As usual, my women friends are dragging grouchy old badger me into modern trends. Even though I am old as dirt and stuck in my ways, I like to think I know how to modernize. For instance I was ok with giving up my keyboard phone for a touch screen (not really but here I am anyway). Then they said I should do yoga in those pants everybody wears to the grocery store. No wait… first it was Zumba, then it was Yoga. I am clearly losing track of the silly things women do to jiggle less in their leggings. I kind of stopped paying attention to any of it when they started neighborhood Mommy and Daughter pole dancing classes.
I have been a good sport and done other activities seemingly targeted to women. Candle parties, sex toy evenings, wine club with a book problem, all of it. I drew the line at the “50 Shades of Grey” fangirl club because I consider bad writing to be a crime against humanity, yet there they were: all the girls surreptitiously licking their kindles.
Now I must deal with the latest “must have” in woman land. It is about period blood. If that idea freaks you out a little, keep reading, we might be on the same team here.
A number, and I mean a statistically significant number, of my friends are avoiding the feminine products aisle and heading straight to the hippy dippy natural store to buy a cup. It is a plastic cup that they wear in their lady cave and it catches the blood. I will just let that sink in a moment.
I can tell you, we have been having a full-on chimp style poo fling fest over this. They want me to put my environmentalist money where my mouth is by putting a blood catcher in the hole instead of disposable products. “Come to the dark side,” they said, “we are liberated and unafraid of our bodies,” they declare.
Alright, so now rather than using menstrual products that decay over a longer period of time than it takes to break down nuclear waste, we are supposed to use blood catching dishes in our hairy beasts. I don’t know, this is all a little waterbirth and patchouli for me.
I asked my progressive friends how they deal with it when the cup overfloweth. Well apparently you use toilet paper and wipe it out. Ok, I could see that being workable. But the next bit came from a seasoned user that didn’t exactly further her argument. She cautioned that when you are cleaning out your slippy cup in a public washroom stall, you need to make sure nobody sees your hand on the way to the sink. Murder scene apparently.
The next issue is reliability. When it REALLY counts, can you be sure that the catch-all will perform? One of the girls was a new user, she asked the group if she could poop with it in. She was worried about the potential of a one push jettison. Unfortunately, by the time our seasoned cup using friend answered her email, newbie had already crapped her pants. Good news though, the cup stayed in, so she had that going for her.
I am thinking summer is coming and lots of us like to wear a dress and maybe go commando. What if you are hanging with your friends (or worse your kids) and suddenly sneeze and don’t have time to cross your legs? Not only is there a high risk for pee, you might hear the tell tale “clunk” that indicates you are officially having the worst moment of your life. There it lies at your feet. Now what?
Anyway, I get that people love this idea. They rave about their Twat Tupperware like it is somehow making periods easier to bear. I love my friends, but I might just not be that free and feminist after all. I can’t face bleeding into a glorified shot glass risking catastrophic failure and losing one into the toilet.
We ended our discussion on the topic of blood management and moved to less controversial subjects like politics, religion and vaccination.
So if you see somebody walk to the sink in a mall bathroom hiding a hand, give her the “sisterhood of the blood catchers” secret wink, because now you know.