Baby Dance is What Babies Do. Not Where Babies Come From.

So I had other plans for today’s blog post. I’ve had a lot of late night creativity the past few days and I have a few posts that I’ve written and plan to publish over the course of the next week, and then a few posts that are “on deck” sitting in my brain. But today I saw something that annoyed me, so I have to comment on it.

I was looking for people’s thoughts on various birth control methods, and I ended up on a Mom’s forum. I was confronted with a bunch of random acronyms that didn’t make sense to me. Acronyms are always worse when you work in a field that has a lot of acronyms, because you think that an acronym means one thing, when in reality it means another. Like AF. I assumed that AF was Autofocus because that’s what it normally means.

But what the hell does Autofocus have to do with my vagina?

I asked a few friends, and one of them came across this useful link. Apparently, AF stands for Aunt Flo, a cute little colloquialism for menstruation. Similarly amusing are BD (Baby Dance, or Sex to sane people), and BM (which stands for Breast Milk).

First – most people you ask will say that BM is Bowel Movement, and I can see tremendous potential for confusion if they assume the wrong thing. “I made three cups of BM today and my son is still hungry!” Or “How do I properly store my BM?” It’s just not pretty.

But beyond the potential for confusion, we have a lot of “cutesy” words made up for regular bodily functions. Aunt Flo? Here’s the thing, ladies, if we ever want people to take our medical concerns seriously, we have to stop labeling them with such flowery names. What person is going to believe that your Aunt Flo gives you considerable pain and cramping? And obviously these issues don’t affect all women, but please for the love of God, don’t trivialize things that impact tons of other women!

And lemme just say one thing. If you can’t call sex by it’s proper name… Don’t have a fucking kid.

Sex isn’t dirty. It certainly isn’t dirty in a consensual, long-term relationship (which is what I assume you’re in if you’re trying to get pregnant in the first place). Menstruation… well, it IS dirty in the sense that it’s really hard to be leaking blood and be clean, but it’s still not something to be ashamed of or to feel that you need to “beat around the bush” about.

The reason that people treat these things like they’re something to hide is because of words like this. Don’t try and cover things up with flowery words and stupid euphemisms.