nature and the universe.” It’s too bad the film narrows its final message to the individual, rather than reflecting on some of the broader work done throughout, like connecting negative menstrual associations to patriarchy, and demonstrating how certain menstrual practices harm the environment and our wallets. Overall, Red Moon is a conversation starter that requires additional reading to supplement its message.
Oriana fox
After looking through all of oriana fox's work on her website, i found this piece of work, which i thought was really good, for the simple reason that barbies are pretty on the outside and seen as the idol...and how we are supposed to look. and on the inside its not so pretty. and to show that oriana has used something that happens to 50% of the populatioon and made it aparant. by putting across the message that women all experience the same thing but sort of get on with it . and myabe because it is internal. people dont openly talk about it . but why dont we talk about it ?? seen as its pretty much the most natual thing to happen to a woman .
BOOK :The Red Tent
The Red Tent is a novel by Anita Diamant, published in 1997 by Wyatt Books for St. Martin's Press. It is a first-person narrative that tells the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and sister of Joseph. She is a minor character in the Bible, but the author has broadened her story.[1] The book's title refers to the tent in which women of Jacob's tribe must, according to the ancient law, take refuge while menstruating or giving birth, and in which they find mutual support and encouragement from their mothers, sisters and aunts.
BOOK : Carrie ( Stephen King)
| Carrie | |
|---|---|
First edition cover | |
| Author(s) | Stephen King |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Horror,epistolary novel |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Publication date | April 5, 1974 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 199 |
| ISBN | 978-0-385-08695-0 |
| Followed by | ’Salem’s Lot |
The Purple Jar
Rosamund and The Purple Jar
The Purple Jar is a well-known short story by Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), an Anglo-Irish writer of novels and stories. "The Purple Jar" first appeared in The Parent's Assistant (1796) and reappeared in Rosamond (1801). Of the dozens of stories Edgeworth wrote in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this parable of desire and disappointment retains an extraordinary hold on the public and literary imagination. The story is about a young girl, Rosamund, who needs new pair of shoes but is attracted to a purple jar that she sees displayed in a shop window. Her mother gives her the choice of spending her money on shoes or the jar and she chooses the purple jar. “You might be disappointed,” her mother cautions, adding that she will not be able to buy new shoes until the next month. However, when she gets home she discovers that the jar was not purple but filled with dark liquid. “I didn’t want this black stuff!” she cries. Adding to her disappointment her father refuses to take her out in public because she does looks slovenly without good shoes.
Scholars have read this story as a parable of Consumer capitalism [1][2]. It has also been discussed as dramatizing a girl's sad awareness of menstruation in the context of an unsympathetic mother and a disgusted father [3]
Cultural references
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1849) alludes to Edgeworth’s story. The character Rose Campbell in Louisa May Alcott's "Eight Cousins" (1875) refers to the story: "I always thought it very unfair in her mother not to warn the poor thing a little bit; and she was regularly mean when Rosamond asked for a bowl to put the purple stuff in, and she said, in such a provoking way, 'I did not agree to lend you a bowl, but I will, my dear.' Ugh! I always want to shake that hateful woman, though she was a moral mamma." A character in E. Nesbit’s 1913 “Wet Magic,” alludes to the “icy voice” of Rosamond’s mother, “the one who was so hateful about the purple jar.”
"The Purple Jar" was also read by Princess Victoria, Theodore Roosevelt (who admired it), Eudora Welty (who did not), and the actress Fanny Kemble [4]
The title of this painting is taken from a series of moralising tales for children written by Maria Edgworth in 1823. Rosamund decides to buy a large jar of purple liquid she had seen in a chemist’s shop window, rather than a new pair of shoes. In this painting her delight turns to dismay as she realises that she will be confined indoors because her shoes are too uncomfortable to wear.
Edgworth was writing at a time when nearly all literature intended for children was didactic in intention, though these moral tales remain very popular today.
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