The Princess and the Pad
and other horrifying humour for women
by
Christine Leigh Langtree
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Smashwords Edition
Copyright Christine Leigh Langtree 2011
A period piece
2. Is there Sex after Childbirth?
Who cares whether there’s life after death or not?
3. When a Gynecologist Calls...
Going down the stairs into a dark basement where, unbeknownst to you, a mad serial killer waits is nothing compared to a pap smear gone terribly wrong
Unless you’re ready to hear something really messy, it might be best to leave his fantasies inside his head where they belong
Once upon a time, I freelanced as a humour writer for a very risqué Australian women’s magazine. Well, it was risqué back in the bad old days of the ‘90s - in the 21st century, when kids have seen every type of sex known to humankind performed on the internet by the time they are 9, it’s probably the kind of thing they give to pre-schoolers to teach them to read.
Here is a small collection of my work for Australian Women’s Forum.
The Princess and the Pad
Something ought to be done about it. We shouldn’t have to put up with this sort of thing. It’s time someone did a bit of serious debunking before a dangerous myth takes hold.
Where did this myth originate? The same place as most modern day myths of course – television commercials. And what is the precise nature of this myth? Simply this – that your average Australian woman goes bolting joyously about the beach wearing barely any clothes on the first day of her period.
Ha! I say to that. Show me a woman who does this and I’ll you a woman who suffers from bi-polar disorder and is currently in a psychotic episode preventing her from feeling any physical pain.
Do you believe those ads?
“Virgo gives me protection - even on my heaviest days,” says a smiling blonde wearing a white bathing suit cut up to her armpits, in the tone of someone who has just eaten a big plate of some delightful liqueur ice cream.
Or “Wow, I feel so comfortable with an extra absorbent Sagittarius girding my nether regions that I think I’ll just go jog up a mountain,” says a cute, happy chicky-babe in the tiniest shorts ever manufactured.
Or “Mmmm-MMMM! I am bleeding like a stuck pig with haemophilia but who cares? I have my Leo with wings in my knickers!” says a confident brunette carrying a briefcase into an important meeting.
If any of those women is wearing a sanitary pad, I’ll eat my Meds. If any of those women even has her period, I’ll have a Modess for dessert. Who smiles like that when their entire body feels like Bikini atoll after a small nuclear test? Who smiles like that when their husband/lover/landlord has moved out because they’re sick of ducking crockery in the week P.P. (Preceding Period)? Goldfish have been known to go out for cigarettes and never return due to the PMT of their owners.
Let’s try and alternative fairy tale on for size. It’s your birthday or your anniversary or you are Cinderella on the night of Prince Charming’s big ball – get the picture? It is a BIG night. You’ve been to the hairdresser and the manicurist. You’ve showered, shaved and are presently polishing your earrings. You look at the white dress, the one that cost you 50 per cent of your wages for the last four and a half months and suddenly, you feel it. That warm, trickling feeling. The one that says that either you’re peeing yourself or the very worst thing - short of giving birth in a crowded shopping centre, of course - has happened.
And since you’re not in the habit of peeing yourself, you have to assume that you have your period. “Oh God,” you say, hitting yourself in the forehead over and over like Basil Fawlty. “Why did I get the white? Why, why, why?” You pace for a while and then you stop and open the wardrobe sadly. You take out your old standby, the medium-sized black dress (because of course you can’t wear your little black dress because of course, YOU HAVE YOUR PERIOD!) and you put it back and you take it out and put it back and take it out and so on for a half hour or so.
Then you decide you won’t be held hostage by your bodily functions and defiantly don your beautiful white dress. That is, of course, after first donning a tampon, a sanitary napkin and a pair of plastic pants your sister left the last time she visited with the kids.
Then you present yourself to Prince Charming.
“Why are you walking like that?” he says.