The Society for Menstrual Cycle Research
Meets 5-7 June in Chicago
The Center for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Illinois
at Chicago hosts the 12th conference of The Society for Menstrual Cycle
Research next month, celebrating 20 years of the organization. The theme
is "Looking Forward, Looking Back: The Place
of Women's Everyday Live's in Health Research."
Some of the many presentations are Hormones and Behavior, The Medicalization
of Menopause, Modeling Menstrual Cycle Changes, The Female Body in Popular
Culture, and three of the many speakers are MUM Board
of Directors member Barbara Czerwinski (you've read about her in
previous News sections several times), Martha McClintlock and Susan
Love.
Harry Finley (that's me) will give a brilliant
promotion of your MUM, the Museum of Menstruation. My tap-dancing lessons
haven't started yet with MUM Board of Directors member Miki
Walsh, so onlookers will have to settle for a sizzling
pitch for my bèbè, The Museum.
It costs $200 for non-members of SMCR to attend the full session, and
there are accommodations available.
Have Feminine Hygiene
Fun in New York!
Susannah Perlman,
who wrote and is writing and performing in a series of comedy sketches about tampons and other things dear
to women, visited MUM last week for catamenial facts.
She brought a "How's it going?" from her friend Beth Littleford, who interviewed the director of MUM for a funny and well-done
broadcast on TV's Comedy Central last December.
If you are in New York, see Susannah's Fried Eggs show at nine p.m. every Sunday at Velvet, 167 Avenue A (10th-11th) for eight
bucks, which includes one cold beverage, OR on Friday, May 20 and Saturday, May 31 at Surf
Reality at eight p.m. That's at 172 Allen (two blocks
below Houston). She says the $10 admission includes sheer entertainment!
The phone number at Surf Reality is (212) 673-4182, and Susannah's own phone
number is (212) 475-1284.
Oops! Read More About the fax
Contest
Another visitor - as a matter of fact, the brother of Susannah Perlman in the item
above, who accompanied her and brought his wife and eighteen-month-old son
Josh to MUM -
pointed out that in the undated promotional literature for the tampon fax
here at MUM, we read the following:
Twenty million women have been buying
external napkins for fifteen years or more. During the past two years or
more 2% of these women have purchased, used and adopted the internal napkin
and notwithstanding the fact that little or nothing has been done effectively
to merchandise this type of item the number of users is increasing rapidly.
If I interpret this right, "external napkins"
in the first sentence means "disposable napkins," since women
have been using napkins probably for thousands of years. The first widely
successful disposable was Kotex, introduced in 1920, but extensively advertised
from 1921. So we can estimate the year
of this promotional sheet as around 1935. Two years
before that is 1933, "or more" making it maybe 1932. If all this is true, fax would be the earliest
tampon that I know of, since the earliest Sears catalog
advertisement for Wix that I have is 1934; Tampax appeared in 1936. The last sentence in the quote seems to lessen
the chances of finding a fax ad before 1935 (or so).
Start flipping those newspaper pages,
folks!
Oh, by the way, baby Josh is the youngest
person to have visited MUM!
The Japanese Ponied Up on Tampons
Kelly Coyne of the Red
Spot menstruation
Web site (I mentioned it two weeks ago) e-mailed an answer to a
question I had posed last year: What
is the Japanese pony tampon? She said it was an example of origami, the Japanese art
of paper folding, and a very old practice. Does pony refer to the form (!) of the tampon, to the fact that
a woman sort of sits on a tampon (but then she does that even more with
a pad), or to a story associated with menstruation, or what? Kelly says she'll tell us more when she finds out.
Be Skeptical
About Health Risks
I am a health news junkie, I admit, just like millions
of other Americans; you may be too. But Dr. Marcia Angell, the executive
editor of The New England Journal of
Medicine, wrote in the The New York Times Magazine recently that
we should all RELAX!
In Overdosing on
Health Risks she points out that
Even though breast cancer is the most common cause of
cancer death in women in their 40's, the disease still affects fewer than
2 percent of women in this age group. After age 50, the death rate from
breast cancer rises rapidly, but over a woman's lifespan, it lags behind
lung-cancer deaths and never comes close to the death rate from heart disease.
Heart attacks kill about six times
as many women as breast cancer [color added]. Still,
many women fear breast cancer far more. Because of this fear, the risk
seems much larger than it is.
She says too that the public expects each report of health
research to be the last word, but that
this news is mostly meant for other researchers, who seldom regard it as
definitive. The public feels jerked around by the scientific
community, and finally thinks that scientists don't know what they're talking
about.
Read the whole two-page article; it cleared up my mental
sinuses.
Generic Premarin Not Approved
A cheaper form of the most
widely prescribed drug in America, the estrogen replacement drug Premarin, won't
be available for now, because the Food and Drug administration found the generic form not to be identical to the original
product.
Placental Defect Found in Preeclampsia
In the recent Journal of Clinical Investigation,
researchers from the University at San Francisco report that the
failure of the placenta to correctly attach to the wall of the uterus causes
the fetus to not receive enough blood, giving rise to the condition known
as preeclampsia. Symptoms include high blood pressure and protein
in the urine, both indicating kidney damage. Untreated, it can lead to eclampsia,
characterized by convulsions, kidney failure and death.
Babies born to mothers having the condition frequently are small
and may have birth defects associated with insufficient nutrients, caused by the restriction of the blood to the fetus.
Neither aspirin nor calcium supplements, previously thought to prevent
the condition, are effective.
Preeclampsia seems to mostly affect women having their first
pregnancies, especially those over 35 or under 20.
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