Paid Menstrual Leave: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

       The 1906 supreme court case Muller vs State of Oregon determined that women should be restricted to working ten-hour work days.   The court determined that because of their biological needs, women made up a social class all their own and needed "special protection" under the law.  
       Most feminists of the era supported the court’s decision.  Its overturn in 1923 under Chief Justice Taft allowed women to work as long as men. This was viewed as a major step backward for women's rights.

       The catch is you have to hand your boss a bloody pair of underwear.  Other than that, menstrual leave is a shimmering display of perks: doesn’t detract from sick days or vacation time, is available up to three days every month, and (most importantly) it's paid leave.   Forget the jelly-of-the-month club.  Forget the bonus.  I want paid menstrual leave.
It’s already a practice in countries like Japan, Korea, and the Philippines (where yes, some employers require evidence that the woman has begun menstruating, such as bloodied undergarments).  The logic tends to be that periods are a part of a woman’s body that can cause pain, and when this occurs the worker, her work environment, and the work she produces would increase in quality with a few days of rest in times of physical stress.  Menstrual leave is treated similarly to maternity leave, in theory.
But this is a system that removes a woman from the work environment for “health” reasons exclusively linked to her existence as a female.  It’s the battle between ability and integrity girls fight from the time they can do anything and be potentially out-done by boys.  Run faster, throw harder...the cliché suburban backyard activities that become rivalries as soon as more than one sex is involved.  Equalling or surpassing boys is no problem in the pigtail days, until that pesky process called puberty gives little Alex next door tight biceps like stolen fruit.  The girls are left with flimsy training bras and what should be an alarming case of chronic hemorrhaging and the realization that God really did screw them over after all.

        So how do we maintain professional equality (if we had it in the first place) when the biology of male and female bodies are inherently unequal?  Feminist critics of paid menstrual leave point out that the practice reinstates stigmas and stereotypes of women, the idea that a woman needs to be taken care of like some delicate garment tossed in the wash.  Most women neither want nor need menstrual leave.
      I'm not one of these women.  In fact, I'm the kind of women the others would avoid in the break room and I'd be forced to eat my bologna and cheddar sandwich in the mop closet with a fatherly and friendly custodian instead.  I both want paid menstrual leave and have a medical history that supports this desire as an arguable necessity.  The practice of paid menstrual leave probably won't be adopted in the US within my lifetime.  There will be days that I go to work when I probably shouldn't, since my drugs are the ones teens use to get high and I technically shouldn't "operate machinery," which I'm only 86% sure includes driving a motor vehicle.  I won't take time off work and I won't ask for it, because every time I brings memories of the middle school days, when the nurse refused to recognize my doctor’s notes and the days I missed for period pain were marked as unexcused absences.  She said it was impossible to give a free pass to every girl having a bad day.  If I had been quicker—maybe a bit more bold—I might have mentioned that not every girl was asking for one.

Because the EFA Blossom Ball Must Go Something Like This...

      “You go into parts of Asia which are booming and said to be the future and you can find very quickly in rural China or rural India, relations between the sexes that remind you of the Middle Ages, remind you of notions of women being owned by men and being treated and abused in a way that is really unconscionable.  So much of that control has been about sex and about the way in which women’s sexual life has been denied, misunderstood, repressed.
       I think that it is so important that in the United States, in the Western world, this process of liberating women continue and not simply be a matter of signing a piece of paper and giving the right to vote and things like that, but a much broader sense of understanding the complexities of the troubles women have in a way that, you know society has focused on the troubles that men have had for two or three thousand years.
       I think in order to do that, what better cause than this one.  Because endometriosis is precisely a cause with the kind of taboos, the stigmas, the silence, the complications that attach in some ways to women’s health issues and has been misdiagnosed and misunderstood and has not had the kind of attention it deserves for precisely this reason.
       So when I look at all of us here in New York, in the United States in 2009, I think this is the right cause, this is the right place, this is the right time, so thank you all very much for being here.”
Fareed Zakaria
2009 Blossom Ball



       Cocktails, dinner, and dancing are included, along with the obscure promise of “preferred seating,” so dad and I pretend $2,500 is a reasonable admission price and that we belong at a red carpet event to begin with, dad in his funeral suit and me in my prom dress from junior year.  There were cheaper tickets that didn’t include the food or drinks, but dad said if he was going to the “period convention” he’d need the alcohol.  
       Dad doesn’t stand out.  The crowd is half gynecologists, half superstars, and dad favors the former.  He's a hospital pharmacist.  He blends in with the doctors, even recognizes a few of them (Dad also thinks he sees Tyra Banks, but he can’t be sure because we’ve never seen Tyra in person).  The Cipriani 25 Broadway venue has the look of a cathedral, with smooth structural arches and ceiling murals that belong in a Kiera Knightly period piece—if the period piece were actually about periods.  
       I’m half as old as most of the women here, blatantly seventeen, not even old enough to drink from the martini glass waiting at our table.  Most of the diseased women here probably have a tale like Padma Lakshmi, cofounder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America (and former Top Chef hostess; she also organizes and plans the gala down to the seasons for the side dishes): painful periods from a young age, misdiagnosis for years, an eventual endometriosis diagnosis and—against all odds—the ability to still have children after all, or adopt.
Endometriosis diagnosis is usually over a ten year process from the moment their doctor decides something is wrong to the day they confirm something is.  By then the main concern is fertility—as it should be—along with cleaning the gunk out of the abdomen that’s been congealing organs longer than I’ve been alive.  I’m young to already be diagnosed, and even though that’s what this Blossom Ball is for (awareness and early detection so future women won’t suffer as much from the disease), because four years of periods causes a lot less damage than twenty, I feel wrong for sitting at the same table as women who know what it’s really like to have endometriosis, making bad period jokes with my dad because the napkins and centerpieces are red.
It’s time for the speeches to begin.  This is the part dad and I came to see: the emotional, hormonal, middle aged women talking about their “miracle babies” and how pain isn’t normal, because that’s how the endometriosis story goes.
I’m at a stage where I have nothing left to solve.  The endometrium hasn’t been festering in my body long enough to impact fertility or stick my organs together or rupture an ovary.  I’m free from most of the fears and hassles and concerns of having endometriosis because I already know I have endometriosis.  All that’s left is the pain—and not one of these black-tied billionaire gynecologists attending the ball can tell me what causes the pain or how to stop it.
Dad makes another inappropriate period joke.  The first celebrity speaker walks up to the podium as we snuff our laughs out from behind blood-red napkins.
       What I need for her to talk about is being a teenager.  Not to briefly mention the feeling that something was wrong, but to explain how they dealt with knowing something is wrong, and that its name is endometriosis, and that when your doctor first mutters it you can’t pronounce the word, because you’re still in middle school, still in speech therapy, and can't make the r sound.  I want this celebrity to share what it was like to know exactly why her cramps were worse then her friends, that she wasn’t going to “grow out of them.”  That’s the real reason I’m at this ball.  Someone needs to tell the true story of endometriosis, about how you leave home for the first time and you're on the phone with your parents, unable to stop crying, unable to stop chanting it hurts, it hurts, and that your father, who can fix anything, just listens.  You can hear him nodding through the phone.  He says he’s sorry, and calls you pumpkin, then hands the phone to your mom so you can cry with her.  What is amazing about this story is your parents no longer try to help.  They offer no advice.  You have endometriosis, and you have pain, and that cannot—will not—change.
  The celebrity doesn’t have endometriosis.  She’s the intro speaker, but her ethos is boosted by fame.  She introduces Padma, who introduces Dr. Seckin (the second cofounder), who introduces an authentic, diseased celebrity.  Each speech is under six minutes, and I’m impressed because the brevity limits the bull crap.  Speakers like Whoopi Goldberg bring immediacy to the idea of "awareness," because it's too late for those who have already suffered, and for those like me who know they have a lot more suffering ahead of them.  We deserve a night to be angry at our disease, to taunt it.  Look at us, and look at this fabulous party we threw.  We have celebrities on our side.  We're not afraid to talk about you any more.  And most importantly, we're in control of what happens next.


       "I’m going to say this loud enough for the press to hear it…We have a duty tonight.  Everybody, and guys this for you as well because I know you know women.  You have a duty tonight.  You only have to tell one other person what you heard.  Just tell them what you heard, or ask them have you ever heard of this?  If the answer is no, share what you learn tonight.

That’s all.  You don’t have to do anything else.  You just have to tell somebody else.  You have to take whatever stigma people think that is there.  You have to take it.  It’s not male or female.  It has nothing to do with that.  It has to do with, here’s a disease you don’t know about and you need to know about it.  It’s that simple.  It’s not rocket science."
Whoopi Goldberg
2009 Blossom Ball

The Famous Insides of Marilyn Monroe

       In the late nineteenth century, menstrual madness was considered a side effect of being a woman.  The main symptoms were severe menstrual cramps and "hysteria."  In 1872, A physician named Robert Battey developed the treatment that would be known as Battey’s Operation, in which a surgeon removed a woman’s ovaries.  This operation became a  popular and common treatment for both period pain and madness, both in Europe and the United States.  

       The best part about gagging in the McDonald’s drive thru line over pictures of my ovaries is they weren’t even my ovaries, just the bloody insides of a random woman my mom found in Google images.  I hadn't allowed myself to see the surgical photos (for a mature reason: insides are icky) and mom figured that from the passenger seat, I could’t run.  She keeps pictures on her phone and likes to show them off, because the amount of endometrium found between my rectum and my uterus was "impressive" for a teenager, though it was only a clump only the size of a thumbnail.  Even with this admirable mass visible in the pictures, I doubt I could sell them for $54, 000 each.

       This was the final dollar amount an x-ray from one of Marilyn Monroe’s surgeries auctioned for in 1954, eight years before the end of Marilyn’s thirty-six year life.  The half-million dollar photograph was from an operation relating to her endometriosis complications, a disease doctors in Marilyn's day knew only slightly less about than they know today.  Marilyn had painful periods, difficulty becoming pregnant, and one known ectopic pregnancy (common in endometriosis  patients).  Her era of fame and endo pain followed the height of popularity for Battey’s Operation, and experts still widely suggested the removal of female reproductive organs as a one-and-done cure for menstrual pain.  This is likely the reason Marilyn is said to have scribbled a handwritten note begging the surgeon to leave her organs--and potential to have children--intact.  Legend states she stuck the note to her lower stomach for the surgeons to find.

Today Marilyn is the poster child for endometriosis.  Her scars are sex icons and her fame remains defiant.  The fun fact about her auctioned x-ray stays close to the hearts of endo patients, offering a fantasy that one day the pain will be worth something.

The Royal Pains and Treatments of Queen Victoria

In the Victorian Era, periods were known as the “feminine disorder,” a constant sickness for women.  Cramps—“a weakness of the womb”—were thought to leave women physically, mentally, and emotionally inferior to men,  susceptible to disease and prone to fainting spells.  Treatments for severe menstrual cramps ranged from blood letting and leeching to tonics and religious purifications.

Queen Victoria’s options for painkiller were limited to pregnancy and marijuana.  Being royalty, she chose both.
The queen had nine children in all, a high statistic for her era (literally "her" era, the Victorian Era).  She is famous for openly hating babies, pregnant women, and the state of being pregnant. It is speculated that she put up with the discomfort of pregnancy because it temporarily halted her periods, as pregnancy tends to do.  She suffered from painful menstrual cramps, and her symptoms so nearly resemble endometriosis that the diagnosis is now a widely accepted and indisputable fact.  (What I mean to say is that her name and image graces every official “Famous People With Endometriosis” list found on the internet).  
       It is confirmed from her diary records that she lived with abnormally painful menstrual cramps, and it is also confirmed that her husband sought out the best doctors the crown could command to cure the  queen of her "weakness of the womb."  One of these doctors prescribed cannabis to help with both period pain and the discomfort of childbirth.  The queen's monthly drug habit was a widely known fact in the kingdom, which by the end of Queen Victoria was an empire on which “the sun never set.”
Today women with endometriosis and any form of severe menstrual pain have more options—which is both a plus and minus.  My own transgression from pain to painkillers went as follows.

1) Tylenol and two Advil.
2) Probably overdosing on Advil.
3) Low-strength birth control, still lots of Advil.
4) Different birth control, more Advil.
5) Another birth control, upgrade to Naproxen.
6) Birth control attempt #4.  Still Naproxen.  Tylenol in between.
7) Tramadol=controlled substance=awkward conversations with the school nurse
8) Laparoscopic surgery—Endometriosis diagnosis.
9) Tramadol, Anaprox, new birth control.
10) Add some nausea medicine for the new birth control.
11) Ultrasound.  Slightly different birth control.
12) Ladies and gentlemen: another birth control.

The process will continue, a few tweaks with each check up, but curing my pain isn’t going to be a simple process because endometriosis isn’t curable.  Like any disease, endometriosis (and period pain in general) is a constant stressor.  Many endo patients turn to stronger narcotics than Tramadol.  Pain is a gateway drug, and so is endometriosis.  
       Not all of us can afford monthly doses of pot or constant pregnancies.  Those are luxuries  reserved for royalty.  And we can't all be the queen.

Cards Against Humanity (But Not Feminism)

        Scientists have discovered that stem cells are released in menstrual blood, and recent science is attempting to use these cells in place of stem cells from bone marrow, umbilical cords, or placentas.  Menstrual blood is constantly available, a better specimen than cells from bone marrow, and is without the ethical issues of embryonic cells.  Already specimens collected from women have successfully grown into cardiac, neural, and bone and cartilage cells.  The hope is these stems cells will one day cure diseases like diabetes and Parkinson's.

       One of the links tweeted on the Steminist Organization's twitter page--which has over 4.7 thousand followers and features one-liners like "That moment when you're the only woman in the room and a man comments on your skirt"-- takes you to a USAToday article on the new scholarship opportunity Cards Against Humanities has created for female students in STEM.
      STEM is the newfound American fad, pushed by high school guidance counselors and endorsed by pop culture like Big Bang Theory.  Careers in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) are growing in pay and demand, and feminists and the Steminist Organization are making sure women are given equal opportunity and recognition in these formerly male-dominated fields—a goal apparently shared with the creators of Cards Against Humanity.

        It’s called the Cards Against Humanity Science Ambassador Scholarship, and it awards women (or, on an interesting note, anyone identifying as a woman in a “significant” way) full four-year undergraduate tuition in a STEM field.  The scholarship is funded by the proceeds collected from the card game’s new Science Pack, a collection of cards with phrases like “In line with our predictions, we find a robust correlation between ______ and ______,” to be completed with “Driving into a tornado to learn about tornadoes,” “Giving a dolphin a hand job for science,” or simply “Uranus.”

         Scholarship applications start the fall of 2016, and a panel of 40 STEM women judges has already been determined to evaluate the applicants.  Board member Veronica Berns issued a statement explaining how women are told in multiple ways not to get involved with science or math careers strictly because they are female, and this scholarship is a way of saying, "Yes! What you are doing and dreaming is really great, and here's some help to get you where you want to go."  A woman's value in STEM fields goes past the stem cells she bleeds.