Egyptian Scribbles: red tent

Wednesday, 7 November 2007

5 days of bleeding and still alive... just

In the South Park movie, Mr. Garrison admits his suspicions about women: “I don’t trust anything that bleeds for 5 days and doesn’t die.” Sometimes I also don’t trust this thing that insists on regularly bleeding and I wish I could escape it entirely! As yet another period approaches, and I face another series of sleepless nights, I began to reflect on the extreme discomfort that insists on visiting every month…

Anita Diamant has written a novel called “The Red Tent.” This title refers to a red tent where women in nomadic tribes used to congregate. Once a month, the women set up this tent and refused to move. They were obviously all on the same cycle and they would sit in the tent, gossip, bleed and … who knows… Cry? Shout? Moan?

Periods are strange and dominating things in my life. Every month, I find my body is taken over by what I call “my period self.” For about three days before my period, and for a couple of days afterwards, an alter being moves in under my skin, creating strange electrical currents down my arms and legs and into my stomach. I can still feel my calmer, rational, happy person there inside, but the period self insists on taking control. I am convinced that this period self is a manic depressive on crack. She takes an overdose of amphetamines and then inserts herself into my body. My mind begins to work over time. I get over-stimulated by ideas, I start attempting to do (literally) ten things at once and I can’t sleep at night. This might seem like a good time to be hyper productive… but no. While my mind is jumping up and down and doing somersaults, my concentration levels also deplete and I become overwhelmingly exhausted. So, basically, I walk around like an over-caffeinated crack addict who hasn’t slept for a month. It’s not a great feeling… particularly when it’s coupled with sharply painful stomach cramps.

I used to despair whenever this period self took up residence. I thought my life was doomed and I would never recover. I now recognize her face, know that she is only passing through, and I try to focus on the fact that I only need to endure her for 10 days. The problem is… I’m only left with 20 days of (relative) sanity in every month.

Where’s my red tent???

Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."