In Other "By Guys For Guys" News, Apple's New Health App Doesn't Track Menstruation

Seriously? Because I track 3 things about my health now that I have to worry about thyroid issues:

1. thyroid hormone levels
2. poop schedule (officially old)
3. menstruation

Now, maybe it tracks the pooping, I don't know. Thyroid issues can cause "intestinal paralysis" but the medication has helped a TON and wow this entry has too much information. Seriously, you poop an average of 1.5 times per week and see if you don't freak out and start tracking it. But the thyroid issue and the medication have thrown my lady hormones seriously out of whack and I know because I am tracking my periods with an app and I've had 5 periods in the past 3 months. My last cycle was two weeks! Also, last October, my breasts grew a cup size for just no reason at all.*

Anyway, that is just entirely too many periods. I had an appointment to try to fix it but I couldn't get the appropriate treatment if I had breast cancer and my biopsy was the day after the appointment. (The biopsy was fine.) I got a new appointment for next week and hopefully the thing that we do at that appointment will straighten things out. But it will take some time to be fully effective, so I will have to track my periods to see how well it's working or not. And so period tracker!

 

This is one of the many reasons that I don't understand how anyone could make a "health tracker" and not track periods. There are so many reasons to track periods!

• The Rhythm Method
• Including tracking ovulation timing to become pregnant
• Migraine tracking
• Perimenopause tracking
• "Is my installed birth control working?" tracking
• "WTF is my cycle anyway?" tracking
• "Maybe I do have PMS" tracking
• "Oh frack, am I late? Frackfrackfrackfrack." (Yes, I just had a BSG binge-a-thon. It's disappearing from Nteflix streaming for a while! It was an emergency! I didn't know who the fifth Cylon was!)

From the article:

You can even use it to input your sodium intake, because "with Health, you can monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in," said Apple Software executive Craig Federighi back in June.

So apparently "am I pregnant?" is not a metric that women are interested in. "Do my migraines correlate with a certain stage of my cycle?" is not a metric that women are interested in. "Have I seriously been bleeding for 18 days? That can't be right" is not a metric that women are interested in. Or maybe there were no women in attendance. Or maybe he just doesn't include women in the set of "you" because women don't fucking count.

No, when he said "you" he meant "me" and he doesn't need to know his menstrual cycle and he probably doesn't care about his manstrel cycle or whatever the male equivalent is called. OMG I really wanted manstruation to be a word and other people are using it-- wrongly, ok, because they're 12 and they**... Never mind. It's been tainted. See what I did there? Man, I have been awake too long.

Menstrual cycle was probably left out because it was reproductive and they figured that issues surrounding pregnancy aren't "health issues." But here's the stupidest thing about it: iPhones are most popular with women. How do you design an... I just don't get it?

Here's the deal: men designed this app, men approved the feature set of this app, men built this app, and maybe some people with occasionally menstruating vaginas were involved as well but if they were they were, they were not listened to. I'm so unable to even with this. We need to put women on feature design teams and listen to them! It's not that complicated; it merely requires that you can admit for just a few minutes that you don't literally know everything! Even I do that sometimes! I know, but it's true.

Previously in "By Guys For Guys" News, ello doesn't grasp why women would want post privacy in social media.

* Except to make $600+ worth of bras no longer fit at a time when I can't afford new bras.

** Seriously, "To become moody, bloated, and generally vaginal?" How does a guy become "generally vaginal? Is he a cavity now? Is he covered with mucus membranes and sweating something vaguely fishy smelling? If he sits in the same spot every day, does that sweat eat a hole in the couch? If you poke him in just the right spot does his cervix-like head start flopping around, like a dog's leg kicks? And why are vaginas bad? These are boys calling things gay because gay is bad but vaginas are also bad and will you please make up your bleeding minds? Are penises good but only if you don't do anything with them? I seriously do not understand these people. Do you boys not even grasp that men have a similar cycle that can cause moodiness and way less than half of women even get "moody?" Of course, boys and misogynists use periods as "the reason that a woman disagrees with my awesomely brilliant but completely wrong self" to "prove" that the women are wrong to correct them on the facts. 

In WoW one time, someone said "why is everyone PMSing?" by which he meant "mad that he went for dinner in the middle of a raid fight and wiped us after spending the previous two fights ignoring directions and wiping us, then talking about how we terrible players were holding back his leetness so we should give all the loot to him." "There's no need to be PMSing! Mom called me for dinner! We had mac and cheese!" So I called him on it and some teenage boy whispered me to tell me that it was a joke and that PMS is just another name for a period. Oh FFS. I educated that teenage boy, oh yes I did. And eventually he asked "are you one of those feminists?" and I said "I believe that men and women are different in many ways but that neither is more valuable or 'better' than the other, which yes, makes me a feminist because that's what feminism means.  Also I out-DPSed him while typing lectures to him about how that joke is neither funny nor true. Some days, I want purge the Internet with fire. I should go to bed instead. Purging with fire will probably make my asthma worse.