Periods Are Overrated

Wow. So something pretty spectacular happened to me this week. Word is spreading amongst modern women everywhere. Kind of like an underground railway, except with cocktails and better clothes. I’m going to tell you a secret. Lean in a little closer. Here it is: Ladies, we don’t have to have our period any more if we don’t want to.

I know, right?

This is up there with the He's-Just-Not-That-Into-You Revelation of 2004. Ground-breaking.

I have had my period for 21 years. That is approximately 252 periods. And this whole entire time I have lived in resignation to the fact that this is our lot in life as women. We bleed every month. Nothing we can do about it. That’s the way it is.

Of course, I’ve heard the stories about women who piggyback their Pills; I’ve heard about the IUDs which basically obliterate the period. Oh, I've heard all about it.

But I genuinely believed those women were playing with fire, so smug was I in my knowledge and assurance that ‘I’ was doing it the right way.

Those women are going to Hell.

‘It’s natural. Best not fuck around with Mother Nature. You don't want to piss that Bitch off.’

Since having complications with my Pill in the late 90s, I have been a free-wheelin’, hormone-free, Pill-hating, PMS-ing woman. I used to pride myself on the fact that I could set a clock by my period. That sucker came every 26 days on the nose. I believed that to mean that my body was in SYNC. It was doin’ it’s thang.

I had completely surrendered myself to the mind-numbing cramps and painful, almost crippling symptoms of My Period for 2 days every month. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, I thought.

Then one day last week my roommate came home with shocking news. And an excerpt from a book I had to read. We as women were never meant to have a period every month.

What!?

That’s.crazy.talk.

Get outta here with alla that CRAZY-TALKIN'!

Here’s the thing: In Malcolm Gladwell’s Book 'What the Dog Saw' there is a life-changing, core-shaking, belief-system rocking essay called "John Rock’s Error” about the man who invented the birth control pill. Did you know he was a devout Catholic? And when he invented the birth control pill, the only reason he had it replicate a woman’s natural cycle was to a) make women feel more comfortable and b) to convince the Catholic church to sanction it?

Yes. There is absolutely no other reason to have a period if you are not trying to get pregnant.

Boff! I scoffed. I squirmed. I objected. You know, I fancy myself a pretty smart, independent forward-thinker, but this is crazy talk. This can’t be right.

Except. Well…

Have I been blindly following along with the status quo? Have I—God forbid-- been letting the Catholic Church into my bedroom? And worse, have I been letting it dictate my reproductive choices?

Well, yeah, I have been. And not even realizing it.

Here’s the thing: Women in traditional cultures have spent most of their 20s and early thirties pregnant or breast-feeding. A study of modern-day aboriginal tribes in Africa also shows that women in these cultures even today average 1 period a year between the ages of 20-34 and 4 between the ages of 34-50. This gives them, on average, a life total of approximately 100 periods. A hundred periods. Western women’s lifetime total? Somewhere between 350 and 400.

And here’s the clincher: Having a period and releasing an egg is not this soft, gentle “natural” process on your body. Nope. It sends your body into what is equivalent to a type of stress and shock. It makes the body regenerate cells EVERY MONTH. As Gladwell puts it,

This shift from a hundred to four hundred life-time periods means that women’s bodies are being subjected to changes and stresses that they were not necessarily designed by evolution to handle!

Cancer occurs because as cells divide and reproduce they sometimes make mistakes that cripple the cells’ defenses against runaway growth. So ANY change promoting cell division (like our periods, hello!) has the potential to increase cancer risk.

Whenever we ovulate, the egg literally bursts (bursts!) through the walls of the ovaries. To heal the puncture, the cells of the ovary wall have to divide and reproduce.

Every time a woman gets pregnant and has a child, her lifetime risk of ovarian cancer drops 10 percent. Why? Well possibly because between the pregnancy and breast-feeding, she stops ovulating for 12 months and saves her ovarian walls from 12 bouts of cell division.

A woman who takes the Pill for ten years cuts her ovarian-cancer risk by around 70 percent and her endometrial cancer risk by around 60 percent.

So. It’s certainly been the most convincing argument I’ve ever heard to stop just "leaving it up to Nature."

Personally, I am choosing to free myself from the pain in the ass that is my monthly period and getting a Mirena IUD.

Crazy talk it may be, but I couldn’t feel happier, healthier or more bloody liberated.

No pun intended.