luchita, I'm also concerned about the lack of longitudinal studies on stopping your period altogether. This is definitely something that needs to be monitored, and women who decide to forgo their periods should know about this lack of study.

The thing is, women are already tinkering with the frequency of their periods. Some do so officially through birth control pills like 'Seasonale,' getting their period every three months. Others do so using the standard 21-active and 7-inactive version—only they skip the placebo week. They don't want their period while they’re traveling, on vacation, super busy at work, or just not feeling up to having wicked cramps that month. Then they go back to taking the pill as normal. And they might do so more often if it didn't require getting more refills on their prescription.

It's all an individual decision, the long-term safety of which needs monitoring. I do worry, from more of a philosophical standpoint, that menstruation cessation will further enforce the idea of menstruation as "unsanitary," something dirty that we shouldn't even talk about.

Wow. Thank you so much for posting that link.

You wrote: "The idea that women in the past rarely menstruated (because they were pregnant all the time) has largely been refuted, so I wish it would stop being repeated as fact."

Can you cite your source for this being refuted? I thought that between pregnancy and breast-feeding, women menstruate fewer times per year than in the past.

Also, regarding Anonymous: although I seriously doubt men sit around chatting about women's fish or dead squirrel smell--if smell's bothered them so much these same men would probably clean their bathrooms more often-- I'd like to defend part of what Anonymous wrote.

Menstruation can have a smell. Whether you sense this smell as the sweet aroma of fertility--dogwood trees in bloom have the same smell to me--is another matter. Menstruation is also messy. Many women regularly end up washing out their underwear in the sink, bleed through pads and sometimes saturate tampons faster than they can change them. They can have horrendous cramps and diarrhea.

You can view menstruation as a beautiful process that signifies your healthy womanhood, but it is messy. So is childbirth. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Right now, I’ve only skimmed over parts of “Behind the Gap,” but it’s chock full of great info. One factor they address is negotiating for better pay. Many women don’t realize the flexibility in assigning salaries and fail to negotiate for higher pay. That’s a gap right from the start.

Furthermore, men are encouraged to be aggressive, but women are often penalized for it. Upon asking for a higher salary, I had a boss hint that I wasn’t being a team player and that there’s more to a job than money—the sort of comments I wouldn’t see him ever making to a man.

Prospective employers now often verify your immediate salary history to confirm how little they can pay you. Thus, even when you change jobs, a low salary at a prior job can follow you to the next. So the gap widens, even accounting for age, education, job field and marital/family status.

It’s great this report dispels some of the myths about the wage gap and tells it like most of already know—Men have the edge when it comes to salaries.

Clockwork Smurf makes some good points, but this one is a little suspect:

The answer to this problem is actually very easy to solve, women must simply demand more money. So long as women only demand x they will only be paid x. When women demand y in equal amounts to men you will see this wage gap disappear. Then however you may also see the number of women employed in a given industry drop as well, but that's an entirely different debate.

An individual woman can request higher pay and be denied. The woman can either a) stay and deal, or b) quit. In quitting, she allows her boss to higher a younger woman to replace her—who the boss can pay still less (unless she can somehow convince no other woman to take the job). Unfortunately, many companies place a higher value on cheap labor than on experience, even when the pricier, more experienced worker would be more valuable over time. The company is just thinking about this year’s financial reports and the salary to revenue ratio. It isn’t that simple.

Also, salaries are kept so secret—who knows what the person in the next cubicle is making? How do you know you’ve been offered less than a comparable colleague? Maybe every woman should assume that whatever salary she is being offered, it is at least 5% less than what a man would be offered and factor that amount further into negotiations.

The President hopes Gonzales will remain Attorney General?? What the heck does that mean? The Attorney General is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The AG “serves at the pleasure of the president,” the phrase the White House is so fond of using. So unless he “chooses” to step down, is asked to resign by the President, or is convicted of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, Gonzales isn’t going anywhere.

So which is it Mr. President? Are you concerned that you’ll fire him, he’ll resign or that he’ll be convicted of a crime?