The War on Menstruation

In some wickedly funny satire, Amanda Marcotte shows us how to create an anti-menstruation movement:

The "abortion is icky" argument is such that the anti-choice crowd could easily start agitating for a ban on menstruation without skipping a beat. The fact that menstruation is incredibly common shouldn't slow them down; after all, the anti-choice position demands that you believe that more than 1/3 of American women are murderers. Menstruation is, except maybe to a handful of insistent earth mother crunchy feminists, generally regarded as pretty icky. I throw a bloody tampon at you, you'll probably do your best to avoid it. Getting the camera out for some gruesome and shocking close-ups of the macabre used tampon just carefully thrown out in the trash or heartlessly flushed down the toilet would be simpler than getting pictures of aborted fetuses. Blow up the bloody tampon pictures, put them on some placards and you're ready to start convincing people that this is so disgusting that someone needs to ban something to make it stop.

When feminists protest and point out that banning menstruation is both not going to work and just a way to abuse women, label them "pro-menstruation." Have pundits on Fox News imply that anyone who defends the right to menstruate is part of a bloody feminist army trying to force all women to bleed all the time. Male pundits and shock jocks could make rib-nudging jokes about how those sex-hating feminists just want to make sure that every night is a "not tonight, Aunt Flow is here" night. Religious nuts would come up with snappy slogans like, "Jesus did not bleed on the cross so you can bleed on your panties!"

The whole post is brilliant.