March 8, 2011 marks the hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD). In keeping with our annual tradition, we are celebrating at Lunapads by offering 20% off everything on the site for 3 days as a thank you to all of our fabulous customers. While we’re at it, we are also going to be donating 1% of total sales to Pads4Girls during the sale.
Today is an exciting day at Lunapads: we’re sending out our largest Pads4Girls shipment ever!
Pads4Girls is an in-house project where we sell cost-priced daily hygiene kits to customers and non-profit groups to give to women and girls in developing countries. It can be hard to imagine, but lacking something as everyday as panties, pads or tampons is preventing girls in many parts of the world from going to school. Girls can miss up to 20% of their education, which can spiral into earlier dropout, marriage and childbirth, increased chances of maternal mortality, reduced career choices and wages, and a less empowered life overall.
Many of you have probably already heard of Chris Guillebeau and his wonderful book, the Art of Non-conformity: Set your own rules, Live the life you want and Change the world. For those of you who know of him and are also Lunapads and DivaCup fans, it will come as no surprise that I find Chris’s work to be singularly validating and inspiring: it also reminds me a lot of you, our amazing customers and community.
His message is essentially this: “Psst – you don’t actually have to do things the “right” way, or even necessarily do them at all: there are ways to imagine and live your life in a unique way, in accordance with what really matters to you, that will provide a rich and rewarding legacy if you are up for it.” Basically, it’s a heart-centered crash course in big picture creative thinking: I devoured it.
The end of the year is always a good time for reflection on the past, and this year is particularly meaningful to us: 10 years ago, Lunapads became an incorporated company!
As some of you may know, I started developing Lunapads and Lunapanties in 1993, and also operated a fashion boutique and artisanal garment factory from 1995-1998. At the end of 1998 I closed the store and factory and set myself to the solo task of building Lunapads: to be honest, it was a lonely struggle.
December 6th is a painful day for any Canadian old enough to remember the horrific events that took place 21 years ago on this date. The murder of 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique (an additional 14 men and women were also shot, but survived) by a lone gunman shocked and devastated the nation, and engendered a disturbing debate about the state of violence against women overall.
Whether one looks back on the incident as the work of a random lunatic or as an extreme point on a continuum of violence against women that continues to permeate our culture, to me the point is to honor the memory of these innocent young women whose lives were so tragically cut short. Please take a moment to read their names, and consider that we have not only lost them as sisters, daughters, friends, and partners, but in the case of the 12 who were engineering students, as women who bravely sought to create their careers in a traditionally male-dominated profession.
December 6th is now Canada’s National Day for Remembrance and Action Against Violence Against Women.
When do the new TSA “security” scanners and searches go too far?
Many of you will by now have heard about a recent incident with a woman who was wearing a GladRags cloth pantyliner and was subjected to an invasive and highly traumatic groin search as a result of the “unusual” appearance of the pantyliner in the scanner. I very much appreciated GladRags’ response which was; rather than warn women not to wear their GladRags on flights, to instead encourage them to do so, as a means to educate TSA personnel that menstruating women wearing cloth pads is in fact perfectly normal, and not “unusual” at all.
For Pete’s sake, what are women supposed to do? Not use anything when they’re having their period and traveling by plane? Makes you wonder how disposable menstrual products show up on these scans, or what response a DivaCup would elicit for TSA security folks? Think about it… what percentage of women are bleeding at any given time and could be affected by this?
Of the many excellent people Suzanne and I met on a recent trip to Las Vegas for the ABC Kids Expo trade show, Karen Wells, co-host (along with the fabulous Erica Matteson) of Pregnancy Place Radio, was a standout. Karen and Erica are doulas with a thriving practice and a keen interest in women’s health and natural products that they have charismatically taken to the airwaves. They thoughtfully interviewed a ton of the many manufacturers represented at the show, ourselves included (click here to hear it!)
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.
The title of this post is a little dig at U by Kotex, whose name implies that “U” (ie you) are authored by someone else – in this case, Kotex. (I may be reasonably accused of reading too much into it, though!) I’ll have more thoughts on that idea in a moment, but where I’m going right now is that we have recently been inspired by an article about stereotypes of cloth diapering Moms/parents, and there has been some discussion about what (if any) stereotypes of cloth menstrual pad users might be out there – let’s check it out.
So what kind of person uses cloth pads? (I simply love this collage of actual Lunapads customers that Lisa created!) My personal view is first that there are so (relatively) few of us natural menstrual product users that we would be hard pressed to come up with more than one or two bona fide stereotypes. My second thought is that in all my years of selling Lunapads, the DivaCup, etc – while I have noticed certain consistent characteristics (for example age, political awareness, environmental consciousness, being closely connected to other women, and yes indeed as we shall soon see, cloth diapering) I would not feel confident identifying types who choose to wash their pads and cups. As an example, I have seen “mainstream” women wearing suits and high heels be totally open to the idea, while their Birkenstock-wearing, ostensibly “crunchy” sisters have said “ewwww” and turned aside: in other words, you just never can tell.
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The Girls Rock Camp Alliance is a volunteer-run, non-profit organization where girls 8 to 18 can learn an instrument, form a band, write music, and rock out with other girls. If that’s not awesome enough for you, it’s also a place where girls attend self defense, body image, zine making, screen printing, and other self-esteem building workshops led by female mentors.
The very first ever Rock n’ Roll Camp for Girls took place in Portland in 2001 — since then, camps have sprung up all over the world, and now more than 700 girls are mentored every year. This year, we’re sending gift certificates and Teen Booklets to the Girls Rock Camp Vancouver campers, and gift packs for the volunteers and organizers, too.
My own experience of being so profoundly influenced by the riot grrrl movement as a teenager makes it easy for me to wax poetic about how heartening and inspiring this all is.. but I’ll let the girls speak for themselves:
