The helpless princess and her rescuer

There is feminist movement going on that aims to empower women and make us feel equal to men. I love the idea of equality of all adults. When I was a child I wanted equality of all children. I used to get punished because such rebellious views did not fit well with my father's views. Before I entered puberty, I was treated equally for the most part and then one day everything changed. One day I was expected to be the one to wash dishes. clean the house, learn to cook, and in general stay inside the house. While my brothers were supposed to rake the yard, wash the vehicle, run errands, ride bicycles, play outside and in general, just have more fun than me.  I couldn't understand why anyone would want to make such a distinction between my brothers and I, so I rebelled. I said no. I said no to washing dishes when I didn't dirty them just because I was a girl. I said no to cleaning with no help from my brothers just because I was a girl. I said no to coming inside the house as soon as the sun set just because I was a girl. I rebelled and I was vocal about why I was doing it, so after a while, my mother started to understand me a bit more. My father, on the other hand was not that flexible. He was set in his ways, so I just got punished for being disobedient over and over again, until he got tired.

And so I grew up to be a feminist.

Childfree Women

Nobody understands when a woman says she doesn't want children. It is passed over as her not finding the right man as yet, her biological clock just isn't ticking yet, or she's just going through a phase. It seems most people believe that women should have babies simply because god gave them the plumbing to do it. It is also seen as a strange thing for a woman to be married and still not desire a child. Some women, however, just don't want to have children. Children are a major responsibility with questionable benefits, so some person choose not to burden themselves with this responsibility. Some women may not even think of it as a burden, but simply have no desire towards making babies.

People assume that there is only one path to life, education, job, marriage, children, die. When I was only a wee teenager I realized just how boring that sequence could be and decided to take another route on my way to death (since we're all living to die). That path has come to be about travelling, learning about different cultures, working and living in various countries, writing and researching, among others. That plan has no room for family house mortgage, mini van or expelling large objects from my body that make me ill during and after pregnancy.

Now, it may not be easy to see how a baby would poop on my seemingly flexibly plans, but let me provide some enlightenment. A 2014 Huffington post article by Emily Thomas stated that raising a child in the US from age zero to 17 costs approximately US$304,000 . Consider the delivery of a child alone, that's easily US$10,000. That's over a million Japanese yen. That would significantly cut into my budget for eating, drinking tea and travelling to two three countries per year. In fact, it may eliminate any such plans whatsoever. This is just a monetary issue though, so if you are rich, that won't be an issue. The thing is though, how many people are rich enough to take three vacations per year to exotic places like greenland, Palau, South Africa and still maintain a child? Even without a child in the picture, I would have to work really hard to achieve my travel dreams, so imagine, having an extra plane seat to pay for and other child related expenses. 

Consider my desire to work in various countries. Again, I would need to consider international schools that are usually expensive. Think of the child's well being. Would a child be happy going from school to school just because of her mother's busy life? I don't think so. That may lead to mental problems in a child, learning problems, mental disorders due to not enough family times and no close network of friends, since he/she never spends enough time in one location to make any real friends.

Another thing, if a woman doesn't want children, she probably isn't overflowing with maternal instincts. She would probably suffer serious depression if she were forced into a situation where she had to have a child. Given the hardships experienced by pregnant women and mothers, a woman should be mentally ready to sacrifice her body, money and time for the child. Otherwise, she will probably be miserable and lose interest in her own life. That kind of thing is what leads to crazy mothers killing their babies and sometimes killing themselves too.

Source of the cost of raising a child: Huffington Post article by Emily Thomas: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/18/cost-of-raising-a-child_n_5688179.html

Periods and other punctuation marks in our lives

This is a stolen idea from a friend's Facebook post. It's about periods and I don't mean the ones that feature in books.

How is it that in 2014, with all the advances in technology, women still use pads and tampons to deal with their periods? The process of dealing with this monthly issue is so archaic, messy and uncomfortable that most women still suffer tremendously and suffer in silence because they are very shy to talk about it.

I often hear that women should celebrate their periods and think of it as a gift. However, how is that kind of thinking possible with an endless flow of blood gathering between your legs that at some point promises to overflow and embarrass the daylights out of you? How is that possible, when the bleeding goes on for days on end and everything below the neck hurts? Perspective is important, but when one has to take 6 to 12 pills per day just to deal with menstrual cramps, positive thinking goes out the door.

Some women have decided to use contraceptives to somehow control their periods, but still they have to use pads and tampons to deal with it a few times per year. For these women, when they start using the contraceptives, they may bleed lightly (spot) everyday for a few MONTHS while their bodies get adjusted to having the extra hormones in its system.  Seriously, how is that acceptable? These contraceptives also have potentially disastrous side effects that have created many horror stories for some women from becoming overweight and not being able to reproduce  to hip replacement surgery. Yes, that's what you read, hip replacement surgery!

The Facebook post that I mentioned earlier  posed some interesting solutions that didn't sound too difficult to attain  in the future, however, they would require some amount of medical research. The post proposed a procedure

• where a woman would visit the doctor once per month so that her entire period could be removed at once
• where a woman could take some medicine that would expel the entire period at once
• where a woman's period producing body parts would be removed and stored by something like a cryo clinic then when she's ready to reproduce, it could be re-installed

To this list I would like to add, 

• a procedure whereby the period is suspended by a drug until the woman is ready to reproduce
• alternatives to pads and tampons ( in this regard, I must say some advancements have occurred. There are menstrual cups available these days. However, they have not gotten enough popularity in my opinion and many women are of the opinion that these cups are gross and would not want to touch their own body fluids or wash it out of a cup.)
  

In regards to alternatives to pads and tampons, there is also a cloth pad revolution going on that is meant to save the environment :). Again, many women are a bit squeamish about this, but personally I believe that this is a step in the opposite direction technologically. I think the menstrual cups have more promise for the future and not to mention they are also environmentally friendly, but are less squeamish in comparison to cloth pads.

In the future, I would like periods to be reduced to just one day or an hour better yet a few minutes of a woman's life per month or year. Having a period to deal with each month seriously reduces a woman's productivity and freedom. If we could create some sort of medicine that could expel the entire period in one go then that would be great.

People often talk about equality between men and women, but how can we seriously discuss such a topic when women become physically less capable for certain days of every month and when they have all these period related needs? There is no male experience that compares with the female experience of a period and in that sense, we can't be completely equal. I am yet to find anything beautiful about having a period and it seems unnecessary unless you want to become pregnant. So, let's find a way to lessen it, or eliminate it, so we can get on with our lives more comfortably! But until then, let's find better ways to cope with this monthly burden!

By the way, I've found a 17 year old advocate for cloth pads and menstrual cups on YouTube. She's a wealth of information and I must say super brave! After finding her channel, I've seen a whole new world that I didn't know existed before. Her YouTube name is Precious Stars Pads.

Check her out at: https://www.youtube.com/user/preciousstarspads

Here is a video on 'Environmentrual cloth pads'. She's super cute, isn't she? She's inspiring and so comfortable talking about her lady parts and periods.