How is reporting something seen on a documentary about the women in question an anecdote? As far as how, I would imagine that they just cut them to size, and block off the back end of the flow for as long as the client is there. He’s not going to feel a sponge.
This has got to be the greatest line I’ve read in a long time!!
“The ladies they interviewed.” The ladies were telling anecdotes. In ONE brothel, in ONE town. Doesn’t make everyone ‘way off’.
So they just keep forceps around to get those sponges out?
I stole it off some other doper. I don’t know who. But I read it and thought the same thing you did. It fitted the situation.
Remember no-one else offered any data at all, so anecdotal is a first step.
Or the first step backwards if it’s false…
Maybe they’re on what I have… Implanon, pretty much stops my period from occuring in the next 3 years. But then there’s the 50:50 chance that you’ll more periods than normal. I presume, by Occam’s Razor, they just use hormaonal contraception and prevent the period from happening in the first place.
Menstrual blood is not the safest thing in the world to come into contact with.
Legal brothels have to follow strict health procedures. I went through the sex worker’s Health and Safety Procedures and could not see anything about menstruation though. But then again, it was on a sex worker’s site.
As far as the placebo pills go, it was always my understanding that while they weren’t necessary, they were included to reinforce the habit of taking a pill everyday. Was I wrong?
No shit. Oh yeah…I just LOOOOOVE getting my period. The high point of my month!
I’m from the “olden days” when you still got the period every month. But I have to ask…do you still go psycho if you don’t get your period every month?
Anyone?
No. Well at least I don’t.
Well, look at it this way, Kalhoun: If you did, wouldn’t every woman approaching menopause (or suffering from amenorrhea) go bughouse?
I can only do it for one month. If I do it for longer, the results are… unpleasent.
I wouldn’t say “stuffed” but the Greeks and Romans both used sheep intestines, among other things, to make barrier contraceptives. Given that some condoms are still made from lamb intestine today, it’s certainly not too far a stretch.
Not a work safe site due to ad content so text is quoted here
:eek:
Seems that it’s not the healthiest way to go. That’s just asking for thrush and other nasties. Not to mention abraising the interior lining making you more susceptible to infection and AIDS if a condom does break.
Was that excerpt from someone who worked in a legal brothel?
Well, they may have figured that women wouldn’t trust that the birth control had done it’s job unless they could see the bloody evidence every month that they still weren’t pregnant.
Aside from the various forms of birth control already mentioned, plenty of prostitutes throughout history have been rendered sterile by STDs. Occupational hazard.
This wouldn’t a problem for your high-end callgirls and escorts, but I would venture to guess that impoverished streetwalkers have a difficult time maintaining sufficient body fat levels to menstruate or conceive. They can’t be eating well, and many have drug habits to support. I remember once seeing a news report on a charitable group that handed out condoms, clean needles, and McDonald’s coupons to streetwalkers.
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If putting washed fingers in your vagina is an unhealthy way to go I don’t want to be healthy. Out of all the things you can put in your vagina, a clean natural sea sponge and your own clean fingers is probably the least likely to cause injury. Sea sponge is used as an environmentally-friendly alternative to disposable tampax.
I’ve used contraceptive sponges during my period and it stops the flow temporarily. I’m not a prostitute. You have to use your fingers to take out a contraceptive sponge too.
From a cat house employee in NV.
“This question is not out of the ordinary. Us girls during that time wear
extra protection, and we use sea sponges. Yes some of do take time off.”
I should also point out that women’s periods do not necessarily a) last a whole week, and b) have a constant flow. It varies woman by woman, of course.
[TMI Warning] My flow is heavy for about 2 days, and then extremely light for a few days. I would really only have to worry about those first 2 days. The remaining days I could easily control things with a diaphragm or something. The only friend with whom I have discussed this reported that her flow is very light for a day or two, then heavy for two days, and then really light for a day. In both cases, it’s only 5 days, and only 2 of those days have a significant amount of flow.
And as others have pointed out, hormonal birth control methods sometimes make periods quite light to nonexistent.
Oh–I forgot to say–sea sponges have been used since ancient times as contraceptive devices. They would usually be soaked in some sort of natural spermicidal agent, like vinegar. Between the barrier of the sponge and the acidity of the vinegar, they actually worked rather well.
And with regard to the makers of the pill’s decision to have women have their periods:
First of all, very little was known about the effect of the additional hormones on women’s reproductive systems. Scientists had known for a long time that oral hormones could supress ovulation, but the problem was that getting the hormones to experiment with was difficult and extremely expensive. They had to be extracted from animal organs. They could barely get enough to experiment with. It was the development of synthetic hormones from plant sources that led to the feasibility of the pill. Once they had them, they created the pill ASAP. They didn’t know whether women HAD to shed that uterine lining every month or not. Other posters have mentioned other reasons that having the period was desirable. So, they developed it with the period included. Another example of their lack of knowledge about the workings of hormones is the fact that the early pills had many times the quantity of hormones that today’s pills do. It was the later research that determined that the levels could be reduced.
Secondly, and perhaps more important–the pill was originally introduced as a remedy for menstrual irregularity. The pill is generally thought of as being introduced in 1960. But it was actually approved by the FDA in 1957, but only for treatement of menstrual irregularity. Naturally, lots of women with in-the-know doctors developed “menstrual irregularity” in the late '50s. 
) The developers of the pill basically had to do this in order to get it approved at all. They knew that a “birth control pill” would be a real hard sell, so they made sure that it had a more “legitimate” purpose.
It’s hard to express how disdained birth control and birth control information was at the time. In fact, it was still technically illegal in some cases. It was only a few decades earlier that people (including Margaret Sanger) were jailed for disseminating birth control information! They were able to get approval for the birth control aspect of the pill in 1960 largely because it had been on the market for a few years already, and proved to be pretty safe and effective.