Warning:
If you can only refer to a vagina as a hoo-ha, va-jay-jay or pussy, you might find this blog post a tad confronting. I highly recommend heeding the wise words of Hermione Granger, that fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself. Then say vagina. Then read my post.
Just recently, I embarked on an exciting new adventure. I bought a menstrual cup! For those of you who don’t know what that is it’s basically a little rubber cup that you put into your vagina to catch blood.
Because I am a fan of storytelling, and because I believe honest and open communication is the key to creating a healthy society, I’ve decided to share my experience of using the cup.
I first heard about a menstrual cup when I was about 14, I remember someone describing to me how it worked to which my response was a whole lotta NOPE!
More recently it started popping up on the internet so I started thinking about it again (well done profiling algorithms, you got me). I was at brunch one day with a good friend and she was talking about how she noticed a significant increase in her house’s output of waste as a result of using pads and tampons so she was exploring the idea of a menstrual cup.
The environmental issue struck a chord with me, and I was feeling adventurous so I went home and bought one online before I could second guess myself.
It came in the mail promptly, and I was left to await my next period. And wait. And wait. And wait. And my purchase of the Diva Cup™ happened to coincide with the longest gap between periods I have had in years. Seriously, I found myself wanting to ask random men in my life if we’d had unprotected sex and I just hadn’t noticed. How sexually active women aren’t fraught with crippling anxiety every single month is beyond me. I digress.
About a day before my period finally came I got a bit impatient and figured i’d try it out anyway, even though I wasn’t bleeding. Got it in fine, all went well. I started having flashbacks to the first time I ever had my period when I decided to go hard or go home and start out with a tampon. The feeling of smug superiority I had when I realised tampons were easy to use was again visible in my reaction to getting the menstrual cup in.
I got it in. getting it out was a different story. Rather than read the instructions like a pleb, or, you know, sensible human being doing something for the first time, I decided to just do what seemed right and pull. It was not right. It was SO NOT RIGHT. If sport, horseback riding and super jumbo tampons had not yet broken my hymen, I can say with certainty that the menstrual cup got the job done. Feeling a bit like a fool for actively traumatising my poor vagina just days before my period, I set the cup aside and continued to wait impatiently.
Huzzah! The day finally came. I washed, squished and shoved just like the instructions said (yes I went back for them, pride and stupidity have their limits for everyone).
Everything was dandy. I went about my daily business and resisted the urge to tell everyone I talked to that I was using a menstrual cup for the first time which is SO exciting!
Time came that it seemed reasonable to take it out, and I was anxious to improve my technique. I gathered all the knowledge I had accrued, which in addition to instruction reading included a bar conversation with my auntie and a couple of reassuring instructions I caught from my sister during one of my period pain meltdowns.
Apparently it’s important to break the seal by putting your fingers up inside and squeezing the cup together. Then you have to pull it out and if, like me, you haven’t mastered that kind of unique digital dexterity, you may need help from your second hand in grabbing nub. I include these details only because if someone else is trying it for the first time, I want them to know that they aren’t the first person to feel as if they are dramatically midwifing their own little rubber baby.
The removal was a success and after a few days I started to get the hang of it. So now I know it, what do I think about this new luxury item?
Well I have always been a tampon girl. Like, captain-of-team-tampon-convert-from -day-one-hiss-when-I-see-pads kind of a tampon girl. So having things go inside me wasn’t a new experience.
What surprised me most about the cup is how much more in sync I felt with my body. I think it had something to do with the daily wrestles I had with my vagina trying to extract the darn thing. It was a strange and fun experience learning to communicate with my body.
The other main thing I got from the experience was noticing how much less waste there was and, despite my unrelenting use of a clothes dryer, I am an environmentalist at heart.
So the verdict is that I am going to stick with the cup, at least for a few more cycles, and I highly recommend people give it a try, if for no other reason than maybe you will also find yourself talking reassuringly to your own vagina in the vain hope that it won’t sense your anxiety and freak the fuck out. If you guys do it too, I won’t feel as weird.
Go team Diva cup!
