I Thought Everyone Knew This

What is period underwear?

What is Prozac?

This episode started as a Q&A.

It didn’t stay that way.

From black “cheek to kidney” netball undies…

to the very real experience of taking antidepressants…

Content Note
This podcast gets into bodies, panic attacks, trauma, sexism, mental health, and the occasional emotional sinkhole. Please look after yourself only listen when you feel safe to engage with potentially triggering material. 
Also, I swear.

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Credits
Recorded on the lands of the Ramindjeri and Ngarrindjeri peoples.
Sovereignty never ceded.

Recorded & edited at Ridley Farm Studio by Luke Ridley
https://ridleyfarmstudio.com.au...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Okay, so I've had a few messages from listeners. Um, there's a fan mail, I think it's called fan mail button you can push, which will send me a text message. Uh, and I've also had people um send me DMs and a friend who I absolutely adore, who listens to all my episodes, has had some I love his questions. So um I thought that I would do like a little makeup podcast. I don't want to call it a bonus edition or whatever, but um, so I thought instead of doing a formal QA, I'd just answer the questions. Because what I'm realizing is they're not really individual questions, it's like they are, but there's a theme, they're all pointing to the same thing, which is how much we don't know. One of the questions I got was Catherine, what is period underwear? And I loved this question because I've just assumed that everybody knew. And there are actually two answers to this question. So answer number one is we've always had period underwear. So if I think back to my time as a girl when I first got my period, um, we just didn't call it period underwear. What we had were black sports knickers, and when I say knickers, I mean those things went from cheek to kidney. They were thick, they were black, they were slightly shiny, probably some kind of polyester, they were indestructible. You wore them for netball, basically, because if your skirt flew up, it was considered fine if you had these black sports knickers on. Um, because you know it was completely pulling if you just had your little floral numbery spots or whatever your cotton cotton, you could not wear cotton tails, you had to wear these black sport snickers. And when you got your period, they became your period undies because if they stained, you couldn't tell. Also, nothing stuck to those things because of the plastic in them, and they held they held a part in place like their life depended on it. I had five pairs of them, um, and I remember being at uni when I was at uni at you know, and go visit my friends and look at their washing line, and you could see if the five pairs of black knickers are on the line, you'd be like, Oh, someone's got a period, or you know, like it was you just knew. But then I want to fast forward to the modern version period underwear, which I think really only came in the mid-2010s, maybe even towards the end of that decade, and it's where the underwear itself is the pad. So the gusset, and that's the part that sits against your vulva, it had this absorbent layer built into it, like front to back, which matters a lot because a lot of pads never quite did that properly. Like I would have to double up on pads, one at the front and one at the back, especially overnight, but pretty much all the time because I had very heavy periods. Um, but the thing about period mine were for modybody, period and the thing about them is that they worked. You could wear one for most of the day depending on your flow. Sometimes you'd need to change it, but and like they've got different levels, so you can get light, heavy, or overnight, and you can even get period swimwear now, and and period thongs. So, for those of you not in Australia, period G strings. Um, but the period uh uh swimwear means you can go swimming when you've got your period. Sorry, that was my stomach. And I remember I loved swimming, but I couldn't swim when I had my period because I used pads. But so now you can buy um period swimmer and you can go swimming like a fully functional fucking member of society. When they came in was right when I was going into perimenopause, so I had already had a very irregular period and it became incredibly unpredictable. But it meant that I could wear a pair every day and not spend the whole day wondering if today it was going to turn into a situation. And I think that's the thing that struck me. I didn't know how good they were, and I didn't realise not everybody knew they existed. And that seems to happen a lot when it comes to our bodies. Another question I got was what's Prozac? And again, I thought everybody knew. Prozac isn't I want to say um I'm not a doctor, I'm not a vet, and you will know why I said I'm not a vet shortly. I'm not giving medical advice. You need to go if you are considering taking medication or changing medication, speak to someone who is a professional with depression and anxiety medication. I'll do an episode in the future about medical advocacy. You do have to advocate for yourself. Yes, it's a pain in the ass. Yes, it's worth it. So Prozac is an antidepressant and it's a brand name. The generic name is fluoxetine. Little warning note here. There's another antidepressant which has got a very similar name, but Prozac is a brand name. The generic is fluoroxetine, and that is F-L-U-O-X-E-T-I-N-E. It's been around since the late 1980s, and it's one of the most widely prescribed antidepressants in the world. And it it the class of antidepressant is an SSRI, which stands for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. Yeah, it's a mouthful. It's a very long way of saying it helps regulate serotonin in the brain. We're going to get a little bit scientific now, people, so you can either fast forward or hold on to your hats. Here we go. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter involved in mood and a whole lot of other things. And what these medications do, these SSRIs, is they slow down how quickly it gets reabsorbed, so there's more of available. And in my experience, it's not a super dramatic medication, like it doesn't switch you from being depressed to being a bouncy, always happy, bubbly chiquita. It just evens things out. Another really important note about Prozac and SSRIs in general is that they take time, so you need to take them for weeks, sometimes months before they have an effect. But I have found over that time the edges soften. So fewer panic attacks, fewer unaliving thoughts. Not zero, but less. And there's something really important I want to say here. When you first start taking SSRIs, and when you first start taking SSRIs, one of the symptoms is they can actually increase unaliving thoughts, which is really confronting, which is why you need to be monitored properly. You need to find a doctor that you trust that understands how these medications work and who is interested in your mental health. Something I find mystifying is that the same class of medication is used for both anxiety and depression. Because in my body, these two things feel completely different. But SSRIs are used to treat, amongst other things, panic disorders and depression. And I've been talking to doctors about this for uh over ten years since I first started talking about my panic attacks and depression. I've been talking about the medication. And it was only recently that I was prescribed something specifically for my panic attacks. Which actually, this medication, interestingly, was initially developed for prostate cancer, but now has been found to help people like me. So I wake up with a panic attack at between three and four in the morning. So it was designed initially for prostate cancer because it lowers blood pressure, but it it's been uh found to be useful for people with PTSD and CPTSD. So that's me. Um, but so there's still a lot we're figuring out when it comes to medication and anxiety and depression. Look, and there's another thing about anxiety and depression medication, and actually a whole all medications, is that historically they've been tested more on men than women. There are a lot of reasons for that. The main reason is because it was thought that women's hormones were too complex and would derail the trials. I'm not even making this up. Read Invisible Women, it's an amazing book. You can't make this stuff up. So, but because historically most, if not all, medications have been tested on more men than women, when you start asking your doctor how does this work in female bodies, you don't always get a clear answer. And that's okay too. I just think it's important to ask it. Oh, and here's an interesting thing: Prozac is prescribed to dogs. Really common, really common. I hass it a lot, and I would say a quarter to a third of the dogs I look after are on it for anxiety, for aggression, for reactivity, and it works, it works. That actually leads me into something else that people ask me about, which is the house sitting. I don't want to spend too long on it. Um, I started doing it because I wanted flexibility. I I separated from my husband and divorced. We sold our house in Melbourne, I moved back to South Australia. I rented in the town my mum and dad live in for nearly a year, and I didn't like it. And I wanted to to travel, um, but I yeah, I wanna I wanted to travel, so that's what I did. Uh it suits my nervous system, different environments, different rhythms, um a bit of space, not having to stay anywhere too long. Um yeah, it really suits my nervous system. Another question that came in the fan mail was what is my view on trans women in sport? And here's my answer. It's not something I get my knickers in a knot about. I don't see it as a major issue, I don't see it as a problem at all. What I find much more interesting is why has it become such a big conversation? Because when you actually look at it, trans athletes competing at elite levels are so rare. Really, really rare. I think there's been two trans women compete at the Olympics in the fucking history of the Olympics. But what is very real is the level of scrutiny and hostility directed at trans women who do play sport. That part's not theoretical. And when I look at the world we're living in, where women are being killed by intimate partners at ever-escalating rates, where violence and inequality are so present, where women are being disappeared by their intimate partners. This isn't the issue that I see affecting most women's lives. But it is definitely an issue that politicians talk about to be divisive, that some media outlets talk about to be divisive. It's been amplified and politicized. It's be once something becomes a talking point, it can feel much bigger than it really is. And I think all of this division, all of this confusion about woke and trans women in sport, and you know, Antifa and um I don't know, crazy feminists. I think all of that comes back to something people say to me a lot, which is after each podcast I do get a couple of DMs, and people have said, Oh, I didn't realise that that was sexist, or that's something I hear all the time, and I didn't realize it was sexist, and I wonder if that's because we've got all this other noise, big noise about trans women in sport, and um you know the manosphere, we've got all of this big noise not based in fact, that I wonder if it's kind of pushing away the everyday sexism that's out there, and one thing I will say about seeing everyday, I don't like the phrase casual sexism because it's not casual, it's sexism, but once you start noticing it, you can't unsee it, you can't unhear it. It follows you everywhere, and you're welcome. So I drive down a street now and I clock the name. Is that a masculine name? Is that a male name? Usually the same with buildings and statues and parks. You start noticing who gets named and who doesn't, and it's really interesting. You go to a war memorial, the men and the women who served are named, but the women who stayed home and got kept the country going are not remembered. Why is that? I'm really interested in everyday feminism and and how women experience and look, I know that's a big subject because if there are three and a half billion women on the planet, we are experiencing life in three and a half billion different ways, but I'm interested in commonality between the inequality between men and women. Um also, but I never want to um ignore or not include, excuse me, ignore or not include women of colour, people of colour. Inequality is everywhere, and it's not as easy as saying, well, it's men against women, it's really not men against women or women against men. Inequality is everywhere, and I'm interested in how society tries to smooth that over and justify it. Um people clutch their pearls a lot when we talk about domestic violence, when we talk about, you know, one woman a week is unalived by her intimate partner, um, killed by her intimate partner, where domestic violence call-outs in South Australia are one in three of every police call out. People act like it's shocking, and they act like, oh, you know, I'm so surprised at that. How is that happening? Oh, it's just a few bad eggs. No, it's not. I look, I'm fuck's sake, I'm not saying all men, right? But I'm saying it's not a few people who men who have suddenly turned sulfuric. It starts way earlier than that, and you can draw a line, not a straight line, but you can draw a line from jokes about women being bad drivers, from dismissing women as too emotional, for saying bull boys will be boys, for from not taking women seriously, from not believing women when they talk about rape that happened to them when they were children, rape that happened to them when they were adults. You can draw a line from that to beliefs, to behaviour, to harm. And there's a line from Malcolm Turnbull that I think about all the time. Oh, for non-Australian, non-Australian, sorry about that. For people who are not familiar with Australian politics, Malcolm Turnbull was um a Prime Minister of our country, and he was interestingly from the Liberal Party, which in Australia that's our right party, our party on the right. Big L Liberal. There's a line from Malcolm Turnbull, I think about all the time. He said, not all disrespect of women ends in violence, but all violence against women begins with disrespect. So the question I'm interested in is what do we do about that? Like the everyday part. The stuff people laugh at or tell me that I'm mentally unstable for calling out. Look, and I don't have a neat answer, I don't have a hypothesis, I don't know if calling it out works, and in fact, in my experience it doesn't. But I do know this it doesn't start with violence. It starts much earlier, and that's the part I kind of can't stop noticing. I'm Catherine Redden, and this is the C word. Thanks very much for listening.