On Blood
[Pinterest]
Some time last year I stopped using the Flo app to track my cycle.
There had been some news about how it was owned by Meta, and how they were able to connect this information about your biological rhythm to all kinds of other identifiers and presumably use that information for something nefarious.
So I divested my period from surveillance capitalism.
I didn’t really investigate those claims, and somehow didn’t feel the need to. The minute I held the idea of that tracking for closer inspection, the reasonable thing seemed to be to stop. Stop willingly providing that information.
Before, I would input the first day into a calendar widget in the app, guided by a helpful ,,+” sign, and the app would show me the bleeding days as neat red circles, followed by some regular looking days, followed by some blue ones to indicate ovulation. Initially, it asked me for how long I bled on average, and even though that number changed over time I didn’t bother updating it in the settings, so the prophecy of period delivered to me was already a mix of machine intelligence and human intuition.
Because I would always input the day it started, the app was able to calculate my average cycle length and came to predict very accurately when my next one would start. I could even swipe months into the past and see how the cycle length had changed over time - I wondered what the stress had been that caused the cycle of August 2018 to be an unreasonable 5 extra days long? But mostly the length was regular, and my app was dependable. I trusted it, and relied on it to plan my travels, anticipate pain, avert a potential disaster by wearing white pants on the wrong day.
Occasionally, it would probe me to fill in more symptoms - was I feeling bloated that day? Had I experienced cramps? But I must already have been skeptical because I always demurred. A personalized quiz required the entry of your email address to receive results - a bridge too far. The homepage grew more crowded over time with articles and quizzes, encouraging me to join the community of women on the path to empowering themselves with knowledge of their own reproductive health.
And then, it was over.
No more neat red circles. No more algorithm humming in the background, improving its predictions with each new input. Instead: iCal, iPhone’s calendar app. I didn’t trust myself to remember the date of my next period with something so cavalier as memory and pen and paper. Small-scale luddite I may be but reckless baby-making machine I am not.
So I kept it tech, but dumb tech. Enabling just enough convenience without smoothing the grooves of my brain tech. Enter an event and set it to repeat every 28 days tech, like a Teams invitation to my own uterus.
There were hiccups. The original 28 days was sometimes coming up short so I entered a new Day 1 and set a longer duration. But the other event hadn’t properly been deleted so for a while I was digitally logging two periods with a 1 week overlap - confusion, mess. It took some tinkering to get it down.
I am now less firmly in possession of my period - I have a more vague notion of when it will strike. I tell myself to be aware of my body and its signals in the week of the calendar event. I treat its arrival as more of a casual encounter - see you sometime this weekend, rather than a strict affair with a hard RSVP. I do feel freer, even though I know with less certainty, which is a funny paradox. Sloppier, more unpredictable, maybe even masquerading as a liberation from big tech. But somehow more my own: blood, and guts, and all.