This time I gotta say, I don't think it's sexism

Steve Gilliard links to this article in the New York Observer that's unduly alarming about these new pills that make you have a period only once every 3 months. Steve is funny in his short commentary:

I own a penis. This seems freakish to me, please explain.

But there is something that troubles me lurking in the text of the article.

"They’re very alluring ads," said Barbara Seaman, a veteran women’s-health activist who lives on the Upper West Side—and she didn’t mean that as a compliment. "Quite brilliant—an innocent young woman who has no idea about the dangers. It’s just some sort of crazy male fantasy."

Okay, I know we're supposed to be all singing hosannas to our menstrual cycles and being downright pleased when we ruin our expensive 400 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets when the blood of womanhood visits in the middle of the night, but this is just silly. Getting your period sucks. The only good part about it is that it is a relief from PMS.

Anyway, you don't get your period when you're on the pill. That bit of misinformation is what is fueling most of this hysteria. (See The Well-Timed Period for more information.) You get a fake period to psyche you out so that you don't think that the pill is profoundly changing your body. If anything, the fake period that's built into the pill is a sexist invention, designed to soothe the hysterical female mind that can't understand such complex things as "No ovulation, no menstruation."

Even more troubling in the lurking notion that going through our periods is just one more weird obligation that women have for no other reason than it's selfish to avoid it. On the theory, I suppose, that unpleasant things are just naturally good for you.

Jodi Young, 40, a comedian living in the East Village, said that she found the whole thing "horrifying."

"If you’re too busy to deal with your period once a month, or it’s that much of an inconvenience, then how far would you go not to be inconvenienced?" she said. "Why not just a full hysterectomy so you don’t have to deal with it at all!"

Damn, let's go back to menstrual huts, why don't we? I mean, if we are obliged to bow down to every biological function as long as it reassures us of our femininity, why even use birth control? It's not natural not to ovulate, and no one has a problem with that. Being constantly pregnant would definitely keep one in touch with her feminine side, but we balk at that. Granted, a period is a small thing and a pregnancy a big thing, but the principle is the same.

I am in a foul mood regarding the natural/unnatural dichotomy where everyone pretends that natural is always superior to unnatural, especially in cases like this where we are happy to go with the unnatural as long as it puts on a good show of seeming natural. I mean, I've fallen into that trap, because it's emotionally appealing. But let's face it. It's stupid.

Anyway, the enviromentalist case will have to fall for minimizing periods. If half the women in America limited or stopped having periods altogether, think of how many less pads and tampons would go into landfills every year! Not to say the trees saved from reducing the amount of toilet paper used to wrap them up before throwing them out.