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People ask you the strangest questions when you have an eating disorder that puts your life at risk. Such as: "How can I get it, but only for a little?" And "Why not just eat a sandwich?"
The strangest thing for me, however, was this: "Do not you miss the rules?" As if the prospect of cramps and bleeding could have brought me back to recovery in the same way that a tuna melt could never.
I did not have my periods at all between 11 and 21 years old. For me, amenorrhea was a symptom of famine. The people around me were right to worry. Even so, I could not help thinking that they had a strange way to express it.
Having a healthy body, a body that could have had my period, I missed it and I was grateful when I finally found it. But miss periods, in itself? Why should I? Was it really health or something more – the idea of being a "good" woman, as opposed to a woman who was using the disease to avoid her monthly chores? ?
I remembered this from reading the revelation that countless women had, for 60 years, had monthly bleeding for no reason. For decades, women who take the combined contraceptive pill have been invited to follow a 21-day leave, 7 days of rest, in order to experience "withdrawal bleeding" which, although technically not identical to ordinary menstruation, certainly resemble them.
The reason is that it's not women's health, even though many pill takers – including myself – have naturally badumed that skipping periods was inherently dangerous. It turns out that John Rock, one of the gynecologists who worked on the development of the pill in the sixties, hoped to make it more acceptable to the Catholic Church. If we could still see that women had "natural" monthly cycles, we could perhaps forgive them for giving up unwanted pregnancies. The pope did not care. Nevertheless, advice to women has not changed, even if they have not been followed.
Years ago, I shared a house with a woman who took her medication all the time and avoided bleeding. I admit to having been deeply suspicious about it. Surely you can not ignore this part of a woman's body? Surely there would be a return on investment somewhere on the line, unlike my own increased risk of osteoporosis after anorexia?
I imagined liters of excess toxic blood accumulating inside my roommate. I considered myself a feminist, and hardly anyone who believed that women should be punished for not having engaged their bodies in cycles of procreation; Yet I had absorbed the idea that the body itself would not "forgive" you for avoiding the rules if you were pregnant or badfeeding. (After all, all I had read about menopause suggested that even all that one would gain with the natural stoppage of menstruation would be lost several times by mood swings. , hot flashes and brain fog, Mother Nature – or the latest joke of God at the expense of women.)
It is easy to be dismayed at the extent to which patriarchal beliefs, religious prejudices and conservative morality inform not only the medical advice given to women, but also our understanding of our own body, whether or not we believe in the misogynistic badization of female pain. both natural and deserved. I do not know that.) This week's pill news is a blatant example of how patriarchy is distorting our understanding of what is in women's best interests. This could lead us to wonder how the promotion of "women's health" could be a matter of not strength and well-being, but of normalization – to make a woman "fit" for a society in which she is supposed to render specific services.
I do not think it's always clear. With so many problems concerning the reproductive life of women – the use of pain relief during childbirth, the increase in the number of caesareans, the desire to increase the absorption of badfeeding – it can be extremely difficult to separate the serious advice based on evidence the ideology. You can make efforts to inform yourself, but prejudices are all around you. It can be inside you too.
I gave birth to my children without pain relief. I tell myself that it was not ideological. I do not think some women are "too smart to push"; I do not believe that a woman should suffer to bond with her child; I do not believe that labor pains are Eve's curse. I tell myself that I was lucky to have no complications and that's all.
And yet, I wonder – is there not a part of me, the part that is surprised women can "get out" by not bleeding every month, which is also ready to believe, deep down, that the female pain is good? Am I absolutely sure that the way I gave birth was better for my body? The more I read, the less I am sure of what is most patriarchal – the veneration of "natural" childbirth or the excessive pathologization of women's reproductive experiences. It may be impossible to know who to trust.
For this reason, it can be a relief when at least one myth is exposed. "How can that be," says Professor John Guillebaud, Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health, "for 60 years we have been taking the pill sub-optimally because of this desire to please the pope ? "
Because, I think, it goes beyond an area of patriarchal control. It is less about wanting to calm a specific religion, but a broader culture that makes lies about women's bodies acceptable as long as they reinforce greater "truths". We end up thinking that we are supposed to bleed. We favor being "normal" before being comfortable. We may be doing it, but we are still far from knowing what is really good for us.
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