By rights, this should probably be a monthly feature, but apparently this blog was a little off its cycle in July. Anyway, it's August now, so it's time for a new roundup of some interesting recent menstruation-related links! (And a reminder that if you ever see any fun period news on the web, you should absolutely send it my way! Never enough of that good good #periodcontent.)
1. Let's start with a fascinating new rehash of the question of whether periods are "natural" or "normal" or even necessary, which you may recall was the topic of week 4 of my Critical Menstruation Studies seminar. This time the debate is being held in a very modern milieu: the vegan blogosphere. Check out this piece from Broadly, "The Vegan Diet Bloggers Who Think Periods Are 'Not Natural.'" Someone should probably send them the Laura Jones piece from Women's Studies that we read in seminar, "Anthropological Fantasies in the Debate Over Cycle-Stopping Contraception." That would probably go over pretty well, right?
2. I finally finished the Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, which meant that I got to go back and listen to this episode of my friend Margaret's TV podcast that I'd been saving, which is split between a discussion of the show and a discussion of menstruation on television, both of which are great. I would love to talk more about the way different forms of media include or exclude storylines about menstruation.
3. Teen Vogue continues to be an A+ source of menstruation-based content, including this piece about a trans period activist doing some really interesting and provocative work on the topic of #bleedingwhiletrans and this one on how menstruation interacts with the observation of Ramadan.
4. Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner's newsletter Lenny Letter recently had a piece about menopause in nonhuman animals that brings up some more of the big question about "natural" and "normal" in a new way.
5. This one is really just a one-off joke, but I saw it made MANY times in light of some recent political events and I think it's a great example of talking about menstruation being used as a kind of currency in public discourse. And yeah. I definitely have.