Stuff that may happen on your period no one told you about.

emmersdrawberry:

So there was a lot of misinformation, and just a huge lack of the nitty gritty stuff, when I was in school and I see a lot of young kids on forums asking if something is normal or worrying about stuff and adults who have wondered their whole lives if other people feel the same on their periods. 

Here’s some stuff about periods people might not talk about;

  • It can smell. But using scented pads isn’t a great idea, the chemicals in the perfume cause irritation. But here’s the thing; vaginas smell. All of them. All the time. Right now. YOU notice the smell because it’s literally part of you, but other people don’t. If it’s a foul smell and very strong you should speak with a gynecologist, but the average day-to-day odor is normal and doesn’t mean you’re dirty. 
  • Diarrhea all day every day.
  •  Or, alternately, constipation all day every day. 
  • ALSO alternatively, a healthy mix of both sprinkled randomly across the days of your period like too much nutmeg where no one asked nutmeg to be. 
  • Your first period might not look like a period at first. It might look, well, brown, and lead you to other conclusions about what’s going on in your skivvies. Then it might not come again the next month and show up on a totally different week when it does. Mine came like A LOT. It was very heavy and I bled through a pair of jeans in the middle of school it was so heavy. I didn’t know what it was and thought I was bleeding from my butt because my liar teacher said a period would only be a ‘tablespoon’. Tablespoon of lies. 
  • At some point your probably going to stain the back of the toilet seat with blood. That doesn’t mean your bleeding too much, or that your dirty, but it’s a tid bit of information I wish I knew as a kid so I could have known to look for it when using public restrooms or at friend’s houses. 
  • Period farts. 
  • Having sex on your period isn’t gross or dirty or wrong. Put an old towel down on the bed and have at it.
  • The feelings you have on your period are entirely valid and not imagined or unimportant because of your period. Whether or not your feelings are heightened by PMS they are still your feelings and should be respected. 
  • The ‘average’ period is anywhere from 3-10 days with any variation in flow. You shouldn’t be concerned because your period isn’t the same as your friends is, only if it changes from what’s average for you. There isn’t such a thing as a ‘normal period’ you need to fit into.
  • If you wear a disposable pad there will be a point where it’s going to unstick at some corner and when you pull it off it’s going to pull some of your pubic hair with it. This is going to suck. I am very sorry. 
  • If you wear a tampon there is going to be a point you will squeeze it out of yourself when you use the bathroom. Just change your tampon each time you go. Please listen to me on this. 
  • Swamp butt.
  • You will get blood stained thighs at some point. It’s going to cake onto your skin and make a mess just everywhere. 
  • The cashier doesn’t care about you buying pads/tampons/etc, they just had a guy buy 4 pounds of carrots, a box of Xtra Large ribbed condoms and cherry scented lube. Your pads are not on their radar of things to care about.

Washing Your Junk:

  1. When you shower (if you want a bath i’d shower before hand or dont wash in the bath itself and shower after to get clean) remember you are not actually washing inside of your vagina, you’re washing the skin around it (labia, clitoris, all those good bits). Using a soft wash cloth with either very mild unscented soap or just warm water.  Seriously, stop putting washing products inside yourself; You do not need to wash the inside of your vagina and doing so can cause infections. Unless given products by your doctor there is no need to douche or use creams or wipes or other stuff like that. They’re lies sold to you to make you think you smell bad. 
  2.  You know how your parents said ‘wipe front to back’?Same with washing, you don’t want to drag butt germs all over your vagina. Don’t do it. 
  3. Some people find that trimming, or shaving, their pubic hair helps them control odor, or makes wearing sanitary products more comfortable, but it isn’t required and is personal preference with different individuals. There is no health benefit to shaving or trimming your pubic hair and it will not make you cleaner than if you didn’t shave. 
  4. Wearing light breathable cotton undies during your period will help eliminate odor and not give you swamp butt. Especially in the summer. 
  5. Washing after sex is a great idea and not just because it’s romantic. If you’ve ever had period sex before you will k n o w but if you have not I am going to just ask you to take my word for it and plan a shower afterwards. 

Feel free to tack on other stuff if you want. Tell me all your period secrets. 

secrethistoriesproject:

20. Ten Interesting Facts About Alfred Kinsey

OK, so you’ve probably heard of Alfred Kinsey: zoologist and social scientist, 1894-1956 (there he is on the cover of TIME magazine, August 1953 with humorously positioned birds and bees)… but have you met Alfred Kinsey: bi poly man, author of a secondary-school science textbook and enthusiastic collector of gall wasps?

If nothing else, many people will probably have heard of the Kinsey Scale – that much-misused metric that has now generated its own minor tat industry. But did you know that: 

  1. Despite the fact that his father was an academic, Kinsey survived some reasonably serious poverty in his childhood – this led to him contracting rickets, rheumatic fever and an inadequately-treated case of typhoid. This in turn caused him to have health problems for the rest of his life. I don’t know whether he identified as a person with a disability, but he was deemed unacceptable for service in WWI as a result of damage to his spine during his childhood illnesses. 
  2. He was a well-respected zoologist before beginning his work on human sexuality – in 1937, he was listed as a ‘starred scientist’ by American Men of Science.
  3. In fact, the American Museum of Natural History in New York still owns about 7.5 million specimens of gall wasps collected by him in the 1910s…
  4. As a young scientist, he also wrote a secondary-school textbook, An Introduction to Biology, which was one of the first texts to present the natural world as a landscape to explore, rather than a set of resources to be exploited – he stated that it was ‘a mistake to test the importance of knowledge by its known, dollars-and-cents application’. However, the textbook also dealt somewhat problematically with the issue of eugenics. You can read more about it at the amazing Textbook History blog here.
  5. Kinsey was bi and poly. He married Clara McMillen in 1921, but the couple had an open relationship (I love the fact that Kinsey’s Wikipedia page says ‘He allowed his wife to sleep with other men…’ – understanding how open relationships work: yr doin it wrong). Kinsey’s male partners included Clyde Martin, one of his graduate students, who appears at some points to have had a triad-style relationship with both Kinsey and McMillen.
  6. In the 1930s, Kinsey became interested in doing academic work on human sexuality – including teaching a class on ‘Married Sexuality’ in which only students who were married or engaged were permitted to enrol! He interviewed thousands of subjects to gather data, and in 1948 and 1953 he published his findings as Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. You can read more about his findings here and here: many of the statistics in the ‘Kinsey Reports’ are still being thrown around today (the infamous ‘10% of the population’ figure, ,  for example, is based on Kinsey data, even though Kinsey didn’t believe that most people actually were ‘exclusively homosexual’ or ‘exclusively heterosexual’).
  7. That in response to allegations that his samples had been biased (for example, some of his original research subjects were drawn from prison populations, and the original studies severely under-represented people of colour), in 1979 Kinsey’s facts and data were re-checked by his successor Paul Gebhard… who found that they in fact mostly held up: where Kinsey had found 37% of men had had at least one ‘homosexual experience’, Gebhard found 36.4%. 
  8. That in the 1980s and 1990s, questions were raised about the possibility that Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute had encouraged child abuse among Kinsey’s research subjects. Some of these allegations went to civil court, and were eventually dismissed in 1994. 
  9. That the Kinsey scale also has a classification of ‘X’ for ‘asexual’, which was later added by Kinsey’s research associates – as far as I know there has yet to be an ‘I’m A Kinsey X’ button printed, but I think it would be a great addition to the collection!
  10. And finally, that Kinsey’s work is carried on at the University of Indiana today by the Kinsey Institute! You can watch a short documentary video about it here. There’s even a sex-ed arm of the Institute, found at http://kinseyconfidential.org/, which provides free information for the general public.

I particularly like reading about Alfred Kinsey because I think it’s so common nowadays to have a mental image of the 1940s and 1950s as a time when sex was incredibly tightly repressed, and when any kind of non-normative behaviour was somehow less possible than it is today, even behind closed doors (interestingly, that’s certainly the image perpetuated by the trailer for the 2004 biographical film Kinsey (link is to video). However, Kinsey’s own life indicates that this really wasn’t the case – he started doing serious research and publicising people’s sexual behaviour, but he certainly didn’t invent it! One of the links below is to an exhibition of vintage sex toys that demonstrates exactly how filthy underground culture in the first half of the twentieth century could be – stereotypes very much to the contrary. As Kinsey himself said:

The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity. (from Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, 1948). 

To the extent that we are able to talk about sex with ‘intellectual honesty’ and ‘human dignity’ today, I think we owe a lot to Kinsey and his work. 

More: 

Biographical materials at the Kinsey Institute: http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/about/kinseybio.html

Collection of vintage sex toys from an exhibit held by the Kinsey Institute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SMoPplInb4

Discussion of Kinsey’s Introduction to Biology at the Textbook History blog: http://www.textbookhistory.com/?p=21#more-21

The ‘Kinsey Confidential’ sex ed site: http://kinseyconfidential.org/

Trailer for the 2004 film Kinsey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppZwSABxeYE

Wikipedia bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kinsey

Wikipedia articles on ‘The Kinsey Reports’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Behavior_in_the_Human_Female

Google Books link: Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pfMKrY3VvigC&printsec=frontcover&dq=sexual+behaviour+in+the+human+male&hl=en&sa=X&ei=i0nXUK6pH43M0AWNuIHABw&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA

Google Books link: Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9GpBB61LV14C&printsec=frontcover&dq=sexual+behaviour+in+the+human+male&hl=en&sa=X&ei=i0nXUK6pH43M0AWNuIHABw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAQ

Google Books link: David Leys’ Insatiable Wives contains a chapter on Kinsey, McMillen and Martin: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tctxQzAKdJgC&lpg=PA59&dq=ley%20kinsey&pg=PA59#v=onepage&q=ley%20kinsey&f=false

do you have any tips on how to get through the shame and guilt felt for being sexually attracted to other girls and wanting to do sexual things with them? i have romantic attraction to girls too but i particularly feel guilty for being sexually attracted.

closetedlesbianopinions:

Hey sunshine,

I’ve found that constantly reminding myself that my attraction to girls is natural and wonderful and fine helps. If I repeated it over and over and over again, even if maybe I didn’t entirely believe it, I could start to accept it.

Unfortunately it’s a very normal feeling for lesbians to experience, but it’s entirely because of the homophobic messages society has sent us all our lives. There is nothing wrong or shameful about girls who have sex with girls. There is nothing wrong with us, and there is nothing wrong with you.

Please know you’re valid and loved, and your attraction to girls is beautiful.

-mod O