Women's Empowerment Stories ...

Walking in Beauty
~ Megan Lalonde

Science and commerce are offering women ever-more-powerful means to suppress menstruating. What does this do to us?

Many of you may have seen the advertisements for a new birth control pill which reduces the number of withdrawal bleeds to four times per year, rather than the thirteen which occur with the traditional pill. In the advertisement, a woman in white twirls around as red dots, presumably representing her dreaded withdrawal bleeds, fly rapidly away from her. She looks happy, active and relieved.

The idea of menstrual suppression is not new. Millions of women have been suppressing their menstruation with the birth control pill since it was introduced to the public in the 1960s, even though most might well have been unaware that the pill stops both ovulation and menstruation since their withdrawal bleeds were intended to mimic their monthly periods. Now, all pretense seems to be discarded, as women, en masse, are being sold the lie that menstruation is obsolete ... women are being persuaded to see menstruation as an evolutionary mistake that need only be endured when one wants to have a child. We are being offered Depo-provera, a synthetic progestin to stop the ebb and flow of our endocrine system, continuous-use birth control pills, menstrual ablation or progestin-laden IUDs, all designed to stop our uteri from bleeding. What does it do to us when we are pushed to stop one of our fundamental bodily processes? We need to ponder why there is such a push to perceive our bodies as a disjointed collection of parts that can be modified or disciplined the way our menstruating bodies are today.

I am reminded of the Navajo concept of beauty. As I understand it, the Navajo perceive beauty as a quality that extends well beyond what is pleasing to the eye. Beauty comes into existence through expression and creation and the experience of ourselves as works of art. It is self-generated and dynamic and some even say that to walk in beauty is our “ultimate destiny” as humans. Beauty holds within it health, goodness, happiness and harmony.

I would suggest that to walk in beauty is, in part, to recognize the beauty of ourselves as menstruating beings.

From my work with women seeking to heal damaged cycles, women wanting to conceive children and women giving birth as well as those transitioning into their queen and crone years, I have seen how essential it is to understand and experience ourselves as works of art and to know that our menstruation is about the capacity to reproduce and, at the same time, it is an integral part of the functioning of our whole body, whether or not we ever bear children. It has been my observation that when women engage with their cycles, they begin that walk in beauty from which they can create a sense of wholeness. And that sense of wholeness becomes, in turn, a solid center from which to descend into some of the often deepest and most frightening aspects of life – loss, sorrow, pain, suffering and death and, yet, to still emerge to create meaning. It is that wholeness that we need to heal the many wounds that life inevitably inflicts.

Perhaps we allow ourselves to be pushed so strongly and subtly to deny our menstruation because we don’t recognize the beauty of our female bodies. Perhaps we are pushed so because we know, as a culture, that without a sense of wholeness, we are blind to the injustices and inequities that we perpetuate and our hands are tied when it comes to change. Perhaps, as I sometimes glimpse, when a woman walks in beauty and her body encompasses all that is good, even when it hurts, there is a power and a possibility that the world will change in such a fundamental way so as to be nearly, just nearly, impossible to imagine.


~ Megan Lalonde

Reproduced with permission from Femme Fertile, Spring/Summer 2007, Beauty and the Blood. Femme Fertile is a publication of Justisse Healthworks for Women, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. For more information, email editor@justisse.ca
 

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