lalabob11 replied to your post “I was able to use a Lena cup after giving birth, and liked it a lot...”
I have a really low cervix, so I’ve had trouble with getting my menstrual cup to fit and sit correctly. I finally found the MeLuna cups, which come in a wider variety of sizes than other cups. I highly recommend them.
Oh that’s good to know-- almost all the ones I’ve seen just come in the two sizes. But how are you to know what size you need??? Age is clearly not the factor that the manufacturers assume.
i’m just gonna cut because this got long, but there are a bunch of great replies here. Read On for Menstrual Cup Discourse from Stars Of Stage And Screen My Dashboard:
icantbearsedtothinkofone replied to your post“I was able to use a Lena cup after giving birth, and liked it a lot...”
I'm 48 and still using a small. I read somewhere that women who have a strong core (ie who do a lot of lifting) tend to be tighter down there, so.
...40. Thanks, autocorrectm
You know, I don’t even lift, and I wouldn’t have guessed my core would be all that tight. I get like, no exercise currently in my lifestyle, I’m basically veal.
But my vaginal passage does not seem to noticeably change size along with my state of fitness. Almost like it’s... a complex structure simultaneously governed by many processes and also not all that affected by much because body parts tend to do what they do. I don’t know.
(The followup message made me laugh a little; I had thought you weren’t much older than me, but I lose track of people sometimes.)
chippanfire replied to your post “I was able to use a Lena cup after giving birth, and liked it a lot...”
I've never had kids, but it took me 4 months to work out how to use my mooncup
For something whose sole instruction really consists of “kind of fold it up, and then WEDGE IT INTO YOUR VAGINA” they’re not really that intuitive to use. You know, folks, it turns out, YMMV, but the vagina isn’t really actually all that friendly to having things put into it. Turns out it mostly doesn’t like it, and for good reason. But since we’re so discouraged from experimenting, both by societal pressure and by the fact that the vast majority of the time the vagina would prefer to be left alone thanks, it’s real hard to get a sense of just what the hell is going on in there, let alone any real notion of the lay of the land.
I’ve been using these things a decade and a half now and I still sometimes just can’t get it to fucking work. At the moment, I just woke up and went and emptied it and my body did not like that, and then I put it back in and my body is like WHY, and I’m super cranky and crampy and having trouble doing all the shit I got out of bed early to do this morning. (Hence sitting here and being cranky on the Internet.) These things hurt when you’re using them correctly!
I saw a post recently about a kickstarter for a cup that an Ehrlers-Danlos (am I spelling that right?) sufferer had designed, that was meant to be usable by people with reduced handstrength, and the OP had captioned it “can you imagine, a menstrual cup that doesn’t TRY TO SUCK YOUR EYEBALLS OUT VIA YOUR VAGINA”, and I LOL’d super hard and then didn’t back the kickstarter because I’m a total idiot. But can you imagine??? I mean usually I can break the suction before I pull it out but sometimes that just makes a huge mess and sometimes I just can’t, so it’s like, SCHLORP, that is so disturbing and also HURTS.
Deputychairman reblogged your post and added:
This is good to know! On the recommendation of my earlier 30s, no-kids colleagues (the beauty of an all women office is we can talk about menstrual cups at work, it’s wonderful) I tried a Fleur cup and after 6 months just gave the fuck up because neither size had ever ONCE been comfortable or without leaks, but maybe I just need a nearly 40, have had 2 babies one? Also with this IUD I have a very light but long lasting period, which perhaps isn’t the flow these things are designed for - does anyone know?
Middle-Little sister has an IUD and has found that a menstrual cup is Not For Her either, but I don’t have more details on that.
(I am currently the only woman in my office. I don’t let that stop me, because the two dudes who are most often there are the manager, SuperDad, who has five children, four of them girls (the oldest 2 in their 20s by now), and my deskmate who is married and needs to Fucking Deal (and honestly is usually pretty chill about such things), but-- while they get it, they don’t understand and have no advice. But, I do have a huge number of actual sisters to call upon for all my anecdata, so I remain #blessed in that respect.)
I imagine it’s that the cervix undergoes Some Changes, moreso than the actual structure of the vaginal canal itself, by having entire human lives pass through it (pause for the obligatory nulliparous mind-blow moment, can you imagine that, wow), and there’s got to be a way to measure this that isn’t just Larger Size For Moms And Old Ladies Or Possibly Both. But I just don’t know how one goes about getting a fitting for such an item. Bra fittings are hard enough, I can’t imagine menstrual cup fittings.
lalabob11 replied to your post “49,555 ugh i’m so close just ugh”
Okay, the more you talk about this the more I want to read it. And I joined tumblr for Star Wars content damn it! Admittedly, it was *your* Star War content that initially drew me here. But I guess now I’m on board for smugly pregnant solar punk mammoths or something.
clotpoleofthelord replied to your post“NaNo update: have made par for today but am going to try to push on....”
oh my goodness i am Intrigued
Yeah? I’ve been feeling like while the setting is interesting enough, I don’t have enough of a story for it to be anything that can like, hook anyone’s interest yet. I am heartened by evidence that maybe I can parlay this setting into something people might be interested in actually following where it goes.
thesacredreznor replied to your post “clotpoleofthelord replied to your post “49,555 ugh i’m so close just...”
that's, like, the thing about nano. i have never once actally managed to write an ending to my nano project. i'm so close this time but i can't think of a satisfying ending so i'm gonna edit first and hope it comes to me. good luck!
Good luck to you!!
I did that once. I won NaNo in 2002 and was all like Now I Am A Real Writer and then nothing came of it and I couldn’t make it work, and then I did it again in 2003 and was like “wow... I am Genius” because I was so good at making wordcount, but like... I think it was 2004 or so that I was like OKAY this isn’t HELPING I am going to instead Devote Myself To A Complete Novel, not just wordcount, and so I busted my ass and wrote a whole-ass romance novel, a little bit cynically I admit, and I finished it, and there was a plot resolution and everything, and then I tried to edit it and it sucked. (Yeah, that was it, it was ‘04 when I wrote the novel with the Vikings.) I couldn’t commit to the genre; I wanted a romance novel but couldn’t keep from maybe-magic or at least some weird mysticism, and I swung wildly from sweet to explicit without warning and unrealistically, and it was just. A hot mess. And I didn’t know anyone who was like, good at editing, and so I got a lot of critiques that swung from too mean to too nice and nobody had a good overarching vision for it.
So like. That novel is half-revised in a metaphorical drawer somewhere, never to see the light of day again probably. Sigh.
(I think the only thing it had going for it was that there was a really hot scene where the hero had the heroine trapped up against a tree in the woods as a search party looked for her, and he had a sword at her throat so she wouldn’t call out to them, but she had a knife at his side that he literally never noticed her holding, and the entire time she’s aware that she could kill him before he has a chance to kill her but she doesn’t want to; she’s already defected, in her heart, and he doesn’t know. Also at least one of the sex scenes was pretty scorching by my standards of the day and I have a hunch would probably stand up to rereading now, if I do say so myself. And there was an old witch who was pretty great.)
Anyway. I should revisit that goal of writing An Complete Novel sometime, that would be a real good idea, and maybe I should do it now. Maybe I know someone now who could actually be helpful. (If you are a person I’ve known since that time, I freely admit that the problem might well be me; I never knew how to ask properly for help and I still don’t.)
Confession time. The Home Out On the Wind series is basically my favorite fanfic. It is entirely the reason I joined Tumblr because of the snippets of content that would get previewed here.
!!! Sorry I just saw this. What! Oh no I’m sorry to have dragged you into this hellsite.
But hello, I hope it was worth it, LOL. And thanks for saying hi! And honestly I really needed that confession right about now, I’ve completely forgotten how to write and it’s goddamn tragic.
I’m glad that’s the series I’ve ever managed to mostly-finish in my life. :)
