Virgin Gorda, other’s misfortune and me

A woman before the dive on which she miscarried

Others misfortune and me: Having recently found that I’m descended from ancient British roots on both sides of my family I think that my genetic heritage may explain why I have the cravings for thrills and risk taking I do. For more about that see my January 9, 2012 post: The Winter Solstice and other Holidays.

Some time ago a good friend and faithful reader asked why I crave taking risks for thrills and write about violence, death and tragedy. It’s taken me a while to think about that and until recently I wasn’t sure I had an answer. My therapist (unaware of my family history until recently) thought I had a death wish because I seem to gravitate to the most extreme sexual encounters involving breathplay while wearing a gasmask and rebreather bag or during dive-sex or some other bizarre sexual encounter to get my thrills and he’s still not entirely convinced otherwise.

By wearing pointe shoes as standard footwear (a fairly harmless kink) while at work as my ballet companies AD and choreographer or in the boardroom of the company I own and even while shopping I’m not only able to enjoy my pointe-shoe fetish in public, but have developed a public persona that projects my artistic ability. While within the business community my rivals who thought the ‘cunt in toe-shoes’ would be a pushover discovered how wrong they were when I handed them their asses in one business deal after another when the real-estate and casino bubble burst here four years ago.

My shrink still thinks my fetish for wearing ‘death rubber’ (which I’ve managed to collect from the bodies of women who died during sexual encounters) reflects my need to make up for the loss of my mother when I was a child. He sees my belief that the dead owner’s Chi (which still inhabits such an intimate rubber device) provides me with her spiritual protection when I insert it in my vagina, as a psychological coping device which calms my fears and gives me confidence in my ability to get through dangerous situations safely. I think there is far more to it than that since wearing death rubber seemingly has protected me from serious injury in difficult situations since I began wearing it about five years ago. I’ve been tested by endocrinologists for chemical imbalances and every test has been within ‘normal’ limits so I’m thinking my craving for danger is hereditary and I’m sensitive to the ancient beliefs that every item has certain powers that can be used by sensitives to advance their own devices and desires.

In Vegas I seem to have been passed over for the contract to tidy up after most of the Organization’s periodic efforts to discourage others from encroaching on the profitable portions of their diversified businesses. Or, perhaps they are just using more stealth and guile rather than blunt force. That’s not as much of a loss as it might first appear as I have become so busy with other projects that Organizational clean-up was becoming a problem for me. But I’m still being called when the cleanup involves women so my access to a primary source of death rubber is still in tact which I’m relieved to know.

The dangers of diving while pregnant: The men with us in the Caribbean were Chris (with Cyndi), Chuck, who is our Gyn (with Anya) and Jack (Lord John) with me. I try never to travel w/o a Gyn since we are all so sexually active especially since Chuck saved Cyndi’s life. It was nearly three years ago when Cyndi had her miscarriage while diving the cove with Chris who was then her bodyguard and lover, when she was almost 15. Long time readers may remember my writing about it at the time in my blog entry on Yahoo 360 for January 12, 2009. She was on the pill and hadn’t realized she was pregnant and while in the pit she began to cramp and hemorrhage as she miscarried. Fortunately Chris got her to the surface as we were entering the cove and Chuck was able to stop the bleeding and administer antibiotics until she could be seen by her family’s doctor who was flown in by RAF fighter jet from the UK.

This time we had The Wanton Lass IV, His Graces sailboat, that’s docked at Spanish Town meet us at Charlotte Amalie on St Thomas where we landed ‘Limnaea’, my G550, at Cyril E. King (STT) with its 7,000 ft runway, and take us around to the north side of Virgin Gorda where we anchored it in the cove as a diving platform. The next morning (after ballet class for the women) we took the Lass’s zodiac out to the yacht disappointed that another boat had come in to ‘my’ cove after dark and anchored for the night. The young couple was already in dive gear as we arrived and after a brief hello they began diving the cove as we boarded the Wanton Lass. Most of the cove bottom is sand at a depth of 60 feet after a steep drop-off from the beach except for the south western end which drops off to 100 -120 feet and has the aquifer emptying into the pit which reduces the salinity of the water there and the current has cut a deep channel that leads out of the cove to the edge of the shelf and empties into much deeper water.

After we put on our dive gear we entered the water and as we began our descent we could see the woman was in trouble and her partner was trying to get her out of the pit, but they were caught in the current. Neither of them was wearing a buoyancy compensator and were over weighted for the fresh water they found themselves in. By the time Chuck, Chris and I got to them the man had dropped his weight belt and was struggling to keep the reg in the woman’s mouth while trying to unfasten her weight belt as they were being swept into the channel and out to sea. Chris helped the man while Chuck, Jack and I grabbed the woman and we all inflated out vests to rise out of the channel so we could swim out of the current. Once we were out of the current we ascended to the surface and had the zodiac come and pick us up. We took the couple aboard the Lass and stripped off the woman’s wetsuit. She had water in her lungs but managed to get most of it out while cramping severely and passing fetal tissue.

Once she had passed the fetus and got her lungs cleared she said she had no idea she had been pregnant. From the size of the fetus it was about two or three months old. She was on Lybrel and had been taking diet pills that speeded up her metabolism which flushed the contraceptive hormones out of her body so quickly that the amount of hormones in Lybrel weren’t able to prevent her from ovulating. Chuck cleaned her up, made sure she wasn’t bleeding and gave her a five day supply of a powerful antibiotic and said she should see a doctor at a OB/Gyn clinic in Road Town on Tortola about a half days sail away to see if she needed a D&C. The couple had rented their boat at Road Town so they knew the way and began their return immediately.

Lara Croft and extended cycle BCPs

Advert for Lybrel the continuous regimen oral contraceptive

“Why Do Oral Contraceptives that Cause Monthly Bleeding Still Predominate?

Healthcare providers' attitudes about menstruation and medically induced amenorrhea are key factors.

Extended or continued use of oral contraceptive pills (OCs) remains low despite obvious advantages of menstrual cycle regulation and symptom management. To determine the factors that influence physicians' OC prescribing habits, researchers analyzed survey responses from 211 obstetrician-gynecologists (OB/GYNs) and family medicine physicians (FPs) in Oregon. Physicians were asked whether they prescribed extended-use (hormone-containing pills for >28 days with scheduled withdrawal bleeding) and continuous use (hormone-containing pills indefinitely without a scheduled withdrawal bleed) OCs, and, if yes, how often. A 5-point Likert scale was used to assess attitudes toward menstrual suppression.

In all, 90 respondents (44%) identified their principal specialty as OB/GYN, and 115 (56%) as FP. Most respondents who reported ever prescribing OCs also said that they prescribed extended- or continuous-use OCs sometimes (50%) or often (23%). OB/GYNs were more likely than FPs to suggest these options (92% vs. 60%), as were urban (79%) versus rural (58%) physicians.

OB/GYNs and urban physicians showed greater acceptance of medically induced amenorrhea as well as more-favorable attitudes about health and economic benefits of suppressing ovulation and safety of extended-use OCs. Most respondents (68%) did not realize that menstrual-related symptoms are most common during the placebo week, and 17% of respondents (most of whom were FPs) were unaware that endometrial thickening does not occur with extended-use OCs. After adjusting for physicians' age, practice location, knowledge, specialty, and sex, the only factor that was significantly associated with prescribing extended- or continuous-use OCs was attitude toward medically induced amenorrhea.

Comment: The gaps in knowledge among the respondents are surprising and underscore the need for ongoing education about menstrual suppression. The authors acknowledge that their small sample size (particularly of rural providers) curtails the generalizability of these results. Moreover, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and certified nurse midwives were not included. Despite these study limitations, the benefits of extended- and continuous-use oral contraceptives remain clear — and the attitudes of healthcare providers are critical in promoting acceptance of these dosing regimens as mainstream options. — Anne A. Moore, WHNP/ANP-BC, FAANP”

Extended cycle pills in real life: The first combined (estrogen/progestin) oral contraceptive pill designed to be taken continuously with no hormone free days is Lybrel. Lybrel has .90 mcg of the progestin levonorgestrel and 20 mcg of the estrogen ethinyl estradiol and is taken continuously 365 days/yr, in 28 day packs (13 per year). For women who can adjust to the continuous dose of hormones – it can take three or four months for a significant percentage of users to stop experiencing irregular bleeding – being period free can be liberating if the woman has been experiencing heavy or painful periods or significant PMS. Another positive for Lybrel is that it uses a very low dose of an older progestin, levonorgestrel, which has a lower incidence of causing blood clots. Most other extended cycle pills have 84 active and 7 placebo pills limiting a woman taking them to four pill-periods a year. Some of those are Seasonale, Jolessa, Quasense, Seasonique and LoSeasonique and they all use the progestin levonorgestrel.

The down side of extended cycle pill is that in addition to taking a long time to adjust to being continuously on hormones levonorgestrel does not have the long half-life of the progestin drospirenone used in Yaz and Yasmin and as a result the hormone levels can more easily drop below the effectiveness level if a woman is late with or vomits her pill. Too, there is no monthly assurance that the user is not pregnant by the arrival of ‘Aunt Flo’. Unless a user is cautious enough to test every few weeks she has no way of knowing if she is pregnant until she begins to develop symptoms such as noticeable breast changes, lethargy and repeated nausea.

A consequence of the Hex or Sex party: Returning readers will remember from my post entitled ‘The Doorman’ on October 31, 2011 and the following post on Nov 2 about the wood chipper that a UNLV friend’s sorority was running a bordello charity over Halloween at one of Adolph’s vacant estates in the hills. The 13 girls who were hostesses in latex body condoms are fine and suffered no ill effects other than sore muscles from their unusual level of exertion. Even the girl who had her cervix battered so brutally is recovering well and probably will only have to wear a supportive pessary for a few months.

However, one of the other sorority sisters, a 26 y/o grad student, who was working as support staff and was costumed as Lara Croft in a silver latex dive-skin had apparently gotten off her pill regimen enough that she was fertile and had breakthrough ovulation during the four days the bordello was operating. We knew she was sampling unprotected male customers, but she was on Lybrel and since there was a waiting list and she was discreetly servicing men who were waiting at the bar for seconds or thirds no one called her on siphoning off potential profits that we didn’t have time to handle. The fourteen of us, Cyndi and I pitched in when it became apparent that the sorority girls were under staffed as far as available commercial pussy was concerned, were getting the guys off as fast as we could while ensuring we were giving them their moneys worth.

Lara Croft and the fertilized egg: So Lara Croft called me on Saturday. I could tell she was nervous and she told me about the struggle she had been having getting regulated on Lybrel with irregular bleeding that would come and go and she couldn’t get a good pill taking regimen so she could develop a habit of taking her pill at the same time each day. I’m wondering why she was calling me about that when she finally got to the point. She began getting nausea attacks three days ago, tested and found she was positive for hCG and she wanted my help getting an abortion. I said she could go to UNLV Student Health and she freaked out. She is terrified of her father finding out she is not only sexually active, but that she wasn’t careful enough and has no idea who the father is. Her father is a prosperous evangelical fundamentalist in a state in the Deep South and she is scared to death of him. She has a bit of money of her own that she gets from her mother so she can pay clinic rates for the termination.

It was pretty early to be having pregnancy symptoms after only fifteen days (she began sampling the clients the day the place opened for business on the 28th) but certainly possible so I had her meet me at the clinic and one of the NPs did a serum pregnancy test and she was indeed very newly preggers. Go figure! So she signed the patient agreement and was given the first three pills (Mifepristone) and Saturday counted as day one in the Mifeprex regimen to terminate her pregnancy. She was so relieved to be getting the problem quickly taken care of. I told Adolph about her pregnancy and he wondered if it was his since he had taken her each of the four days she was helping at the estate. She was to return to the clinic on day three, today, so I met her at the clinic and the NP said she should take two misoprostol tablets which she did. The misoprostol can cause cramping, bleeding and nausea so I took her back to the sorority house where there will be other students to take care of her if she starts to bleed heavily. Mifeprex is about 95% effective in terminating pregnancies so she should be fine. In two weeks she will need to go back to the clinic to make certain that everything is normal and her reproductive tract has recovered.

Beavertail seduction

Lesbian escort candidates training in beavertails

The beavertail seduction jacket: The beavertail jacket is easy to get in and out of and is ideal as a dive-sex tease. In lighter moments, as a tension release, I teach ‘Beavertail Seduction’ in my Advanced Sexual Techniques class at St Lucy’s and it is a popular facet of the course. Modern copies of the vintage beavertail jacket complete with brass twist-latch crotch fasteners and wrist zippers are available in the new neoprene materials that allow more flexibility in a form fitting jacket so a girl can show off her legs while by opening the front zipper midway she can display her breasts appearing to be available while at the same time seemingly protected from the male gaze. The beavertail-girl and her admirers all knowing that in seconds with one pull on the zipper and opening two twist-latches the delights of her ripe body can be made fully accessible for a sexual encounter. The self lubricating zipper pulls and precision detent twist-latches make Gepettos faux-vintage line of beavertail jackets a must-have in any sexually active female diver’s wardrobe. Another nice thing about the beavertail jacket is that the 5 mm neoprene back protects the wearer if a rented tank harness still isn’t comfortable after adjustment or if she is pushed into and penetrated against a wall while on the surface in a training facility which often happens during training at Adolph’s.

Hoods with beavertails: I’ve mentioned the utility of hoods before, but it doesn’t hurt to mention it again because we see young divers with large sections of their long hair cut away because they couldn’t get it untangled from their dive gear after they wore it loose while on a dive. It’s undeniable that long hair floating around a divers face or streaming behind her when she is moving can be gorgeous, but entangled in hoses, valves and regulators it can limit the range of movement of a woman’s head and sometimes impair the functioning of her equipment. Hoods are ideal for controlling and protecting a diver’s long hair while also providing thermal protection and keep her hair from being used as a weapon against her in a fight. I prefer wearing a hood for an additional reason. I think it adds an element of mystery about me showing the shape of my head while hiding the color and style of my hair and a hood provides an element of anonymity concealing my long auburn hair when I’m trying to go unnoticed.

Our ‘Rapture’ celebration: The get-together at Adolph’s Saturday afternoon (5/21) with a small group of friends was to celebrate the passing of yet another end-of-the-world pronouncement with no apparent effect. Was Harold Camping's ‘prediction’ a scam to suck millions from the credulous, or does he just need a new calculator? This is the second time he has missed his own prediction of an EOW date. But wait! He’s trying again! He has revised his apocalyptic prophecy, saying he was off by five months and the Earth actually will be obliterated on Oct. 21. Go figure! Will the third time be the charm? Will he scam millions more from true believers? I think we have far more to worry about from religious extremists with WMDs.

In any case, we had a great time though Diané was far more sensitive to nitrogen narcosis than any of the rest of us and couldn’t go below 100 feet w/o flooding her mask. Peter stayed with her and they had their own more or less private encounter at 80 feet while the rest of us were enjoying the buzz of nitrogen intoxication at depths between 125 and 150 feet. All the guys behaved themselves, I mean by not pulling their partner’s gas guard out, which I was a bit concerned about since some of the guys think that sort of thing is extremely funny because it leaves the girl vulnerable. Afterward Adolph had a lovely buffet of pulled pork barbecue, smoked salmon, prawns, raw oysters, caviar on toast points, and raw veggies. I thought it was pretty much a male menu, heavy on the protein, but not the usual German dishes he serves so that was a welcome change.

Big Pharma and dive-sex: Pharmaceutical representatives for the major drug houses like Pfizer, Barr, Watson, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer-Schering, Ortho McNeil-Jansen etc routinely meet with the Gyns and Nurse Practitioners at our clinic to educate the practitioners about their contraceptive products. The Pharma Reps are all young, attractive, athletic well educated women who can get and hold the attention of the (mostly male) medical professionals who are their clients. One of the Reps who I have recently become friends with works for Pfizer and until recently she pretty much ignored me. She was courteous enough, but her attention was directed toward the Gyns and PAs who prescribe contraceptives. However, after a friend with an IUD got PID and ended up with a badly scarred fallopian tube from having pool water forced into her uterus during dive-sex Ms Pfizer sought me out. She wanted to be fitted with a professional level diaphragm to use as a gas-guard during dive sex. She had heard from friends in a professional woman’s group she is in that I am the go-to girl for dive-sex protection and training.

It’s nice to be appreciated, but that’s not quite accurate because I don’t train clients who walk in off the street. I have quite enough to do working with the Casino’s escort trainees and with students in my St. Lucy’s Contemporary Sexual Health and Advanced Sexual Techniques classes which are in addition to my being AD for the casino’s ballet company. But she provided an opportunity for me to become valuable to a major Pharma Rep who has the authority to dispense samples of all sorts of meds at her own discretion. My new BFF, Ms Pfizer, is taking a Pfizer contraceptive, the continuous COC Lybrel that is taken 365 days a year (13 packs) so in theory she has no periods in a year. However, in real life that isn’t quite the way Lybrel works for many (about 60%) of the women who take it. A Lybrel blister pack contains twenty-eight (28) yellow tablets each containing 90 mcg of levonorgestrel, and 20 mcg of ethinyl estradiol and after taking Lybrel for about two years she is still experiencing occasional instances of spotting. But because her pill-periods were so painful with other pills she tried she thinks the occasional unexpected spotting is worth the bother. So she has been using an All-Flex diaphragm, inserting it daily, to prevent any possibility of embarrassing bleed-through instances when spotting.

The invitation: She has been invited for an all expenses paid weekend at The Lorelei by Adolph (he is inviting all the Pharma Reps one at a time) and she said she wanted me to give her at an overview of what to expect during dive-sex, but she really wanted more. She had heard she needed to wear a gas-guard during dive-sex and thought that her All-Flex would serve that purpose. However, she recently had an instance with a lover where he managed to under-thrust the rim of her All-Flex and left his seed in the dome. She wasn’t concerned about pregnancy, but was worried, and rightly so, that if her All-Flex was under-thrust during dive-sex she could be at risk of PID or an embolism. So she sought me out to be fitted for the style gas-guard a professional escort uses for dive sex, Reflexions, and to discuss the possibility of it being under-thrust. Additionally, she wanted to know what to expect from Adolph because she had heard I know him well.

The good news: She is not allergic to latex, has a wide pelvic ledge and a 70 mm Reflexions fits her perfectly. She is also PADI qualified for open water so at least she knows how to use her SCUBA equipment which was a big help when we went into the training pool first to practice underwater insertion with a G-spot dildo and then a bit later a male escort candidate joined us (he needed the practice) to give her her first heterosexual dive-sex encounter. I reassured her that while it is possible for a determined man to under-thrust the rim of a Reflexions it is very unlikely because it hurts the man to under-thrust a flat spring rim and it is unpleasant for the woman as well so she would know if the attempt was made. I also coached her to pay close attention to the amount of air she has left because during underwater sex you tend to forget about breath control and gas conservation. Running out of air during an encounter really ruins the mood and makes a man like Adolph very angry.

I told her he has a habit of preventing a partner who runs out of air from starting for the surface until he plants his seed inside her so that delay can be very unpleasant and sometimes extremely dangerous. While things are going his way he has the appearance of amiability. However when something goes wrong he has a very quick and violent temper, so when she is depending on him for her safety I said she should do whatever is necessary to please him. My advice initially took some of the enthusiasm out of her anticipation of the weekend, but she is determined to do whatever it takes to meet Adolph’s expectations – if it gets her a free weekend at The Lorelei – because she has heard how luxurious the spa is. She promised to let me know how her weekend at The Lorelei goes.

Barrier training and identity theft

All-Flex diaphragm compressed for insertion

The All-Flex as a training barrier: The 12-14 y/os at St Lucy’s in our Feminine Hygiene class are fitted with an All-Flex as their first training barrier because it is the easiest style to insert correctly. Every girl is fitted regardless of any other method of contraception she is using. For anyone reading this who says that 12 y/os are too young to be using birth control, I say, “Get Real!” It’s true that the age of consent in Nevada is 16, but we teach the use of a diaphragm as a method of flow control during a woman’s period. It just so happens that it can also be used as a contraceptive device and for URTP (upper reproductive tract protection) when she is old enough to have dive-sex. Most of the girls past menarche are on some form of hormonal or IUD method of birth control anyway because their parents have approved it. The usual reason given is ‘to regulate their cycles’ even when everyone is aware the teens are using it for protection while actively participating in horizontal sports.

Elke and Flibanserin – an update: Boehringer Drops Female Desire Drug. Germany's Boehringer Ingelheim said today (10-08-2010) it will discontinue development of its investigational compound Flibanserin for the treatment of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder because of FDA requests for further support the efficacy and safety profile of the drug. “The decision was not made lightly, considering the advanced stage of development,” said a Boehringer executive. “We remain convinced of the positive benefit-risk ratio of Flibanserin for women suffering with HSDD”. Returning readers will remember that in my entries for June 17 and July 8, 2010 I wrote about Elke, Adolph’s pool assistant and German arm-candy, being on Flibanserin. Perhaps it had some placebo effect for a while but she is off it now as the improvement she seemed to have disappeared.

Fall pregnancies: Last week at the clinic we began to see the usual crop of Fall pregnancies. There was only one St Lucy’s girl. The other seven came from UNLV (3), local public high schools (3) and the last one a new showgirl at a rival casino who came from a casino in Atlantic City. This phenomenon occurs each Fall as young women switch from their Summer vacation or intern jobs to Fall back-to-school routines. All were within the 8 week maximum for taking Mifeprex but five of the six (the seventh miscarried) had menstrual extractions. The sixth, the showgirl, took Mifeprex.

Boned at the Barre: The St Lucy’s girl is a transfer student from Los Angeles who is taking ballet and was using Lybrel the estrogen/progestin pill (90 mcg levonorgestrel and 20 mcg of ethinyl estradiol) that is taken every day for 365 days. That dosing regimen is supposed to stop your periods, but break-through bleeding is common for 30% of users for up to 6 months while user’s bodies get used to the hormone levels. In June of this year the maker, Wyeth/Pfizer, repackaged Lybrel in a new blister package and the St Lucy’s girl had a hard time remembering to take her pill from a blister pack rather than the old ClickCase. She liked the ClickCase and thinks the blister pack is common. The psychology of that probably led to her not taking her pills correctly and eventually her pregnancy. Counting back it appears she had been inseminated when she arrived on campus. She tested negative for hCG during her mandatory pelvic exam the day she arrived and hadn’t had sexual contact with a partner for the next six weeks which means she conceived a day or two after she arrived.

Since she never had a period she didn’t have any warning that she was preggers until her breasts began to swell and the milk glands surrounding her nipples became prominent as they increased in size. Three weeks later during one of her first times being penetrated from the rear while en pointe, in the usual Boned-at-the-Barre position - feet a la seconde penetrated from the rear while bent over holding on to the barre - she had her cervix rammed several times by her partner and began to hemorrhage. She fainted and miscarried right in the studio bleeding all over a new pair of Gaynors she had just bought to have sex with her fave ballet teacher. She was rushed to the clinic and had a menstrual extraction to make sure that all the fetal tissue and placenta were expelled. She was put on a ten day regimen of antibiotics and told not to have any sexual activity that would cause her uterus to cramp for the next week while her endometrium was replaced.

Identity theft: I’ve mentioned in earlier entries that my women escort candidates and St Lucy’s students who are fitted for gas guards have RFID chips put in them so we can tell who is absent from class and ensure that they are wearing their gas guards before they enter the water for dive-sex labs where partners will finish inside each student during her dive. The RFID chips also help identify women when they are wearing DiveRubber or encasement suits where faces and identifying body markings (tats, scars, blemishes, etc) are hidden so from a distance it is almost impossible to know who is wearing the rubber suit. We have had instances where someone tried to have another woman take an exam dressed in the absent students DiveRubber or fetish gear. We are seeing gym-bag, dance-bag and reg-bag thefts in women’s locker rooms apparently to get their gas guards with RFID chips in them so they can pretend to be the student/dancer when dressed in fetishwear or dive gear. Wearing another woman’s diaphragm with her RFID chip it makes it much easier to get into some of the women’s secure areas at St Lucy’s and in the escort training areas at the casino. To combat that we have gone to biometric scanning of thumbprints as a cross-check to get into women’s secure areas.

The Last Taboo

FLOW by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim

Published on Psychology Today (http://www.psychologytoday.com)
By Molly Castelloe, Ph.D.
Created Aug 3 2010

The Last Taboo: Menstruation and Body Literacy

"Many moons ago, Gloria Steinem wrote and article "If Men Could Menstruate," which I excerpt here:

"So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, worthy, masculine event... Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation ('men-struation') as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat ("You have to give blood to take blood"), occupy high political office ("Can women be properly fierce without a monthly cycle governed by the planet Mars?")... Street guys would invent slang ("He's a three-pad man") and "give fives" on the corner with some exchange like, "Man you lookin' good!" "Yeah, man, I'm on the rag!"... Lesbians would be said to fear blood and therefore life itself, though all they needed was a good menstruating man."

Gloria, you got to love her! She knows how to transform people and perspectives. Switching gender roles shows us how we create fictions around the subject of a bleeding uterus. What we take as objective or value-free (menstruation- shh, just clean it up!) is really man-made meaning. The riff above gives us a glimpse into how sexual difference is socially constructed. In other words, it shows the show.

I've enjoyed reading Regina Barreca's lively rejoinder to Satoshi Kanazawa's "Why modern feminism is illogical, unnecessary, and evil." Yet clearly the evil among us is menstruation. Or rather, how we think about it.

Contrary to what Kanazawa says, feminism (a multi-vocal movement) does not claim "men and women are on the whole identical." Feminism does, however, strive to illuminate how social and historical conditions make men and women seem more different than they are. For instance, Third Wave feminists of today detach menstruation from the gendered body. They reach out to transsexed people (Male-Females do menstruate) and acknowledge that not all women have a period (post-menopausal females do not). Of late, these plucky feminists have also been toying with the notion of menstrual taboos.

Social taboos against women's monthly have been common throughout history. Pagan Greek and Roman cultures believed that contact with women during menses withered crops and soured wine, dimmed the sheen of mirrors and dulled blades of steel. Leviticus, from the Old Testament, warns that during flow women are not only ritually "unclean," but in danger of contaminating others. Some theologians claim that the Christian perpetuation of these beliefs has fueled the case against women as priests in the Catholic Church.

Cultures often construct fantasies of danger and power around the body's orifices. These vulnerable, penetrating spots reveal our interiority. They are the places where we take things in (food, air) and put things out (words, blood, children, excrement). These are sites of terror and pleasure -- and intense myth making.

Elissa Stein and Susan Kim, authors of the book Flow (2009), argue menstruation is "hidden in a figurative box (scented, of course), stuffed deep inside the great medicine cabinet of American culture: out of sight and unmentioned." They claim this kind of silence is a matter of deep-rooted shame regarding the female body rather than an act of modesty or conversational etiquette. Secrecy is a familiar trope in the advertising for sanitary products. Pad and tampon ads avoid direct allusion to blood by pouring blue liquid on the hygienic napkin to demonstrate how it absorbs.

If men could menstruate, newspapers, TV, and online sources would treat the subject more openly. We have only to recall the media coverage of Uta Pippig's 1996 Boston Marathon victory to see the difficulty in dealing directly with the subject. Pippig spent most of 26.2 miles plagued by menstrual blood, cramps and a live camera feed. While the German runner, who finished first in the women's division, stopped several times to clean menstrual blood off her legs, commentators stumbled over their well-versed tongues: many halted at the euphemistic "physical problems" or "stomach pain." Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara sparked further controversy by remarking on the media's failure to address the incident in a straight-forward manner.

There is even more mystery shrouding flow for low-income minorities. A 2007 study "Nobody told me nothing," interviews seventeen African American women from a public housing project to find they have few reliable sources for learning about menstruation among their schools, their mothers, and female friends. According to the data, avoidance of the subject led to confusion and negative attitudes toward all menstrual-related events throughout a women's life. This is of special note, the study adds, since minority women in the U.S. face more menstrual problems than white women.

Women's periods are an astounding problem in developing nations, too, where annually girls miss on average 50 days of school and work due to fear of disgrace. According to children's rights activists Marc and Craig Kielburger:

"Three days a month, Annalita is too embarrassed to go to school. The Rwandan teen, like millions of her peers worldwide, is menstruating. Her family can't afford sanitary pads, so Annalita makes do with what few materials she can find including rags, bark and mud. But these makeshift pads are usually ineffective. Rather than focusing on her studies, Annalita spends her day anxious about a potential accident in front of her classmates."

It is this kind of message - the ominous threat of leakage - that multinational companies like Tampax bank on in some of their ads. Here's one from Seventeen (2004) that lays in on thick. It bodes of a shark attack with the caption "A Leak Can Attract Unwanted Attention."

Stigma surrounding menstruation tells women there is something wrong with their bodies. It fosters shame, self-loathing, and a bad self-image. Many women internalize this attitude, learning to hate their bodies. In the West, they spend extravagant time and money trying to "improve" them, medicate them, aromatize them. You may even see ads for these kinds of products in the margins of this page.

In her book, "New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation" (2010), Chris Bobel argues that when women can't talk openly about "leaky, messy, authentic bodies" they become vulnerable to pharmaceutical companies, like the makers of Lybrel -- the first extended-cycle oral contraceptive that eliminates menstruation altogether. Bobel claims these corporations exploit women's discomfort through the cleverly packaged idea of freedom from the body. As she puts it, these pills "promote liberation (get it? Lybrel/Liberty?) from our unruly, messy, uncooperative bodies that get in the way." Instead, Bobel encourages "body literacy" with regard to women's cycling. That means "you decide how you feel about your period - not tampon manufacturers, not your 5th grade health teacher, not your Mom, not pharmaceutical companies - you."

In Rwanda, inadequate information and hygiene has spawned a new market-based program that generates support for affordable, eco-friendly sanitary products. In conjunction with MIT, Sustainable Health Enterprises creates a sanitary pad made of banana fibers -- a material abundant in the landlocked African country. The product can be sold at 30% less cost than international brands and made locally by Rwandan women with microfinance loans.”

Personal comment: After it was explained to me (in student health class) what was going to happen I began to look forward to when I would be old enough to get my period. I’m fortunate that my periods are almost painless and when I began cycling (I was 14 and in ballet school where the training almost certainly delayed menarche for me by at least two years) my cycles stabilized and became regular within a few months so I have had no real menstrual problems. I do realize that I’m fortunate and that some women and girls have terrible periods so painful and heavy that they are immobilized and need hormones to moderate the symptoms. I think one of the major advantages of using the Mirena IUD which releases the progestin levonorgestrel or the single rod implant Implanon which releases the progestin etonogestrel is that for women who have menstrual problems these devices can minimize or eliminate most of the symptoms for many users.

A word about Lybrel: It can take a long time for the body to adjust to Lybrel (365 active pills) and other extended cycle birth control pills such as Seasonale and Seasonique (84 active pills each). For a significant percentage of extended cycle pill users irregular bleeding is a common side effect for up to nine months after starting those pills. Many women who switched to extended cycle pills to be ‘period-free’ find they can’t stand not knowing when they will start to bleed and switch back to a 28 day pill cycle again.

Menstruating women and shark attacks: I think the probability of being attacked is no greater while a woman is on her period than off. The National Association of Rescue Divers: http://www.rescuediver.org/rescue-tech/sharks.htm says this about menstruation and shark attacks:

“Shark bites occur more frequently in murky water. They are attracted by lights, noise, or splashing, and smell. For theses reasons surface swimming should be kept to a minimum, in shark waters. Research shows that bright colors attract sharks more than dark objects, so it is better for divers to wear dark colors. Blood in the water can attract sharks from long distances. They can sense blood in the water in concentrations as little as 4 parts per million. Bleeding into the water by a diver or swimmer may not go unnoticed. Women who are menstruating are recommended to wear tampons. As to any evidence that the menstrual cycle can increase the hazard of shark attack is inconclusive. It is believed that sharks are only attracted by fresh blood.”

And this from Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida: http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/sharks/isaf/mens.htm about shark attacks and menstruating women, which says in part: “Don't worry about it. Lots of women safely dive while menstruating. Although we haven't got solid scientific data on the subject, so far we haven't seen any obvious pattern of increased attacks on menstruating women.”

I wouldn’t go swimming without wearing a menstrual flow control device of some sort, a tampon, diaphragm or menstrual cup mainly for hygienic purposes, but scaring menstruating women out of the water because they may attract sharks is pretty far fetched. It has more to do with the colors of clothing the clarity of the water and the amount of splashing a swimmer is doing. I’ve been swimming around sharks in the coves of Virgin Gorda when I’m flowing and haven’t had any problems. Now dolphins are a different story entirely. Males dolphins have initiated sexual encounters with me when I’m fertile as well as menstrual. Perhaps they can sense that my secondary libidinal peak is when I’m menstrual. You think?

I think having my period is a reaffirmation of my femininity, my ability to bring new life into the world and a sign that my reproductive cycle is functioning normally. I try to teach my students that their periods are to be cherished and used for pleasure and should not be a cause for sequestering themselves while auntie Flo is visiting.

St Lucy’s Ballet intensive

Lybrel no-period pill pack showing click-case dispenser

Prep for Summer ballet intensive: We are doing things a bit differently this year for St Lucy’s Summer Ballet intensive. In the past we have had a 15% dropout rate for the course and we are trying to lower that this year by more selective screening and dietary changes or supplements begun well ahead of arrival. Even with tougher screening there are far more applicants that we can possibly take even running two classes of twelve students each. The limiting factor is finding male ballet partners who are experienced, considerate lovers and free of STIs. We use a lot of the younger male escorts with dance backgrounds who have gone through the course in the last year. The quarantine after STI screening limits their income but that isn’t as much disincentive as you might think because there is a lot of sex with 17 y/o hardbody ballet girls to be had for the five weeks of the course. Most of the guys love it because it’s a way to stay in shape while almost on vacation because the inexperienced girls are blown away by the guy’s stamina, the intensity of the orgasms they give and suck up the guys tales of life in Vegas. It borders on hero worship and is a huge boost to a male’s ego!

The Vegas Ballet Experience: There are a lot of summer ballet intensives being offered, many by far better known schools than St Lucy’s. However, we like to think St Lucy’s provides a unique opportunity for the adventuresome ballet student who wants to experience what dancing in Vegas can be like while protected from some of the rougher edges of the real world, such as hard drugs and STIs. Students are nominated by their teachers from ballet schools all over the US, Canada and Europe. They must be at least 17 y/o by the time they arrive in Vegas for class, must have been taking pointe at least three days a week for the last five years and have their parent’s permission to be sexually active. We assume if the student is seeing a medical practitioner for birth control the parents are aware and consent to sexual activity, but require the signature of the mother or guardian to make sure there are no misunderstandings since Vegas is not Disneyland and accidents can happen.

Screening: Once a student is nominated the screening process begins. One of the common problems we are trying to address by screening is annoying side effects from hormonal contraceptives. Decreased libido, difficulty becoming aroused, vaginal dryness, breast tenderness and irregular bleeding can all be caused by birth control hormones. We have found that hormonal birth control causes a deficiency in vitamin B and additionally many women on hormones are also deficient in vitamins C and D so we start a candidate for a place in our ballet intensive on a special multivitamin at least two months before she arrives for her prep week.

We also want a candidate to have been on her hormonal method for at least six months. That’s because it can take that long for a woman’s body to get used to the hormones in her pills, especially breast swelling and tenderness and irregular bleeding from extended cycle pills. Imagine trying to partner with a man when your boobs are so sore that you can’t stand to wear a bra much less have a man hold and lift you where your breasts get jostled around and mashed in his embrace. Or in rehearsal or in performance and you start to bleed not just spotting, but heavily enough to soak thorough your tights or tutu! Believe me when I say that’s embarrassing, horribly distracting and it gets the costumer very upset as well since it’s nearly impossible to get blood out of a tutu, though it is possible to dye it to mask the stain.

Additionally we try to select otherwise qualified candidates who seem to thrive on birth control hormones, that is they have increased libido no irregular bleeding and are aroused easily while taking their pills correctly. There are some of those just as there are some women who can’t tolerate hormonal contraceptives of any kind. During prep week we administer an entrance exam that tests a students strength and stamina en pointe not only as a minimum entrance requirement, but also as a baseline for comparison for students we accept into the course to be compared with a final exam at the end of her five weeks of Vegas ballet training.

Pregnancy testing: The first thing we have a candidate do when she arrives is to test for pregnancy. If she tests positive she needs to make a choice as to how she wants to proceed. We do not allow pregnant women in the intensive, however there is time to terminate by means of a menstrual extraction and still participate in the course. We have only had that happen once and the student elected to have the ME and stay for the course. She did exceptionally well. Testing for pregnancy is done daily for the student’s safety as extremely intense sexual intercourse can cause a miscarriage and nausea during dive-sex can be fatal and dive-sex is part of the course. When detected a pregnancy can be terminated by ME and the student can continue the course while wearing a gas guard and on an antibiotic and 600 mg of ibuprofen every eight hours for a few days while her uterus recovers. Then after the course of antibiotics she can rely on her Reflexions or FemCap and spermicide for contraception while her hormonal protection is being reestablished. With students on hormonal contraceptives we have had one or two pregnancies terminated every summer for the last several years and no students have dropped out due to pregnancy related issues.

Hormonal birth control: St Lucy’s girls participating in the summer intensive have GyneFix IUDs implanted. For other students we won’t accept girls using Depo-Provera injections (given every 12 weeks) because we have found that women on Depo do not do well in the course and have weight and stamina issues. Neither will we take women if the are using NuvaRing because there is too great a risk of the ring slipping out and the student losing her hormonal protection or the ring interfering with the seal of the students gas guard. We ask students to bring their birth control pills with them and bring at least one extra pack in case something happens and the open pack is lost or becomes contaminated - think dropping it in the toilet. Most of the students seem to be using extended cycle (greater that 28 days w/o a period) pills like Lybrel or Seasonique With Lybrel once adjusted to the hormones a woman can go for a year w/o a period and on Seasonique she can go 84 days before taking the placebos to get her pill period. This year we have two French girls enrolled who are on Qlaira (a 28 day cycle pill) and they are experiencing amenorrhea (not having periods) when they take the inactive pills. Some amenorrhea is experienced by at least 15% of Qlaira users so these girls are thinking themselves fortunate. Though, with all the sexual axtivity they will be experencing if it were me I’d feel more confident getting my period on a regular basis. Of course with testing daily they will know as soon as possible if there has been a pill failure.

Pointe shoes: All major makers’ stock shoes can be purchased locally at the St Lucy’s school discount. If the student wears special make up (SMU) pointes we ask her to bring along at least eighteen pairs of pointe shoes for pointe and technique classes and performances because students typically go through three pairs a week and if she needs more the lead time for SMU shoes is too long for them to be any use for the course. Once the candidate passes the stamina test we fit her with both a FemCap and Reflexions flat spring diaphragm as gas guards for protection during dive sex and with Gaynor Minden pointes for pointe sex classes as Gaynors are far more comfortable and provide more support for sex en pointe than traditionally made shoes.

Avoidable fetish fatalities

Diving while pregnant

Dive-sex while pregnant: We have had another instance of a young, 24 y/o, woman, die while having dive-sex. She was on the birth control pill Lybrel that you take continuously all 365 days a year. Lybrel is a very low dose combined (estrogen/progestin) pill that has 0.090 mg the progestin levonorgestrel and 20 mcg of the estrogen ethinyl estradiol in each active pill. In a Lybrel dosing regimen there are no inactive pills. She was eight weeks pregnant and since she was taking an active pill each day she had no periods so there was no way she could know from missing a pill period that she was preggers. She had been nauseous for the last few days but attributed it to a stomach virus. She was being penetrated from the rear and vomited and drowned before her boyfriend realized what was happening. She became unresponsive and when he withdrew and rolled her over her mask was filled with vomit. He rushed her to the surface but she couldn’t be revived. He said she had an ear infection a few weeks back and was given doxycycline for ten days to get rid of it. We think the doxy decreased her hormonal protection to the point that she had breakthrough ovulation and the egg was fertilized and implanted. Diving while pregnant should be avoided because the pressure changes can damage the fetus cause birth defects. This sort of an accident can be easily avoided by testing for pregnancy before diving and if you are nauseous – pregnant or not – it’s really a matter of self-preservation not to dive while sick

'Suicide' by suffocation: There are some young women in town who are trying to copy-cat the professional actresses in the BDSM gasmask-rebreather fetish videos, often with tragic consequences. In my Contemporary Sexual Health class at St Lucy’s one of the first things I do is cover this risk. Students learn NOT to try to reenact encounters seen in adult videos until they have been trained in how to do it safely. Otherwise it’s as though they were trying to commit suicide. This week we have had two teen girls die while using gasmasks with rebreather bags connected. Perhaps it’s because rebreather bags are primarily a male fetish here in the U.S. and the dangers of rebreather bags are not well understood by women from just watching their guy’s getting off wearing a rebreather, but it seems there are far more young women dying than men while wearing rebreathers. Gasmask-rebreather bags are also a solitary activity associated with masturbation so when something goes seriously wrong there is often no one around and rarely has the user thought to set up an alarm of some sort to enable her to call for help.

The first was a 17 y/o who was using one of her father’s gasmasks and rebreather sets while her parents were out of town. She was found in the basement of their home in a room converted to a ballet studio with a wall of mirrors and a barre. She was in one of her mom’s latex body condoms, a leather front laced corset and a high quality pair of her mother’s black leather mid-calf ballet boots. She had put on her dad’s mask with rebreather bag connected to the filter connection and the valve on the rebreather bag was closed. She had handcuffed herself to the barre with two lengths of chain on opposite sides of barre brackets and the handcuff key on a lanyard was on the floor at her feet. Even if she had the lanyard around her neck I don’t see how she could have unlocked the handcuffs unless she held the key in her mouth after pulling off her mask, but since she must have dropped it she never had the chance to try. Apparently she couldn’t get the mask of either since there were scrapes and blood on the rubber under the chin of the mask and her throat was scraped and bloody where she had tried to get it off by rubbing it against the barre. Her left leg was broken in a compound fracture where she fell off pointe, probably when she was too weak from lack of oxygen to stand any longer. When she fell she ended up hanging by her wrists beneath the barre where her parents found her, suffocated from the carbon dioxide in her sealed rebreather bag.

The other death was a 19 y/o who wore her father’s Mestel SGE 400 and rebreather bag set into the swimming pool at her home. She was in a bikini and was wearing a weight belt with twenty pounds of lead around her waist. For some reason she couldn’t get out of it or perhaps she was overcome before she knew what was happening and never tried. Gasmasks and especially rebreather bags are not made to withstand the pressure of being submerged in water and the pressure collapsed her rebreather making it impossible to draw a breath so once she was under water she had a very short time before she was in trouble. Her 16 y/o sister found her on the bottom in the 15 foot dive-well of the pool. The mask was partially flooded as though she might have been trying to get out of it when she passed out.

Bubble fucked, part II

A Cooper Surgical – Milex wide-seal – silicone diaphragm

A reader’s question: An interested reader asked if the manufacturer and style of diaphragm is important when being selected – to be used with an Oves cap - for women needing effective bubble fuck protection. The short answer is yes.

I know I’ve said that being bubble fucked is something most women want nothing to do with and that’s true. But at St Lucy’s there are a lot of girls who are interested in having the experience at least once, “been there, done that got the tee shirt to prove it’. And at St Lucy’s that usually means changing diaphragms because almost all the girls who use Ds there wear Semina, the super thin transparent silicone dome ‘Barbie Barrier’. A Semina is great for pregnancy protection from a thrusting penis and for ordinary dive-sex down to 10m but the dome isn’t thick enough to take wear from the hard silicone wings of a pussy reg being shoved into the vagina and rubbing against the dome. For bubble fuck protection a Milex Omniflex is the diaphragm of choice to be used with an Oves cap. An arcing spring style should be not be used because pressure from the wings of the mouthpiece could cause the rim to fold and lessen the rim seal. The dome of a Milex is better because while still stretchy and flexible it is thicker making it difficult (but not impossible) to puncture or tear so it better protects the Oves cap sucking on the diver’s cervix.

Gas fisting: I think it’s fun when the gas balloons my vagina and I try to teach the introductory course so the students will enjoy that experience too! It’s sort of like getting fisted during a submerged pelvic exam and when I describe it that way it increases the student’s interest in trying it. Of course vaginal ballooning forces a girl to pee in her partner’s face but he’s in a mask and reg so that's really not a problem. I tell my students the guy she’s with is too busy watching her reaction to worry about being in a cloud of her urine. Of course that’s not the only cloud because the air being forced out around the mouthpiece carries with it a puffy swirls of semen, spermicide and dive-gel which coats her partner’s facemask unless he turns away, but few do because they are fascinated by how she is handling the experience.

Single hose regulators: I’ve mentioned before that it’s necessary to use a single hose reg., that has a purge button, when the intention is to use it for bubble fucking. That’s because double hose regs don’t have a purge button so there is no good way to force air into the vagina with a dual-hose mouthpiece. What I do if I want to wear my Mistral twin-hose reg is I’ll have my partner attach an octopus with a pussy reg to his SCUBA set. That way I get a bubble free view of him moving in and out of me during sex then get to see him insert the modified mouthpiece in me and watch the cloud of semen, dive-gel and bubbles gush out as he pushes the purge button and fills my birth canal with air.

A dive-sex pregnancy: I was CD19 yesterday and spent several hours volunteering at the clinic. One of the 18 y/o St Lucy’s girls came in for a termination after testing positive before starting her afternoon SCUBA diving class. She is on the continuous regimen pill Lybrel (from Wyeth) where a combined estrogen/progestin pill is taken every day with no pill free days. It is a new dosing regimen (approved by the FDA in May of 2007) of very low dose. Each round yellow 6mm pill contains: 90 micrograms of the progestin levonorgestrel and 20 micrograms of the estrogen ethinyl estradiol. The pills are taken continuously 365 days/yr. Lybrel comes in 28 day packs (13 per year). She had irregular bleeding off and on for the first 90 days which happens for about 40% of women starting Lybrel after which she hadn’t bled at all for the last 9 months.

She had taken antibiotics for a sinus infection and recognizing that her hormonal protection could be compromised she intended using a strapless FemCap as back-up. However the cap hurt her new partner, an escort candidate, and so she switched to an old Ortho 60mm All-Flex latex diaphragm that she had been fitted with several years earlier when she first came to St Lucy’s. Since she was still growing then and had become much more sexually experienced since she last had the diaphragm fit checked it was much too small to provide effective protection. She had dive sex with her new guy 7 times using the diaphragm in the week she was on the antibiotic and for an additional week after finishing the medicine while her hormonal protection was being reestablished. She was very newly preggers, having passed all earlier daily hCG tests required before diving each day. She opted for a menstrual extraction and was on her way an hour later having also been fitted with a new 70mm silicone All-Flex for protection during dive-sex. Because she was so early in her pregnancy there was no need to dilate her cervix to insert the small cannula for her ME. She was feeling achy after the procedure so rested the remainder of the day but she’s fine now.