28 days

I was reading an article about how women's monthly cycles with contraceptives can become optional. Of course, I was reading it, while I was at full cramping and irritability. And I wondered what it would be like to not have a cycle. No seeing what hurts more this month. It always changes. This month it happens to be my teeth and gums. It feels like my teeth are going to fall out. They're still not sure how the hormones affect that. For the career minded woman, they say, cycles are a nuisance.

The drugs for what's widely known as "the pill" were really only given for 21 days with the last 7 pills basically sugar pills to allow for the cycle. If you skip the last week and continue to take the doses then the cycle doesn't happen. As drug companies develop long term contraceptives or continual ones like the one that goes under the skin, the cycle is skipped altogether.

Yet I practice a style of martial art that examines and studies the way the male and female energy interact and express themselves. The cycle creates a natural up and down experience of this energy from male to female. To go through days when the energy is dark, and days when the energy is light, and days when I can maneuver between the two. I just recently figured out which days I was particularly male, which ironically coincided with the specific days that society has marked as the most female.

And men don't think they have a cycle explicitly, but there seems to be an up and down of men's hormonal states and I wonder how much of that is in reaction to women's hormonal states in the way women living in proximity of each other will soon have coordinated cycles. Do men have an internal one or are simply responding to ours? A sympathetic response? And if they do, what happens to those responses?

Would it mean that when women are being bitchy, they could no longer blame it on PMS? No more excuses for craving chocolate? Find some other way to tap into their deep emotional states. Find some other way to reach into their sensitivities. At what point along with the female/male energy curve does the neutral state leave you?

So when there is no cycle, I'm having trouble concieving of what this would be like, it was all just be...what...even? No up and down...just nothing. 28 days of nothing.