Periods in sociobiology: the status of women and sanitary protection

The poverty of most of the world will lap also at the West if resources are wasted into near extinction.  How much of the status of women of the West has been made possible by being able to waste disposable products - throwing away mountains of soiled stuff, unrecyclable, land-fill burdening.  Further inventions needed include cost reduction, feasible home manufacture from cheap materials, cleansing without water, and quick biodegradability into fertiliser.

There is a link with the problems of population growth. The larger the world populations, the greater will be the shortage of water as the world’s greatest crisis - unexpected developments excepted.

The larger the female population and the more that family planning reduces continual pregnancies, the greater the problem of materials and water for feminine hygiene.

And the greater the risk for the status of women.

So on the macro scale, limitation of population growth is part of a solution to ensure that women have the chance of freedom of status.  On a micro scale, which also affects the macro, remains the matter of freedom for women during that one week in the month. New inventions are needed - and also, awareness of what possibilities may already exist.

The West with all its technology and science has still much to learn from the less ‘developed’ countries, where down to-earth strategies have had to be used for centuries for everyday matters. Yet how little affluent Westerners know of other methods for toilet-training, or of getting babies to sleep, or of making do with 7 litres of water a day - and of managing the monthlies.  Like the medicines waiting to be found in the forests, known by the disappearing tribes, there may still be simple low-tech solutions that the superior- feeling whitey may have never bothered to observe, or may have written up only in anthropological literature that the public have not read. Look first for these possible secrets among peoples where women have most freedom. Then Western technology may be able to come at even more convenient, practical, healthy, minimum cost and environmentally friendly solutions than we have now with drugs and not-completely-disposable disposables.

What human genetics may next turn to may be in the present realm of science fantasy, in ways perhaps to produce humans less involved in reproduction, or with less recurring inconvenience in doing so.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of billion poor women who just need their lives made that critical little bit easier, and an additional ecological problem to avoid if we share our own improvident solutions disposable solutions for ‘feminine hygiene’ on any larger scale.