For the last few years, I’ve been struggling with where I find myself on a political spectrum. Sure, I’m on the left. I call myself a progressive and feminist. I know that I’ve grown more than distasteful of electoral politics (which once interested me fairly significantly), and that Hurricane Katrina was the moment that I threw up my hands in complete frustration and rage at the general state of affairs. I’ve dabbled in arts activism, local community organizing, sociolinguistics education, feminist activism, tech empowerment, you name it. None of it seems to singly suit me anymore, and most of it angers me. I’ll say it: I have anger issues. Hello, my name is Deanna, I have anger issues. (That one was for my therapist, everyone wave at her– she’s back there in the corner, waving back at you all.)

More than anything, I’ve been a bridge-builder for most of my political career. I come from working class, conservative roots, and I have been fueled in the past by a passion to build understanding between worlds that don’t talk to each other. A lot of that has to do with the tight relationship that I have with my folks; I find myself wondering how they would react to things that I’m working on, or how a particular issue is framed. Far more than I do now I often used them as guinea pigs: Pop’s the hard-line conservative, Mom’s our swing voter.

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Shameless self-promotion, because I’m honored to be included in an article with so many stellar women of the media world — check out Adele Stan’s fantastic writeup on women making media: Thanks, We’ll Make Our Own Media.

no no, thank YOU, Adele!

A crazy time here in Deannaland. I was in Cambridge this past weekend for the annual Best-Conference-Ever: Women, Action and the Media. I did double-presentation duty once again, sitting on Jenn Pozner’s panel about women, feminism and blogging, and then did my workshop on “Empowering Online Communities.” (See the presentation and the followup materials here.)

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What Gerald Ford said about her: “if God created the world in 6 days, he couldn’t have rested on the 7th day– he would have had to explain it to Helen Thomas.”

In other news of my world: I’ve been chosen as one of the Real Hot 100 Women!

Dang, to be listed among such fabulous luminaries on the list, and to be plucked out of over 350 amazing women. Many thanks to Robert Greenwald and Evan Derkacz who nominated me, and the friends who humored and edited me as I wrote my self-plug. ;-)

There’s been a lot of chatter about this article, which talks about how women are choosing to no longer have their periods by continuing to take birth control pills (instead of that week-off business which makes the bleeding start); some are opting to have Aunt Flo in town only a few times a year.

The troublesome part of this culturally has a lot to do with how it’s being marketed, especially on television. I wrote a rant about this on AlterNet last year; I’m sparing those readers this somewhat intimate glimpse today, haha. The point is that pharmaceutical companies are marketing our periods as a disease that needs to be cured, not as something that’s healthy and natural. Another way to demonize women’s bodies as unclean or just plain “not right.”

Recently, I went to my GYN with some weird feeling around my left ovary, not pain, just sort of… well, indescribable. Without going into too much detail, my doctor (who’s very much committed to alternative medicine as well as standard medicine) suggested that I take a stronger Pill for two months straight, missing three periods in total. I was creeped out and irritated.

I mentioned the above rant about marketing and while she agreed with that view, she also pointed out something that I hadn’t thought about. Evolutionarily speaking, our bodies haven’t caught up to our lifestyles yet, and more specifically, the fact that we’re living way, way longer than we should be. And for women, we’re having way, way more periods than we ever were supposed to, and it’s evidently pretty stressful on the reproductive system.

She explained that, contradictory to what I’d learned in that 5th grade health-n-hygiene session (which were, as she noted, often sponsored by Tampax and Kotex), it’s not that our uteruses build up a bunch of tissue over the course of three weeks that needs be flushed out by having a period. It’s more like the tissue is there, and the stopping of certain hormones releases it. By continuing the hormones, we’re just continuing the tissue’s existence.

There’s evidently some research out there (I haven’t looked for it yet) that suggests taht by having as many periods as we do now (think about it: 13 years old –> 50 years old, times 12, is over 400 periods) is stressing our reproductive systems out so much that it might be causing ovarian and other cancers.

This certainly doesn’t excuse big pharma for marketing our bodies as diseased, of course, but it’s worth considering.