Lunapads Blog

Last week Suzanne and I attended a talk given by legendary women’s health pioneer Dr. Christiane Northrup.  While I fully expected to hear something very inspiring, her talk exceeded my expectations and she absolutely rocked the house. She was funny, personal, knowledgeable, totally in her power and perhaps most importantly got all 500+ of us in the audience to move and get into our hips.

True story: she and her gorgeous pole dancer daughter Kate led us all in a raucous booty-swaggering exercise (to “Fire” from the Pointer Sisters, no less!) to wake up our female mojo, which according to the good doctor is the locus of our wellness, wisdom and creativity as women. It was awesome.

 

It got me thinking: how much of a stretch is it to suggest that hips is actually a metaphor for vulva, or better yet to use the fiercely powerful word reclaimed by our friend and author inga muscio, cunt? After all, it’s not just bones we are talking about here, but what’s between them, which is where things really get interesting. This train of thought in turn inspired me to contemplate what might be going on with respect to being more in touch with our “hip” power and saying goodbye to disposable pads and tampons.

To be blunt: tampons suck. Literally! They are full of chemicals and plastics that are expressly designed to suck whatever is inside of us out. Oh, and then get “discreetly” chucked in the garbage, but I digress (although this point also has relevance to this conversation!) My question is: what else is getting sucked out (literally and figuratively) along with our menses? Here are a few ideas: our natural vaginal moisture, our self esteem, our mojo.

Speaking of mojo, Dr. Northrup’s message has got me fired up enough to share something here that I have not to this point discussed, even offline: in addition to all of the other benefits of switching to Lunapads and the DivaCup that we here at Lunapads like to natter on about incessantly (you know, boring old saving money and the planet etc etc) one of the things that shifted for me after I stopped using tampons and switched to cloth pads was that I started having better orgasms.

Yes, ladies, you heard it here first (and I am blushing, but whatever) but I am going there because if there is anything that we must unlearn and fight against (along with shame around menstruation and other body-related issues) it is shame around sexuality. In the case of orgasms and menstruation, it’s all happening in the same place after all, so it seems perfectly natural that they are connected.

Maybe it was because I was better lubricated? Makes sense from a physiological perspective, but I think there’s more to it: further to my earlier comments about suckiness and what else might be being depleted as a result, there is something very not gentle, very not loving and very not fun about tampons. So it kind of makes sense to me that if we stop putting things that are not gentle, loving, fun etc in our female temples then perhaps they will be more juicy, happy, healthy, powerful, creative and so on. Looking back, I see it as no coincidence that at the same time I dumped tampons for Lunapads I also broke up with my then-boyfriend and started a business.

Another tangential (and again, purely anecdotal) thought here is fertility: I have heard on way more than one occasion from customers who were having trouble conceiving having things fall into place after letting go of disposables. You wouldn’t deliberately put a bunch of potentially toxic plastic and chemicals into a room where your kid was playing after they were born: what might the consequences be of doing it before?

What do you think? This is a huge and rich topic that has inspired at least two more follow up posts, and I would love to hear from you about it. Have I crazily confessed some personal information and ideas that may be totally unrelated, or has anything that you have read here struck a chord? Has your sense of personal mojo (whatever this might mean to you) changed since making the switch to Lunapads and the Diva Cup?