Seems a bunch of the NC-17/ unrated films that got theatrical release are missing: Y Tu Mamá Tambien, Shortbus, Romance, Intimacy, Nymphomaniac…also, pretty much any Peter Greenaway film (I think it's Prospero's Books that has an entire flock of male nudes descending a staircase, which left me and my mom in stitches…

I was just going to say...

Yep. That scene was rewound many times.

I started watching this show expecting to get Viola Davis in Olivia Pope power mode, but it's so much more complicated and interesting than that. Annalise is very good at her job, and clearly in her element then, but everything else about her life is so compellingly ill-fitting from the clothes to the wigs to the…

Seriously! Do they not realize that they look like overgrown toddlers in those giant baggy shorts? And don't even get me started on what happens to swim trunks like that once they get wet. Ew ew ew.

Mmmm...I think it's actually pretty common for survivors to work out sexual trauma through claiming the thing that caused them trauma as their own, whether that's rape fantasies/ role-play, or wanting to be dominated – which is not at all to invalidate what you went through or feel (I'm so sorry) but to show that the…

Ahhhh, I forgot about this. So amazing.

Seriously, ALL HAIL THE CUP. And nope, no age restrictions – Lunette specifically advertises their model 1 to girls who've just started their period, and Diva Cup pitches their size A to both girls and moms who might be buying them for daughters. I can see that the cup might technically be a bit challenging for girls…

Omg, the few times I used pads before abandoning them forever, I was like "what fresh hell is this?" - the smells, the garbage issues, the plastic waste, the chance of leaks on to your clothes in highly visible areas, the impossibility of being discreet about carrying them or stashing one in your pocket…

I have to say, I was horrified when I read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and learned about the belt/pad combo girls used to be subjected to. I was so confused by the description I couldn't even figure it out at first, and then when I did…the horror. I read recently that the publisher has updated Margaret to…

I've heard the opposite, that the age of first periods is actually dropping. It used to be pretty common for most girls to get it between 13-15, but I was one of the last to get it at almost 13. My sister didn't get hers until high school and she felt like a total outsider.

I'm totally relieved to see it! I now know it's normal, but no one ever teaches girls that it is so I spent the first few years of having a period feeling gross. My cycle starts and finishes with brown or pink discharge around the actual red tide.

Yeah, I have PCOS, and when I was 15 or 16 I had a summer where I didn't get my period for four months, and then I had it near-constantly for the next three. I really wish that OB/GYNs would drop this "irregular periods are normal in teenage girls" shit. I could have been diagnosed with PCOS then, not had to wait…

Yeah, someone really needs to prepare girls for the possibility that it'll be more brown crust than red tide. I was a bit confused at first, but after a few hours I figured it out. Also, you have the only discreet mom in all of Jez-dom! My mom blabbed to my dad and sister almost immediately. I was already annoyed to…

All the horrible pad stories…I wish people would just get over their hymenophobia and give all teenage girls tampons immediately. My swim coach in junior high didn't give us a choice. We were told in no uncertain terms that our periods were no excuse for missing practice or meets and that we were to use OB tampons…

All the disloyal moms on this thread! I got mine at school in junior high and waited almost all day to tell my mom because I was so annoyed (she got hers at 12, grandma on the other side of the family not until she was 16 and my older sister was almost 15 – I did not want to deal with all that mess every month until I…

Amazing.

Your Jez alias wins.

Yeah, I got mine at not quite 13 and grew another four inches after that point.

Con: not feeling the Orientalism. So predictable, and of course they had to have Hamish Bowles write it, so it would have that extra soupçon of Colonial Brit condescension.