Period shifting, a bloody good time!

A ten day supply of Norethisterone for shifting a menstrual period

An easy way to move your period: “If you are not taking the COCP ('the pill') then a hormone tablet called norethisterone can be prescribed. The dose is one tablet (5 mg) three times a day. You start three days before a period is due. It can be continued until you want to have a period. Your period will then normally begin 2-3 days after stopping it. It can be taken for up to 3-4 weeks if necessary. This is only for use on an occasional basis for special events, rather than something to be taken regularly.” The complete article can be read HERE.

A menstrual period is triggered by a decrease in a woman’s normal progestin production which causes the lining of the uterus, the endometrium, to slough off and be discharged as menstrual flow. Norethisterone is a progestin taken to maintain the woman’s progestin level to delay her period and can usually be taken safely but there can be typical hormonal side effects such as bloating, stomach upset, breast tenderness and decreased sex drive.

I’ve found that norethisterone works just as well to schedule a bleed when I will be with a partner who enjoys menstrual sex as avoiding bleeding if it will be at an inconvenient time. Norethisterone can be easily obtained from a pharmacy/chemists with an Rx from your medical practitioner or on the Internet. It does take some planning as you have to have the pills and begin three days before your period is scheduled to start. Then stop three days before you want to bleed. I haven’t used it that much, three or four times over the last ten years, but it has worked very well every time for me.  

A down side of period shifting is that it resets your cycle so that any electronic or manual menstrual calendar being kept has to be changed to track your cycle using the new CD1 date.

I thought I would write about this now as The Dryads (Bryony and Claire) and Bea all have been taking norethisterone so we could all bleed together over the May 30 Bank Holiday and the musky metallic scent of menstrual flow and coitial discharge permeates  the air in the ladies dressing room. It’s not a foul rotten meat smell, but is quite noticeable after changing diaphragms or menstrual cups during our holiday ‘period party’ so lots of air freshener is being used. Returning readers may recall that when my wards lived and exercised with me in Las Vegas they were all in menstrual synchrony with me.

All my circle of friends have copper bead GyneFix IUDs implanted so that they continue to cycle naturally with some having slightly heavier menstrual flow from the copper beads dissolving in their uteri. All have had their IUD strings removed so they can wear cervical barriers for flood insurance while having dive-sex and all have totally waxed pubes for ease of cleanup and displaying cameltoe. Now instead of an occasional string check they have periodic ultrasound scans to check correct GyneFix placement.  Since my wards have gone their separate ways when they visit they can synch up with me by taking norethisterone.

Since I’m CD3 and bleeding heavily over this holiday weekend we girls are having such fun enjoying menstrual sex with our lovers not worrying about the possibility of having a gushing incident just taking advantage of it should one occur. Tim as well as the men the girls brought to the castle for the holiday all love the scent, taste and look of a partner with her waxed pubes covered with menstrual and coitial discharge from them swimming in the red sea so we are all having a bloody good time.

Women, fertility and desire

Fertile: Is she or isn’t she?

Live Science
By Stephanie Pappas,
LiveScience Senior Writer
17 October 2010

Booty Call: How to Spot a Fertile Woman

Ask the average person how the menstrual cycle affects women's moods, and you're likely to get an earful about PMS, or premenstrual syndrome. While it's true that PMS symptoms are common (although not as stereotypical as usually believed), new research is finding women's behavior shifts at another point in the reproductive cycle: ovulation.

Two new studies in the November issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior find that women get a little wilder during their most fertile days of the month. One study found that fertile women are more open to the idea of hooking up with a stranger or acquaintance, while the second found that women with less masculine-looking partners are more likely to lust after strong-jawed men during fertile days than women with partners with manly mugs.

The new studies are two of more than 20 that have examined the effects of ovulation on the way women dress, talk and think. While it's not yet clear if or how these temporary changes affect women's relationships in the real world, they may by a key to humanity's past.

"The idea is you see the preferences that would have evolved ancestrally still show up," Steven Gangestad, a University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist and co-author on both new papers, told LiveScience.

Ovulation and lust

Until about a decade ago, most research on the menstrual cycle focused on PMS, which occurs after ovulation and before menstruation. Few people had investigated whether ovulation affected women, Martie Haselton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told LiveScience. (Ovulation occurs when a woman’s body releases an egg down the fallopian tube where it can meet up with Mr. Sperm.)

"Nobody was asking what happens on fertile or non-fertile days," Haselton said.

One reason no one had tackled the question is that researchers in human evolution had long assumed that ovulation didn't matter much in humans. Unlike other mammals, which go into "heat" during fertile periods, women can be up for sex any time of the month. Evolutionary theorists have tried at several explanations for the loss of this estrus cycle in humans, one of the most common being that humans lost the "heat" phase to conceal ovulation. If a man didn't know which sexual encounter would pass his genes along, the theory went, he'd be more likely to stick around and help raise offspring.

The problem is that men do seem to be able to tell when their partner is ovulating, albeit imperfectly. No one knows how men can tell (smell is one hypothesis), but several studies have found women report that men become more attentive and jealous around fertile days. One 2006 study published in Evolution and Human Behavior found that when women were fertile, their male partners saw other men as a greater threat to their dominance.

Another problem is that women do seem to have a "heat" phase, although it works very differently than in other mammals. It's not that women become more receptive to sex in the five or so days around ovulation, Gangestad said. It's that they want sex for different reasons.

"It may be experienced more as a kind of lust mid-cycle," Gangestad said. "Outside of mid-cycle, women may be more interested in sex for intimacy."

Multiple studies have found that women go for more masculine-looking men when they're ovulating. According to a 2008 review of research by Gangestad and his colleagues published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, some of the masculine traits fertile women prefer are strong-jawed faces, muscular bodies, dominant behaviors, deep voices and tallness.

Because most studies on the topic have been done on heterosexual women, little is known about how ovulation affects lesbians or bisexual women. One study, published online in May 2010 in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that ovulation boosted lesbian women's motivation to act on their desires for other women, while bisexual women showed smaller increases in motivation. While women's sexuality is more fluid than men's, study coauthor Lisa Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Utah, told LiveScience, the findings suggest that ovulation could be a window into the biologically-based component of female sexual orientation.

Girls gone fertile

Back in the more-studied world of heterosexual couples, Gangestad's most recently published study on female preferences finds that if a woman is partnered with a man without a masculine face, her eye is more likely to wander during her fertile days.

This wandering eye doesn't necessarily translate into a cheating heart. Most women probably notice nothing more than a "funny little feeling" of lust during their fertile days, Haselton said. But other studies have shown that the hormonal fluctuations surrounding ovulation do change women's attitudes and behavior.

For instance, fertile women seem to be more open than non-fertile women to the idea of taking "sexual pleasures where [they] find them," in the words of one question asked to participants in the study by Gangestad and his colleagues published in the November issue of Evolution and Human Behavior. They're also more likely to express interest in sleeping with an attractive stranger or someone they don't care about.

A 2006 study in the journal Hormones and Behavior found that women who had their pictures taken during fertile and non-fertile stints were judged to be trying harder to look nice on fertile days, suggesting the hormonal boost of ovulation may translate to real-life decision-making. The women's faces were blacked out, so judges could only go on hairstyles and clothes to make their assessments, said Haselton, who co-authored the paper. To avoid any menstruation effects, none of the women were photographed right before or during their periods.

"We saw that the effect was strongest for women who were photographed closest to the day of ovulation within the high-fertility window," Haselton said.

An online shopping experiment reveals fertile women are also more likely to choose sexy clothes and accessories than women who weren't fertile, according to the study published online in the Journal of Consumer Research in August. For those who aren’t as interested in sexy clothes, ovulation can mean more money. In a widely publicized study published in Evolution and Human Behavior in 2007, researchers found that ovulating strippers made an average of $30 more an hour than menstruating strippers and $15 more an hour than non-ovulating, non-menstruating strippers.

Do fertility fluctuations matter?

The big question, of course, is how much ovulation affects the real lives of the non-strippers among us. Do women give in to the temptation to cheat more often when fertile? (No one has found any evidence suggesting they do, Gangestad said.) And what about the massive number of women on the birth control pill? The pill halts ovulation and smoothes out monthly hormonal cycles, so do women on hormonal birth control act differently than those who aren't on the pill?

The answer to that question depends on whether women base any long-term relationship decisions on the changes that happen around ovulation, Haselton said. So far, none of the studies on the topic have shown that ovulation changes women's preferences for long-term mates, just short-term flings.

"Being on the pill does remove a lot of the variation in the changes in hormones across the cycle, so we certainly would expect it to have an impact on a woman's behavior," Haselton said. "But if it's only having an impact within that narrow range of fertility, then maybe it's not that big a deal."

From an evolutionary perspective, unraveling the question of ovulation could reveal a lot about how human reproduction evolved. It's possible that women really are trying to signal their fertility with sexy clothes, Haselton said, but it's more likely that the changes are side effects of the hormonal tides women experience throughout the month.

Perhaps women really did evolve to conceal ovulation but can't quite cover up all the side effects, Haselton said. "There may be a co-evolution arms race between women concealing and men detecting any cues that leak out."

Personal comment: I think this is an important article because it summarizes and to an extent explains in print so many of the psychological aspects of a woman’s menstrual cycle and how they affect her personality. Some women, especially dancers and those of us in the adult entertainment industry have known since we were teens how to use our hormonal fluctuations to increase our attractiveness to men. It’s instinctive, but can be developed into an art with a little practice. We have known for years that intimate performances while fertile can bring in a lot more money than the same routines when we aren’t. That is why my dancers and other entertainers at the casino don’t use hormonal contraceptives.

Copper IUDs are the contraceptive of choice for the younger girls and sterilization is popular for the older ones and gas guards are now commonly worn by professionals even when no dive-sex is anticipated so if while receiving oral her client blows into her vagina the likelihood that he will give her an embolism is greatly reduced. Guy’s wanting to ‘blow-up-a-pussy’ has become very popular here recently. Initially that caused a lot of concern because it’s not good business to tell a client no. Fortunately it is just a matter of a girl being fitted for a diaphragm to use as a gas guard and she’s good to go. Personally I’m a lot more likely to try risky things with risky men while I’m fertile than when I’m not, although when I’m menstrual I’m almost as adventuresome.

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.