Why Period Pain Isn’t Normal (Episode 311)

Full Transcript: Episode 311

Lisa: Welcome to the Fertility Friday Podcast, your source for information about the Fertility Awareness Method and all things fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of The Fifth Vital Sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Journal. I’m a certified Fertility Awareness Educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly twenty years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health, because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health, because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I manage to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health, and I’m so excited that you’re here with us today.

I’m excited to share today’s episode with you. Today I’m sharing my conversation with Maisie Hill, the author of Period Power, and we dive into fertility awareness charting and the incredible role it can play in our lives. What I found really fun — just a fun fact — is that when I was talking to Maisie, I realized we’d had similar experiences. We had both discovered fertility awareness at a relatively young age, and it really shaped our understanding of health, our bodies, and our cycles. As someone who has been cycling naturally and tracking my cycle for the better part of two decades, it’s really fascinating to see how much of an impact it can make in your life. So regardless of when you discover charting and how long you’ve been charting, if you have the opportunity and the desire to tap into that, definitely follow it, because there’s a lot of wisdom and guidance you can gain just from going with the ebbs and flows of your cycle — paying attention to your emotions, the physicality, and all these different aspects of your health. Understanding that your cycle is a vital sign, and that if something is out of whack, or if your emotions are beyond what you feel they should be, those are all indications — your body’s way of communicating with you. So this is an amazing opportunity for you to connect with yourself, because so many of us feel disconnected. So with that said, let’s jump into today’s episode with Maisie.

I’m really excited to be here with Maisie Hill today. Maisie is a highly qualified and sought-after women’s health expert with over a decade of experience as a practitioner and birth doula. Maisie knows the power of working with the menstrual cycle and believes that our hormones are there to serve us and help us get what we want out of life. What lights Maisie up is helping women understand the inner workings of the reproductive system so that they can make sense of their menstrual cycle and use their hormones to great advantage in their lives. Her first book, Period Power, was published by Bloomsbury imprint Green Tree on May 2nd, 2019. So in today’s episode we’re talking about Maisie’s new book, Period Power, which is a great book — I’ve been privy to a copy and I’ve really enjoyed it. There’s a lot of overlap, and in our pre-chat we were calling ourselves blood sisters, because we do. So with that, welcome to the show.

Maisie: Thank you, Lisa! I am so excited to be here, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, and I just loved it when we were talking before — I feel like we’re blood sisters too, because when I was reading your book, I just loved it. I think sometimes when you’re a practitioner and you know a lot of the content that’s in other people’s books, some of them really stand out when you read them because you feel yourself connecting with the stuff you already know, and some new stuff as well. I have to say, you had stuff in there I hadn’t come across, but I found myself reading your book connecting with my knowledge in a deeper way through your explanations, and I really congratulate you, because it is an incredible book.

Lisa: Well, thank you so much, and we were talking in the pre-chat as well — I mean, your book too, I was reading through it, and it’s really refreshing, because there’s an explosion of discussion around period health and the menstrual cycle, and of course interest in fertility awareness. But it’s rare to find a book where someone is actually addressing those concepts in a way that’s accurate, and that comes from your years and years of experience working in the field. So same to you — we could sit here and compliment each other all day. But I really want to get into it. I think, what I typically ask most if not all of my guests, because of my own interest and curiosity, is: could you share with us how you found yourself in this field? You’ve been in the field a long time, so share with us what prompted you to dive in, and what inspired you to put your knowledge into Period Power.

Maisie: Such a great question. So I got really lucky, I have to say — I feel like I got lucky a lot, because when I was doing my A-levels, which is like the end of high school for anyone listening in North America, my mum was training in aromatherapy and reflexology. So at the same time I was studying biology, she was focusing on those therapies, and that clued me into a more holistic way of doing things. I also discovered Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom on her bookshelf and devoured it as a 17-year-old — it’s a pretty hefty book for a 17-year-old to read, and I loved it. Then, when I was living in New York, I came across the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which I’m sure all you listeners are familiar with. I read it and was just astonished at what was going on inside my body — curious, fascinated, amazed, and also really angry that I was 22 and only coming across that knowledge then, when actually I needed it when I was 14. It really stayed with me, and I’d recently come off the pill, so I started charting my cycle as a method of contraception. It’s been my main method of contraception other than using condoms ever since — I’m about to turn 39, so I’ve been using it a long time, and it’s worked perfectly for me. I’ve had two planned pregnancies, no unplanned pregnancies.

Those books really got me dialed into women’s health, and at the same time I started working as a birth doula and training in therapies myself, always with the view that I wanted to focus on the menstrual cycle, fertility, pregnancy, and perimenopause. That was always what I wanted to do. I just got really lucky, because I read those books and started coming across great practitioners — I trained with Nicole Jardim and Jessica Drummond, and then went on to do an amazing apprenticeship with Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer, who I know you’ve had on the show — they’re incredible women. Their apprenticeship through Red School was the final piece of the puzzle for me, because how they explain the cycle according to the four seasons just gave me a framework for putting my knowledge of Chinese medicine, hormones, and day-to-day tips for living together. And I have to say, it was actually having my son, and being up breastfeeding him night after night, that really drove me to finally write the book — something happened when I was up at two o’clock every night breastfeeding him and things started to sift into place for me, and I thought, I’ve just got to write a book and get this out there.

Lisa: That’s an incredible story, there’s so many pieces of it — I think that’s why your book resonates with me, because there’s a difference between reading something today and becoming interested versus having read it at such a young age. Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom — when I was in university I went through this whole post-high-school feminist phase, and I went to town on the books, reading and learning, and a huge part of it was obviously the menstrual cycle. It’s interesting, because if you get to a place where the menstrual cycle is central in your understanding, then all the other aspects — feminism, women’s reproductive rights, birth control, even body image, how you look at your period — I feel like a lot of it stems from there. I feel like that’s what — because from your perspective, having charted your cycles for so long and relied on it for birth control, you have a different knowledge of charting that you can only gain from doing it for however many years that is. So yes, you’ve answered the question — now I know.

Maisie: I have to say it was also — what really got me dialed into this — my own experience of having absolutely horrific period pain. For years I really slogged it out with horrific pain, and it was my journey to heal that pain, trying all sorts of therapies and working on different aspects of my life, and getting incredible results — having really incredible periods now, not painful in the slightest. That was also what really made me want to focus on this. Being in this world, in this field, and being very outspoken about hormonal birth control, I get a lot of pushback, especially from women who have horrible periods that are excruciatingly painful. What I’ve found is that when I say things publicly, like “the pill doesn’t fix or cure anything,” there’s always a percentage of women who jump on that and say, “This woman is crazy, who is she anyway? The pill is the only thing that’s ever helped my periods. I had horrible periods for years, and if it wasn’t for the pill, I wouldn’t be able to go to work.”

Lisa: And so I hear that, because I was you. I too had periods that were so bad — I’ve said it on the podcast a number of times — it felt like someone reached up into my gut and squeezed as hard as they could. That was one version of the pain. I say that because it’s necessary — people don’t understand how painful it can be unless they’ve experienced it themselves. So share with us a little more about your journey — what was your pain like? If you could describe it on a scale of zero to ten, zero being nothing, ten being someone stabbing you in the abdomen, and how did you manage it before you came into this knowledge of a different way?

Maisie: Oh man, there’s so many different layers to this — I’ll try to keep it brief for you. I had cramps from the beginning, from my first period. In my mid-teens I went on the birth control pill, partly as a method of contraception and partly because it felt like the responsible thing to do, and also because I had this pain and just wanted to get rid of it. It did get rid of it — it didn’t treat it, but it got rid of it — but it also numbed the pain, and it also numbed me. I had a lot of issues while I was on the pill in terms of my mental health, and absolutely no sexual desire of any kind, which had a huge influence on how I thought of myself — really thinking I was abnormal for not feeling desire and not feeling better living my life.

So I came off the pill, and immediately I had to deal with the pain, and I dealt with that by just chucking painkillers down my throat. They worked sometimes a little bit, but they really just took the edge off. I would not be able to work — I would be in bed with numerous hot water bottles on my abdomen and back, rocking around, grabbing at pillows, jumping into scorching hot baths. I remember, three months in a row, I gave myself blisters on my abdomen from a hot water bottle that was so hot, but because I was in so much pain, I couldn’t recognize that there was this other pain going on from the hot water bottle. It was horrific — I remember being at the farmers market in Park Slope, Brooklyn, once, trying to get home, and I just couldn’t, so I had to lie down on the sidewalk, with people looking at me like I was on drugs, and no one offering help — my frankly quite useless boyfriend at the time couldn’t get me home either. It was a mess all around.

I tried all sorts of different therapies, and some of them worked better than others. What I realized is that when you have something going on like that, sometimes there’s a magic bullet, but often treating menstrual cycle issues requires a multi-faceted approach. Acupuncture worked brilliantly for me, as did a specific abdominal massage therapy. I also had to look at nutrition and my lifestyle, and I did a couple of years of therapy, because I remember someone saying to me, “Maisie, it’s like your uterus is an angry fist saying ‘F you’ to the world,” and I was like, that is exactly what it’s like. There was a number of things I had to do, and I think that’s what really helped me as a practitioner now — understanding that different things work for different people at different times in their life, and that treatments can really improve things, but everything else has to be looked at as well.

Lisa: Wow. Yeah, I feel like I just need to let that sit for a second. If anyone listening didn’t know how bad period pain can be, now you know — it’s horrible. But this is the thing — I get it when women say the pill is the only option, because their doctors are often telling them that’s the only option — at least they aren’t offering hysterectomies, I say that as a joke, but it’s not really funny, though it’s recommended less so these days. But I suppose part of your story is that if you experienced pain that bad, the pill didn’t actually do anything to deal with the underlying reason why you had the pain. So the only way you can understand that the pill doesn’t cure, fix, or heal anything is by first understanding that periods should not be painful — a novel concept. If you can first get that periods shouldn’t be painful, and that a healthy female body that is menstruating shouldn’t have that level of pain, and that pain is an indication of a problem, only then can you recognize that if it’s not supposed to be painful, there’s something you have to correct in order to get rid of it.

Maisie: Yeah, completely, and I really appreciate you making that point, because we are really socialized into believing and accepting that period pain is part and parcel of having a menstrual cycle. Period pain, and pain at different points in the cycle, is common — that does not make it normal.

Lisa: Yeah. And the other thing is, even if the pain is horrifying, if your doctor is saying that’s the only option — keep your doctor, we all need doctors — but what I would hope you’d take from Maisie’s story is that it is possible. It’s not necessarily easy, it’s never easy, it doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not the same as taking an Advil. When you’re addressing period pain from the root, you have to make a bunch of changes over a period of time, but once you get the support you need to really address the underlying issues, through potentially a variety of modalities depending on what works for you — it’s not like one thing, you can’t expect to go to acupuncture and do nothing else and have your periods magically fixed forever — but once you sort it out, you can experience a life of minimal to no pain, once you’ve gone through the process of figuring it out, dealing with one cycle being a little better, one cycle being horrible. Once you figure this out over a period of time, you can get to the point where there’s no pain.

I imagine there are people suffering with pain in their cycle listening to this, thinking, “That’s an extreme story, but I still don’t think it’s possible for me.” I was working with a client recently who has adenomyosis and lots of other issues going on, and she’s been on the verge of having to call an ambulance and beg for morphine — she’s had the phone in her hand, wondering if she was going to do it. She’s done that before — she’s been hospitalized regularly every time she has her period, in the ambulance on morphine. I’ve been working with her, and the transformation she’s undergone in the several months we’ve been working together is incredible — now she can go out for a gentle walk when she has her period instead of being bedridden or in the hospital. That’s partly due to the treatments we’ve been doing, but it’s also largely due to all the other strategies she’s brought in, and I really do think that if that change is possible for her, it’s possible for others. But it’s hard when you’re in that place, maybe on some level consciously or subconsciously believing your body is dysfunctional and incapable — it’s hard to shift that belief that something can be different for you, and that’s where getting support from someone is important, because they can help you take the necessary steps.

I remember when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I did something similar to what you did — I went off the pill because I didn’t want to be on it, and I still had to deal with the pain, so it was a combination of ibuprofen and failed attempts at all different things for a few years. There’s a lot of resources out there that make it seem simple, like “just take cramp bark” or “it’s in your mind because you have unresolved sadness, so just think of nice things” — a lot of garbage stuff out there that doesn’t work. So any woman who feels like she’s tried everything and nothing works — this is similar to what you’re saying — when you work with a practitioner who understands the underlying factors and reasons why you have period pain, which is largely related to inflammation among other specific issues, they can help you devise a plan to systematically address those things through a variety of approaches, over time, and who’s willing to work with you over that time. If your doctor is telling you it’s not possible, again, keep your doctor, but continue looking for a practitioner who truly understands and has specifically worked with women who have period pain and supported them to improve it. So I appreciate you for hanging out here with me, because this is the message — it is possible, it’s not BS, but it’s different from what you’d think, different from Western medicine — it often starts with what you’re eating, what you’re exposing yourself to, and what nutrients you’re deficient in, and it goes from there.

Maisie: Yeah, there are so many layers to it, and it’s often like the layers of an onion — you have to peel each one away and work at it, but those effects are cumulative and they all play a part. When we’re working with menstrual cycle and fertility issues, it’s a kind of long-term game — sometimes there are quick, easy wins that make a difference early on, but often we’re looking at working over the course of several, if not many, menstrual cycles to get the effects we want. It’s really a worthwhile investment, because we’re thinking about the health of women through our reproductive years, through any pregnancies we might have, through postpartum, through perimenopause, menopause, and into our post-reproductive years. The work we’re doing in our teens, 20s, 30s, and 40s is far-reaching — I’m a big believer in making that investment, whether it’s an investment of your time, a self-care practice, or even just tracking your cycle. Tracking your cycle is an intervention that makes a difference — if you can do nothing else, track your cycle, have conversations with friends and family, and explain things to your kids. It’s far-reaching — it’s our legacy, the stories we’re leaving behind for future generations about what’s possible for our bodies.

Well, and of course there’s nothing wrong with using alternative therapies — there’s nothing wrong with using the pill to manage your period pain, and nothing wrong with taking ibuprofen, because no one should be in pain, especially that kind of pain. I just think it’s important that we don’t settle for the lowest common denominator — this complete garbage baseline expectation of women’s health — as if that’s good enough. We can certainly use those tools to help us while we’re on our journey to figure out how to handle it. That’s what I did — I did what my knowledge allowed at the time. My knowledge was, “okay, I need to be on the pill,” so I took the pill; then I expanded my knowledge, got off the pill, started with painkillers, and continued expanding my knowledge until I didn’t need those anymore. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using them, but we have to actually value women enough in our culture to believe that it’s not good enough for us to be in such severe pain that we need to be medicated all the time. Is that really such a revolutionary thought — that we deserve to not be in such severe pain that we require constant medication, and that if we do require constant medication, it means there’s something we could potentially be working on?

Lisa: Yeah, and to be clear, if you have a very heavy menstrual flow and you’re struggling to find other ways to reduce that flow or the pain, while you’re getting trustworthy information to make other decisions — either alongside using hormonal contraception or not — you can treat that as, “I’m going to use this for now because that’s what I need,” while you find out if there’s something that might work better, or things you can put in place so you can transition off the pill and have a better experience. Sometimes it’s really straightforward — I have clients with really heavy flow taking paracetamol for pain relief, and one immediate strategy is switching that out for ibuprofen, which may also help reduce the flow at the same time. Medication has its place, but sometimes it’s about making a more informed choice to support whatever your needs are. See, this is why we’re blood sisters.

Okay, so I want to switch it up a little bit, because — well, this is really important and I’m glad we had this conversation, but one of the things I wanted to ask you, and I’m not sure if it ties into the period pain conversation, is about certain trends, because you’ve been in this space for a while. When I first did training in fertility awareness in my early 20s, I learned the method in a way — when you learn to teach fertility awareness, or you read Taking Charge of Your Fertility, you’re presented with a menstrual cycle that falls into these normal parameters. Back when the fertility awareness educators of the 70s and 80s were developing and teaching, the landscape was a lot different — not every woman had been on the pill for 20 years. In my practice today, it’s actually rare for a client to have never taken birth control — every now and then I’ll run a group program and one woman in it will have never taken it, and I’m always like, “wow, they still make women like you.” My practice today, and the average woman I’m seeing, is very different from what the average fertility awareness educator was seeing in the 80s, 90s, and even the early 2000s. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how the landscape has changed and what that means for practitioners, because even classically trained fertility awareness educators run into very specific situations all the time that standard training doesn’t teach you how to handle.

Maisie: Yeah, okay, great question — so my perspective may be a bit different, and I want to clarify that I’m not trained as a fertility awareness practitioner. I’ve used it personally for great success, and I look at BBT charts specifically as a Chinese medicine practitioner, because they tell us a lot of great information, and they can sometimes flag up conditions like hyperthyroidism or cycles where ovulation isn’t taking place. But I think the biggest change — and this is a quite selfish perspective — is that everyone’s using apps instead of paper, and I find this challenging, because often the apps are creating the rules and identifying when someone’s fertile or may have ovulated. There’s a disconnect, because for me, one of the huge benefits of tracking your cycle is understanding it — being able to figure those things out yourself — and particularly when it’s being used as a method of contraception, I have concerns about anyone just using an app.

Lisa: Well, let’s talk about that — this is really interesting, because when you started charting, correct me if I’m wrong, there were no apps — my own method too was Taking Charge of Your Fertility, going to a local shop and paying to photocopy the sheets inside of it.

Maisie: Yet, for me, I created a spreadsheet version of the Taking Charge of Your Fertility chart, and I ran it off and made books out of it, that kind of thing. So it’s a different era — on one hand I feel old in a way, but on the other hand I feel very thankful for the experience of learning to chart on paper. Not because you have to chart on paper, but because if you actually chart on paper, even just for six to twelve cycles, you get the opportunity to really identify when ovulation happened and start paying attention to your own body signs.

Lisa: So tell us — for the women who are learning to chart on apps that offer predictions and fill in information, how have you found their understanding of fertility awareness to be different from yours?

Maisie: Oh, well it’s hard, because of course I’m a practitioner, so I’m coming at it from a very different place than someone who’s just coming to it as a method for their personal life — I have to appreciate that. But I find that women who are using apps basically don’t understand the guiding principles, the rules — if you took the app away, most of the clients I see wouldn’t be able to identify when their fertile window is.

Lisa: Well, I can hear the listeners — like, “I use apps all the time!” I kind of anticipate this because I’ve been doing the podcast for so long, I feel like I’m the whisperer of the questions that pop up in people’s minds. So for the listeners who are like, “whatever Maisie, I use apps and I know what I’m talking about” — I think it’s helpful to point out that there’s nothing wrong with using apps that have those predictors, because people are using them and it’s fine. I had a really interesting conversation with Holly Grigg-Spall about Lady Comp, and I don’t hear a lot of talk about Lady Comp anymore, but I was very much “I don’t know about this app thing,” and she said, “let’s have a conversation about it, because there are some positives we need to talk about.” That conversation was really helpful — she described it as, for many women, the gateway drug of fertility awareness. These apps are what first invite women into this conversation — women who would otherwise never have even dipped a toe in. So for the listeners who do have an understanding, who’ve taken the time to chart and potentially turn off the prediction settings and identify their own ovulation — speak to that a little.

Maisie: Yeah, sure — I use certain elements of some apps that I find useful, believe it or not, I’m not a hundred percent anti-app, and I often find that a combination approach works really well. I’m really interested in the Read Your Body app that’s coming out — it’s a purely thermal-based app where the user identifies things rather than the app doing it, so I’m excited for that. For sure, there are a lot of people out there using fertility awareness who have a very good understanding of things but prefer apps — I have no issue with that. But in my practice, with the women I work with — and I’m not putting them down at all — apps are convenient and yes, they can be the gateway drug, which I think is such a great way of framing it, but a lot of my clients have trouble identifying things even with the app’s guesses; I’m not so sure that’s exactly their fertile window. My preference, the way I read cycles, is probably because that’s how I got started — I read them better on pen and paper, and maybe also because I look at ten different apps across a week and they all look different, which can make it hard, especially looking at things from a Chinese medicine point of view, to get a gauge on the range of temperatures and the clues in someone’s symptoms.

Lisa: Well, I can appreciate that. For me, as a practitioner who teaches a method, when women come to me with their charts, I read through and meet them exactly where they’re at with all that information, but when a woman enters one of my programs, we start charting in a more structured way, because once you get the different aspects right in a more specific way, the chart itself becomes more meaningful. When you’re taking your temperature correctly — I sometimes hesitate to use the word “correctly,” but there is a difference — it’s the simplest thing, like keeping the thermometer in for ten minutes, and a lot of women think that’s silly, how could that make a difference — but when clients are on board with taking the temperature and doing all the correct things we talk about, the actual meaning of the chart is different, and when they compare previous charts to the ones we’ve done together, the temperatures make more sense because there’s less fluctuation.

Maisie: I could see that, yeah — but there’s a refinement that happens when you’re working with somebody who can provide you with that instruction. I didn’t have the experience of learning it on my own with an app — I learned from women who were trained in fertility awareness, so all of those little nuances from the very beginning I was able to correct, so my charts made a lot of sense, and I was charting on paper, like you were, so I was able to understand what I was looking at.

Lisa: Yeah, and I think that word “refinement” really sums it up perfectly. And don’t get me wrong, I started charting when I was 22, and I haven’t kept all my charts — I don’t know what happened to them — I wish I had an app so I could go back and look at 15 years ago and see what was going on then. For sure, apps have their place, and it’s all about, with cycle tracking in all its forms — whether BBT or tracking mood and energy — doing what works for you in the context of your life. The apps trend is huge and really interesting, and it’s exciting to see it going mainstream, even though educators like myself groan a little because it’s not as refined. I’m curious if there are other changes you’ve seen, or we can even touch on the changes in the way the media covers periods.

Maisie: Something is really weird — in a way wonderful, in a way weird — to see how periods are just everywhere now, how social media is filled with images like bloody pads. I grew up in the era of the blue liquid in the commercials.

Lisa: It is very different now. I actually had a journalist ask me recently, “Don’t you think it’s getting a bit too much?” — because there’s so much discussion, especially here in the UK, with a lot of books, including my own, that have come out this year specific to periods, and that’s created more discussion in the media, which I think has been building for the last five or so years. The journalist asked if we’re putting too much emphasis on it, and I said, “what’s too much?” Having a regular menstrual cycle is so essential and beneficial to our short- and long-term health, and no one else is obsessing about their own health markers like this, so why wouldn’t we obsess about ours and consider them? I think this continual positioning of us as “other,” as if we’re the ones who are different because we aren’t men — it’s the wrong way around, as so many wise women have been saying for decades — it would be a very different conversation if it were reversed.

Yeah, we’re not “little men,” we’re not men without penises and breasts — it’s not like our ovaries are an optional accessory, the way a car’s air conditioning is something you can just switch on or off and the car still works the same. My ovaries are not air conditioning — if I shut off half my endocrine system, it’s not going to just work perfectly; it’s going to affect more than just my ability to have children. Until we get our heads around the fact that the ovaries make estrogen and progesterone, and we have receptors for those hormones everywhere, including our brains, bones, and breasts, and understand that this is just a part of the biological female body that’s important for optimal health, it’s going to be really hard to have meaningful conversations about why it matters.

Maisie: A hundred percent — I’m literally on the verge of high-fiving my screen right now, let’s do it.

Lisa: One last topic, as we bring our interview to a close, that I really wanted to throw in — and we talked about this briefly in the pre-chat — is one of the trends where there’s a part of me that can barely believe it’s a real thing, and a part of me that’s in denial that it’s a real thing: the way our culture is policing vulvas and how they look. I follow the Vulva Gallery on Instagram and I love it — I’m not well-versed on everything about it, but the woman behind it recently released a book, I think it’s called something like The Book of Vulva Diversity — she’s an artist, and women send in pictures of their vulvas, it’s not spread-eagle, it’s more like you’re standing in front of a mirror. I didn’t realize it was a thing that so many women were ashamed of their labia, feeling like theirs was too long, too short, or uneven — I didn’t realize that was such a huge problem for so many women. So let’s get into it, because in your book you briefly touch on how the porn industry has changed what we think all of this should look like.

Maisie: Yeah, apparently we’re all supposed to have “baby vulvas” — nice and tight, perfectly symmetrical, bald, and, I’ll say, nipped and tucked — because that’s actually where things are heading. There’s an increasing number of women and girls, and I really do mean girls, prepubescent girls, starting to undergo changes and even seeking out what’s called “corrective surgery” — but it’s not corrective, there’s nothing to correct. You are not abnormal if one of your labia is slightly longer than the other — that’s elective plastic surgery, whatever term you want to put on it, but we don’t see that kind of symmetry in nature. Flowers are often used as imagery for vulvas, but when you look at rose petals as they unfold, they’re not perfectly symmetrical — some are bigger than others. Our labia are a sequence of folds unique to us, and that process starts in utero, in pregnancy. It breaks my heart that there are people, male and female, who think vulvas should be symmetrical and hairless, and so much of that comes from exposure to pornography — whether it’s photographs that have been airbrushed and made to look different, or porn actresses who’ve had surgery, or who shave. It does change things.

I actually heard an amazing story — I wish I could reference it properly — but I believe it was a Dutch sex educator on a British TV show, giving a group of British schoolchildren a high-school-aged sex education lesson. She was showing photos of different vulvas on a board, with hair and all, and the male pupils reacted like they were thoroughly disgusted — which I think is actually a really common reaction now. So she gave them all razors and told them to go home and shave off their pubic hair, and when she met with them a couple of days later, they were all really itchy and sore. I thought that was a great way of showing them what their expectation is of female bodies — that we’re expected to go to such extreme lengths, even just considering surgery, let alone actually having it. It’s the state of play at the moment, and I find it heartbreaking, worrying — it really angers me.

Lisa: Yeah, there’s so many things wrong with this idea. Part of me wonders — men don’t necessarily grow up seeing penises all the time either, but I feel like men grow up in a culture where they end up seeing more penises than I ever saw vulvas. Growing up, I didn’t see anyone’s vulva — it wasn’t until maybe I was reading or watching something that mentioned looking at your own vulva that I actually went home and did it. I remember, even in junior high science class and in books, there wasn’t a picture of a vulva that showed what an actual vulva looks like — when you look at penises in books, the general anatomy shown is what it actually looks like, but when you’re looking at images of the vulva, even in certain medical textbooks, it doesn’t show labia, it doesn’t show what an actual human vulva looks like. I remember at school the clitoris was drawn as a dot, and I remember coming home and looking at my own vulva in a mirror, thinking something was wrong because I didn’t have “the dot” — because I had a clitoral hood that was bigger than the dot, and I’d never seen anything like that represented.

Maisie: So in many ways, that’s why I bring up the Vulva Gallery and her book — if you think your labia are too big, or whatever, it’s a good thing to look at, because it actually shows you what women’s vulvas look like, and how some women do have labia that hang a little longer, and that’s just completely what the human vulva looks like. I think the big problem is that we’re not seeing that diversity — we don’t see what real women’s vulvas look like, with hair, in all the different shapes and sizes. If you saw what actual labia look like on a hundred different women, you’d realize your labia is completely fine.

Lisa: Yeah, what a wonderful gift that would be — growing up knowing there’s nothing wrong with you. I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s interesting you bring up the medical textbook, because some of them still don’t feature the clitoris, or the full extent of it — they still portray it as a little nub or a dot, and they don’t include the internal anatomy, when we now know the clitoris is far bigger than the external part. It’s also worth thinking about how the internal reproductive anatomy is represented — this very fixed idea that the uterus sits bang in the middle, and the fallopian tubes curve out and the ovaries hang neatly beneath them — when actually the fallopian tubes go further backwards rather than straight out to the side, and the ovaries sit slightly posterior. Part of the internal diameter of the fallopian tube is as narrow as a human hair, while the rest is more muscular, and when you think about the journey the egg has to make, and the hair-like structures lining the inside of the tubes, and how the tubes slow that journey down for good reason as far as the potential for conceiving goes — I’m just amazed by the body. This is what I think is really important: talking about how incredible the female anatomy is, because so often it’s talked about as this part of us that doesn’t work that well — that it doesn’t contract efficiently in labor compared to other species, that it causes us pain and heavy bleeding, that we have an “incompetent cervix,” “failure to progress” in labor — we’re always talking about female anatomy in really degrading terms, which I don’t think is helpful at all when we’re trying to have a positive image of ourselves. Talking about how amazing our bodies are, and the incredible feats they achieve throughout our lifetime and in each menstrual cycle, is really important.

I have a question for you, so I’ll throw it your way and let you take it however you will: how do you think learning about the menstrual cycle early on, and about periods, reproductive anatomy, and ovulation, could impact a woman’s self-concept and her thoughts about her own body, her own vulva, and even her own femininity?

Maisie: Such a great question to end on — my heart fluttered and I got goosebumps as you asked that, because it does have such a huge impact, especially at that point in adolescence where our bodies are changing and we’re starting to work towards ovulation and having a menstrual cycle. That’s a time when a lot is in flux, in terms of our internal environment but also the external environment and people’s responses to us — thinking about how the knowledge that you’d started menstruating was greeted, how did people around you respond, what did that mean for your relationships and family dynamic. Jane Bennett has an incredible book that talks about this quite a lot, and it has a huge impact on how we view ourselves, our fertility, our reproductive capacity, and our mental health — it impacts us on every single level, and it always will. So it’s really powerful to bring this in from an early age, and I’m talking preteens — going way back — and I don’t mean just talking to our daughters, I mean talking to our sons as well.

My cycle came back when my son was about 18 months old, and I was so excited to get it back. I’d had an amazing pregnancy, an amazing birth, a great postpartum, but what I found challenging was not having a menstrual cycle, because I’d gotten so used to living in tune with that rhythm. When it came back I was so thankful to be bleeding — the first thing I did was tell my boyfriend, who was so pumped for me, gave me a massive hug, and said he knew how important this was to me. Then I told my son and showed him the blood, and let him know — I didn’t make it a big deal, and it doesn’t have to be a big deal, though you have to do what suits your family and your kids best. But I think we don’t trust kids enough with that information, and a lot of that comes from what we’ve internalized from our own experience. Saying it in a positive way — “I started bleeding today, check this out” — now if we have a bath together, he thinks I’ve got some kind of magic power, and he wants me to turn the whole bath red. I think it’s really powerful to have these conversations from an early age, changing the stories passed down through generations into ones that are positive, that normalize the menstrual cycle and celebrate it for how incredible it is.

Lisa: Well, I couldn’t agree more — after all, every single person on earth is here because of their mother’s menstrual cycle, so it’s kind of important. Well, Maisie, thank you for being here.

Maisie: Thank you, honey — we could have kept chatting for the rest of the day.

Lisa: No, this was great, it was so nice to share stories and learn from you, and just be immersed in period positivity — I’m sure there are a lot of women listening to this episode who really needed it, so thank you for that. Where can listeners go to learn more about you and what you do, and grab a copy of Period Power?

Maisie: MaisieHill.com is my website, and I’m on Instagram — that’s usually where you can find me, my handle is @_maisiehill_. My online membership — the doors will probably be closed by the time this episode goes out, but they’re opening at the end of October and will open again in 2020. And my book, Period Power, is available in all good bookshops.

Lisa: Awesome — well, thank you so much for being here, we’ll make sure to link to everything you mentioned, and thank you so much for coming on the show.

Maisie: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Lisa — I’ve been so excited to have this conversation with you, and I hope we get to do it again.

Lisa: Yes, thanks again! Thank you for listening — if you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with a friend. You’ll find the show notes page for this episode over at fertilityfriday.com/311.

I hope that you enjoyed my interview with Maisie — what a powerful and important conversation. I mean, imagine if we’d heard this conversation when we were all 13 years old — these are the types of conversations we should be having as we come into womanhood, as we’re welcomed into this incredible time in our lives when we have the capacity to create life, within a culture that doesn’t celebrate that. Imagine if instead of scaring young women about the thought of an unplanned pregnancy, and focusing on this really negative view of our body’s amazing ability to create, we focused on truly understanding it — understanding that it’s nothing to fear, that we can understand and work with our bodies and achieve whatever we want. It’s completely and fully possible to successfully prevent pregnancy without hormones throughout your life, and not every young woman at 12 or 13 is in a sexual relationship, so that shouldn’t be the only way we talk about the menstrual cycle.

So many different topics and concepts came out in today’s conversation, and one of the things I think is so important to remember is that when women have a deep understanding of their menstrual cycles, their bodies, and their fertility — when they understand that it’s an incredible part of a whole that serves a purpose, and that the emotional and physical changes they may experience on a cyclical basis are part of a normal process — it helps them understand and appreciate themselves, even at the most basic level. That basic understanding — that your period, and the different phases of your cycle, are a normal, natural, healthy part of being a woman — also helps us appreciate our bodies.

When I think back to my own journey of discovering fertility awareness at a young age, discovering that my cycles were healthy and normal, and that I didn’t have to be afraid of my fertility, it helped me develop a positive relationship with my body and with my vulva. Using a menstrual cup helped me overcome the discomfort a lot of women feel about actually touching their bodies and being in connection with them — through the process of fertility awareness, checking my cervix, using menstrual cups, it really helped me recognize that these are my body parts, and there’s nothing wrong with how they look, feel, or smell.

I know that for some of you listening who are perhaps uncomfortable with me using the word “woman” when I talk about the experience of menstruation and periods — I use that word because the vast majority of individuals who have this experience are women, and I feel it’s important to say that for all the women who identify as women. That said, I do recognize that not every individual who experiences periods and a menstrual cycle identifies as a woman, but in either case, paying attention to your menstrual cycle, connecting with it, tracking it, and learning from it is an incredible way to connect with a central part of ourselves that so many of us have felt disconnected from.

I hope that this conversation between Maisie and me has encouraged you to continue to pursue that, to enjoy it, and to celebrate it — and to push back against a healthcare system that tells us to suppress it, ignore it, and treat it as unimportant, without even considering that it could be an important part of our experience throughout our lives.

So I just want to thank you for tuning in to the podcast today. I appreciate all of you for being part of the Fertility Friday community, and for sharing the show, whether it’s the podcast itself or specific episodes, with your friends and anyone who you think would benefit from it. If you can think of a friend or someone in your life who would really benefit from hearing today’s episode, again, the show notes page link is at fertilityfriday.com/311.

With that said, I will let you go. I hope you enjoy your week and your weekend, and that you’re finding ways to stay connected to the world, whether that’s going out for walks and enjoying nature, or connecting with friends and family in whatever way you’re able to. I do hope that you are doing amazing, and, as always, until next time — be well, and happy charting.