To Bleed Or Not To Bleed
To bleed or not to bleed,-that seems to be the question:-
Whether ‘tis nobler to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous moods, cramps, and PMS,
Or to take arms against our bodies with a sea of drugs,
And by opposing ourselves, end it?-To stop,-to cease,-
No more; and by a pill to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural fluxuations
That flesh is heir to,-‘tis culturally
Devoutly to be wish'd. To stop,-to cease;-
To sleep! Perchance to dream:-ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of nothingness what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal cycle,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes worth living of so long life.
This famous speech from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" was frighteningly easy to adapt to menstruation. I was inspired by Jodi's "No More Menstruation" blog that talks about the new oral contraceptive that is taken continually, with no break for bleeding. The "To be or not to be" speech jumped right into my head, and the parallel with "To bleed or not to bleed" was too perfect. I looked up the actual speech in an old copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare that I happen to have lying around. You can just as easily google it, though I like the way the older version has all the dashes. Anyway, you can see for yourself how little had to be changed. I'm kind of stunned actually how beautifully the point is made…
Michelle
Michelle Singer is a freelance journalist currently living and working in Montpelier, Vermont. Former GladRags employee and menstrual enthusiast, she is also a great lover of books, hiking, and wrestling with the continual confusion of feminism. She lives in a multi-generational home with all her most important fans–her parents, husband and two truly adorable children.
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November 13th, 2007 at 6:33 am
The thing about any birth control pill is that the bleeding that happens during the placebo week is not an actual period. The bleeding is a withdrawal bleed, not a shedding of the uterine lining (because there is no build-up of the uterine lining when you’re on the pill). So you can’t equate ONLY the pills that have no placebo pills with the cessation of menstruation. Technically, anyone on hormonal methods of birth control is not truly menstruating.
Here’s a relevant quote: “The effect of the Pill on the endometrium is so modest, women could go for months without having to menstruate. However, the inventor of the Pill feared that women would find this unnatural and disturbing.”
Source: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f00/web2/donimirski2.html
This article has a very interesting discussion about the history of menstruation. The author’s hypothesis is that the number of periods women have these days is actually unnatural and unhealthy. Women in the past had many fewer periods because of later onset of menstruation, more pregnancies, and longer breastfeeding.
I like to play Devil’s Advocate.
November 13th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Devil’s Advocate is good.
The pill from the earlier blog was only the inspiration for this poetic interpretation. I myself thought of the “sea of drugs” and “pill” to be a much broader reference to all the ways we are changing our cycles through synthetic drugs.
I have heard of the hyposthesis that now we may be unnaturally menstruating “too much” or more than we used to. But the truth is, it’s a hypothesis. We can’t rewind time to know for sure what people were doing or how they were bleeding, although this argument is made with sound logic.
Here’s the heart of it for me: there are other values to having a hormonal cycle and menstruation than the physical shedding of blood, although there are arguments here that support that process like the woman who argues that menstruation serves to clean the body of pathogens that women might be vulnerable to via sex. The menstrual cycle is the cycle of the earth - sping summer, winter, fall, building, ovulation, decline, menstruation, the cycle of the moon, of one single day - it’s all the same cycle. Menstuating gives us a sense of that. It’s also an emotional cycle which I can’t stress enough, can be an enormous gift to women.
November 14th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
i recently saw the cover of cosmopolitan magazine in a store and it had the headline “the best news we’ve heard about periods in years!” inside was an “article” extolling the virtues of lybrel, although it was fashioned to be a pro/con type article. anyway, the two pros were “never have a period again!” and “if you’re on birth control, you’re not having a period anyway!”* so i think it’s dangerous to use the argument that birth control users don’t really menstruate — it’s better than nothing, right?
also, i don’t how i feel about saying that women are having unnaturally more periods than before. in some ways, i think that’s valid — girls are beginning menses much, much younger than they once were — but i also find this kind of thinking dangerous. if most women over time ovulate monthly, what’s wrong with someone now ovulating more than a woman who ovulated less (because she was pregnant or nursing)? isn’t it a matter of choice? what would women long ago have chosen? something to think about, since we’ll never really know the answers.
*the one downside of lybrel, according to cosmo, was that you might just bleed/spot constantly and experience lots of pain and side effects. but! no periods!