Stimulating Conversations

Okay, this is me pulling an article out of my arse at the last minute, because the new expansion pack for TS2 is damn distracting & I’m a rabbit on crack. Or something. So instead of something intellectual & stimulating, I’m going to discuss the different styles of menstrual aid. Yes guys, this is your cue to leave.

Ah, menstruation, the joy of blossoming womanhood, right up to the minute you realise this means a gushing red torrent once every 28 or so days, more or less frequently depending on general health, genetics & luck.

First off to bat are tampons. I’ve heard them called mice, plugs & bungs. They are more or less some absorbent spongy matter rolled into a tube & shoved up your not-quite-so-happy-right-now place. With any luck, there are strings attached. In favour of tampons is convenience, because you can go swimming & horse-riding & play beach volleyball in tight white pants while using one – at least until you have a mega-clot slide over it & into your underpants, leaving you full of shock & dismay that you’d somehow picked up a leech at the beach, and it latched on there of all places! Best to back it up if you tend towards clotty or unexpectedly heavy flows.

Tampons carry a risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome if used incorrectly, which is to say if you don’t carry a bottle of hospital-grade antibacterial wash in your handbag and use it immediately before inserting the tampon, you increase the risk of microbial growth on & around the tampon. This risk increases over time so the recommendation is that you use the lowest absorbency tampon possible for your flow, and that you remove & replace it every three to four hours, eight at the outermost. After seeing how quickly microbial life grows in a warm, moist, food-rich, closed environment, I would err on the side of caution & stick to a three hour change-over. What you do, though, is your own damn business.

Now we move on to sanitary napkins, aka pads, surfboards, wedges, rags, wodges. Call them what you like, they are a long, thin bundle of absorbent material covered in a permeable membrane. Women have been using a variant on the concept for anywhere between decades, centuries, or millennia, depending on which historian you believe. There’s a good reason for it. It’s fairly no-nonsense, and something you can cobble together in a hurry to stop the red tide from being immediately visible to the public. At least until it moves, fills up, or ties itself into a knot. But the principle is sound & anyone with even a micrometre of resourcefulness would be able to throw together a makeshift pad in less time than it takes to say ‘oh shit, I wasn’t expecting that today!’.

Interestingly, sanitary napkins as a commercial product came about when some clever boffin realised that wound dressings make a very good menstrual barrier. Go them!

One of the bummer things about pads and, to a lesser extent, tampons, is the gods awful smell of menstrual blood being broken down by bacteria having a bloody good feed, if you’ll excuse the pun. This is one problem not experienced when using the third type of menstrual aid – the cup.

Plungers, cups, call them what you will, they are a vessel inserted into the vaginal entrance that allows blood to collect & be disposed of at a later stage. Because the blood is fresh at the time of disposal, the smell is far less pungent than that given off from a freshly disposed tampon or pad. I would hesitate to say pleasant, but I would definitely say a pleasant change from the “rotten meat” smell I’m used to with pads and tampons. The downside of the cup is that it does need to fit well to work correctly.

For ease of use and availability, sanitary napkins are a clear winner. For practicality and lack of intrusion into your daily life, the menstrual cup is miles ahead. All three types of menstrual aid have issues with application, and all three will leave you with blood on your hands at one stage or another. In the end, it’s all down to personal preference.

Floopyboo