It seems like every day a new health tracking gizmo appears in stores. The fitbit. The Apple Watch. TICKRx. Leaf, a tracker that’s advertised as “for women” because it’s a fitbit copycat shaped like a piece of jewelry. But are any of these really that special? Do any of them really understand what women need? No! And that’s why I am developing an innovative and unique health tracker, exclusively for the self-aware, self-care-oriented woman. VULVALUV Wearable Tech Intimates. S

“Having sex on your period is absolutely safe,” reassures OB-GYN and talk-show regular Dr. Laura Berman. Like most sex experts in the past half-century, Berman is ready to demolish old menstrual taboos and usher in a modern period. And like many educators, physicians, and cultural critics who have written about menstruation, she frames her recommendations within a historical narrative: in the old days, religious proscriptions and folk traditions labeled menstruating women as

One of the most popular ads at the Superbowl this year was “Like a Girl.” Respected documentary director Lauren Greenfield asked a series of girls and boys, “show me what it looks like to ‘throw like a girl.’ ‘Run like a girl.’ ‘Fight like a girl.’” Teenage girls and boys performed a caricature of silly, incompetent running and throwing. Young girls, though, ran fast and threw hard. They didn’t know, yet, that girls are incompetent. It concluded, “Let’s make #likeagirl mean a

*Half-price sale on my book, The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America! Ask someone to talk about her experiences with menstruation for a couple of hours, and she will usually laugh: “What on earth would I have to say for that long, on that subject?” And then, as it turns out, she will tell story after story. In researching The Modern Period, I interviewed 75 diverse American women and men, old and young, about the role this relatively mundane bodily event

* My book, The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America, is on sale for $30 hardcover! When you were 14, if you had your period, but your parents couldn’t buy you pads or tampons, would you have gone to school? It’s unimaginable, right? It would have been too gross and humiliating to even consider. Better to pretend to be sick, and deal with the missed work and the bad grades. In many parts of the world, that’s exactly what happens. And that means that girls d

Miscarriage rarely makes the news, except in tabloids. But last year, Virginia state Senator Mark Obenshain’s ill-advised attempt to require Virginia women to report all miscarriages to the police contributed to his failure to become Virginia’s state attorney general. The bill, introduced in 2009, haunted his race for the position. Obenshain was trying to demonstrate his moral outrage over the case of a frightened teenager who had given birth to a premature stillborn baby, an