Heavy Flow

By Jen Vaughn
comicscurator.tumblr.com

Jen is no stranger to creating comics about menstruation (in fact, that's how I first met her!), but she's clearly got it down to a science at this point, as this comic about menstrual cups is both informative and entertaining.

The comic opens with Jen remembering her early experiences with periods, and how our society deals with them (generally poorly). Then Jen makes a discovery, paying for disposable tampons and stuff is expensive! (Especially when you also have to buy birth control, "creepy hair removal products", and unicorn figurines.) So Jen gets a menstrual cup.

The then talks about the invention, history, and evolution of the cups, answers common questions about them, discusses the problems of initially getting used to using them (a topic other creators have covered), and more!

Through art filled with visual gags, and ridiculous humour (what sort of cup does a giant use?) Jen creates a.... (I'm trying to avoid the use of the word "entertaining" again, to the thesaurus!) absorbing comic that is worth checking out if you're thinking about getting one of these cups, or even if you have no idea what they are at all.

Plus this comic gives me an excuse to post this video.

Chart Your Cycle: Five Years On

By Chella Quint
www.chartyourcycle.co.uk

I’d psyched myself up. I was ready to read another zine about menstruation. “Let’s do this!” I said to myself. The original Chart Your Cycle zine (which was made for 24 hour zine day back in 2005) was about menstruation, and so I expected this to be as well. Thus I was a little surprised (and disappointed) to discover that most of this zine wasn’t actually about that topic at all.

Most of this zine is devoted to finding out what Quint’s friends were doing five years ago. The results are probably more interesting for Quint than me, as with no idea who these people are or what they’re currently doing with their lives, I’m left with a single paragraph about their lives from five years ago. The interesting ones feel as though they require more than a paragraph or two to tell their story, while the boring ones are, well, boring.

The most interesting pieces in here are two pieces which I believe are by Quint. There’s a piece on using an old fashioned “looped pad and belt” style feminine hygiene product, which gives an interesting look into how that stuff used to be done. There’s also an interview with (I believe) Quint’s mom, about using the rhythm method and getting pregnant. However with no introduction I was halfway through the (admittedly brief) piece before I could figure out who the people asking and answering questions were and what the hell was going on.

To be honest, I think a zine about people who have been using the Chart Your Cycle zine and their experiences with it would have been more interesting overall.

Adventures in Menstruating #5

By Chella Quint
www.chartyourcycle.co.uk

For whatever reason I'm having a hard time starting this review. Adventures in Menstruating is a well put together zine about, well, it says what it's about on the cover. You can probably guess from the cover if you're interested in this thing or not.

There's a page where Alison Bechdel shows off her reversable shirt (good for hot flashes!), a page on wanting to go back in time and tell '50s advertising execs to create ads that are less demeaning, some fake ads, an interview with the cover model Kitten von Mew, a piece on the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, criticisms of modern adverts, a comic drawn by Sparky Taylor that had pretty cute art, some poetry I didn't really care much for, a fairly interesting piece on "friendly bacteria" yogurt and the way it's advertised (so much content about advertising!), and a couple of other things that are worth discussing a bit more.

The first is an excerpt from the novel Rose of No Man's Land by Michelle Tea. It features a couple of hitchhiking girls throwing a bloody tampon at a creepy boy who's offering them a ride. I showed this to two different girls, one of whom thought it was funny, the other thought it was really gross. I'm somewhere in the middle. I mean, yeah it's kind of funny, but at the same time it seems to create a double standard. I can't really imagine a piece of fiction about boys throwing any sort of bodily fluid at a girl presented in the same positive light. I mean, I can only imagine it turning out as "boys are immature jackasses/incredibly sexist". Do you think otherwise? Let's discuss!

Then there's a piece by Dr. Brooke Magnanti/Belle de Jour about oral sex when you're on your period. This piece make assumptions about guys I find kind of frustrating ("They even eat supermarket value sausages [...] they're not squeamish."), and then discusses proposes the idea of sex as a reward. Now, I know some people are into relationships were one person has power over the other, but I'm really more about equality and respect in relationships. I mean, some of the stuff here is fine and good, but other bits makes me wonder what the response would be if it was about guy's trying to get anal sex or something. ie. I'll go down on you if you let me fuck in you in the ass. Hmm...

Surely having an understanding partner is better than trying to trick them into doing something they don't want to do. Yes, we should discuss sex, menstruation, and so forth, but I guess I'm not really down with the whole style of this zine. Still, to each their own, and lots of people do seem to like this sort of thing.

There's just two things I'd really wish the creator(s?) of this zine would do. The first is learn to use paragraphs, they are awesome. There are entire pages here that are just blocks of text. This is hard to read!

The second is also to do with the text, as some of the fonts used are hideous. Belle de Jour's piece is difficult to read because it uses a font that is terrible for articles. Headlines? Other short pieces of text? Yeah, fine, but urgh, it looks awful here.

How Do You Feel About Your Friend?

(I got sick of terrible webcam images, so now there are slightly better ones!)

By Chella Quint and Sarah Thomasin
www.chartyourcycle.co.uk

Sometimes I wonder about why there seem to be so many zines about menstration. But I've realized that one of the reasons is probably because there isn't much discussion of these things in most mainstream media, so people have to make their own stuff in order to have people actually talk about it.

And yes I said "it" instead of an actual term because this is a zine about menstrual euphamisms and I thought it would be kind of ironic (gah, is it?) to refer to it as such. The zine talks about how menstration is often seen as embarassing or shameful, and the need for other terms to use while discussing it with people. Yet, the zine continues, most of these euphamisms are now seen as "negative and potentially opressive" and raises the idea of creating 'newphemisms' for menstration.

That's a totally rad, and probably amusing, idea, but unfortunately isn't really followed through in the rest of the zine. Instead we get colouring pages to try and visualize existing terms like "Aunt Flo is visiting" and "surfing the crimson wave". There's also a text piece that says that the word "curse" is only used to mean swearing in America and I'm pretty sure that's not true.

This really seems more like an activity book you would use in a workshop. I think if you had a bunch of people answering these questions, doing the activities, and discussing stuff you could have some really good conversations. But (as a male) sitting by myself in my bedroom I guess I didn't get as much out of it as I could have.