Those cups are kinda good but there’s a steep learning curve involved in using them. They can be tricky inserting and they can be messy AND tricky removing them. Plus, when they leak, they LEAK! I had a bad accident with one and ever since then, I’ve used nothing but pads and tampons. I don’t like taking risks–however economically–during my time of the month.
They are gross too. It’s one thing to see blood smeared on a pad or absorbed on a cotton plug. It’s quite another to hold a whole day’s worth of collected blood and tissue in a mucousy rubber cup before pouring it into the toliet. It makes me gag just thinking about it, actually. And I’m not even the squemish type!
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I don’t disagree with your post out of hand. Could you give any info to back up the statements that
we well-fed developed-nation womens can have a flow that puts our tribal society sisters to shame.
but it also happens that the fit and trim have such a slight periods that they don’t notice.
MY interest in the last quote centers around the difference between a woman who is “trim and fit” as opposed to an athlete(who might be considered to be more than just trim and fit).**
Quote 1 - This link is was cited by an earlier poster, http://www.mum.org. It’s a slightly goofy site, but links to a lot of good work. (The link also has papers that talk about later onset, pregnancy, and the consequences of untreated STDs cutting the total number of periods for women in other cultures.)
Quote 2 - My statement was too general for you, I guess. It’s a complex issue. I am have never seen a simple scale for determining at what point a particular woman’s low body fat would stop the flow. For instance, pregnancy and birth occur in refugee camps to women who are starved and under extraordinary mental stress, a “crack ho” with all the attendant mental and physical problems of addiction can give birth, yet we recognize that in many cases low body weight or low body fat has an effect. As a general rule the body reacts to certain stress (low body weight, excess body weight, certain medications, being on a death march, etc.) with hormonal changes, but predicting which women will see these effects is a crap shoot.
Would it help if I showed how difficult it is to set a baseline? For instance, some women have low body fat because that’s how they are; some women have low body fat because they are on restrictive diets and misuse drugs (OTC and otherwise); some women have low body fat because they are on a restrictive diet and do triathlon training; some women have low body fat because addiction cuts in on your eating time. Those are very different causes for low body fat.
When I was, at least not by my lights, not an athlete, my period was either basically invisible or a spotty day or two. All my gynos have shrugged it off as normal. I didn’t realize how long a period could be until those “light days” pads were advertised. The ads suggesting using different sized pads for different days, and listed a lot more days than I thought possible!
As an aside, the word “tampon” was coined by French trappers who observed that just prior to wintering, bear sows would fashion a wad of clay and moss into a vaginal plug to prevent the intrusion of ants or parasites while hibernating. This would technically make tampons a prehistoric non-human invention.
Can I get a cite? I’ve talked with french programmers, and on more than one occasion they’ve used the word tampon to mean buffer. That implied to me that it meant buffer, first, and then adopted it’s current meaning.
Our oldest son was born in 1966. We lived in Cincinnati and our church group raised funds by doing marketing research for P&G. My wife and several other mothers were the first to do a test run on disposable diapers. The outside was PVC plastic with an absorbant liner. They were a simple rectangle and pins had to be used. We used them on a trip from Cincinnati to Holland, MI and thought it was one of the dumbest ideas we’d ever heard of. :o
The word does indeed come from the Middle French(1400-1600) which meant “plug.” The OED cites the menstrual use of the term from 1848.
I can find no cite for the trapper/bear origin and assume that Zenster was merely joking.
j.c. Thanks for the info about athletes, body fat and periods.