• Photo by Boris Mann / CC BY-NC 2.0

    This is from a few months ago, but I just discovered it this week, via MenInMenstruation: The Man-Pax Experiment. After being told by a reader that until he’s worn one, he has no business making a tampon or maxi-pad joke, comedy writer Sam Jordan conducts a good-natured experiment, and documents his week of wearing a maxi-pad.

  • Aurora at The Vagenda queries the need for modesty during a pap smear: “There is nothing immodest about failing to be embarrassed by the idea of a nurse and doctor glimpsing my pubic hair. There is nothing immodest about having my genitals visible when they are being examined. There is nothing immodest about being treated for a disease.”
  • Contraceptives could save lives. That’s the conclusion of a study published this week in The Lancet, published just in time for a major family planning conference in London organized by the British government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The proportion of international population assistance funds that went to family planning dropped to just 6 percent in 2008, down from 55 percent in 1995, while more money went to fight AIDS/HIV and more ideological battles (especially in the US) overshadowed the continuing need for family planning.
  • At xoJane, s.e. smith takes on the marketing of feminine hygiene products to menopausal women.
  • We’re all so, so tired of the question of whether menstruating ladies in the woods attract bears. What about deer?
  • The way menstruation is — and isn’t — represented in film and television plays a role in what we think about it, according to Lauren Rosewarne’s new research.
  • When we criticized Jennifer Love Hewitt for promoting vajazzling a few years ago, we thought it was a passing trend. But the practice is still around, and now enshrined in an art exhibit at (Art)Amalgamated in New York.  (Editor’s note: I was more surprised to see the author refer to her vagina as her ‘kitchen‘, as I’m more familiar with that term used to refer to another part of female anatomy: the difficult-to-reach, hard-to-style hair at the back of the neck, a term commonly used in many African-American communities.)
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