Fluid Meanings

For future exploration, and any comment you might wish to add:

At the conference today a woman gave a paper partly concerning the practice of suppressing menstruation through contraceptive usage. Which I do, with my handy little Implanon implant, 'cos frankly I HATE HAVING PERIODS which make me crampy and sad and bloated and weak as piss for one week out of four. Then somehow I started to conisder this suppressing of my 'most womanly' of activities in terms of gender identity, and being 'post-female', and body modification and such as the question time progressed, and was about to mention that I was one of these folk they discussed ('but what type of women are they? who would do such a thing? *giggle*') when it occurred to me that I also induce lactation, the other 'ultimately feminine' act, and that this has a lot to do with the same issues I suspect. Then I thought about how I actually enjoy bleeding and court it in certain contexts, and then, well, I really couldn't find a way to express it all in such a forum...

Then again, sometimes stuff is just gross, period, and my desire not to have blood pouring out of my bits at often inconvenient times and accompanied my many uncomfortable if not downright disagreeable sensations may have less to do with the patriarchy than the fact that it just plain SUCKS, and being all self-affirming regarding my femininity and bleeding on a pot plant is not going to make it any more pleasant or desirable to me.