Cloth menstrual pads have many benefits over disposable products. They are cheaper, last longer, and do not end up in landfills like disposable sanitary napkins. They are comfortable, available in many styles and patterns, and can be customized to fit your body and needs instead of being mass-produced in a particular size and shape that may not work for you. In addition, cloth pads are made by women, and buying cloth pads means supporting women entrepreneurs and small business owners.

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Adahy’s pattern and variations of rounded pad styles are very popular, although many pads have a more squared-off look or wider center. This and other styles are AIO, or all in one. Another style, which is used by Lunapads, has multiple absorbent layers which can be added to or removed from the pad base. Theses layers can be placed inside a pocket or held down with strips of fabric or rickrack. While AIO pads have the advantage of convenience, pads with multiple layers are easier to customize based on your flow and air-dry much more quickly.

Cloth pads tend to average about $5 apiece, depending on the fabric involved. (Bamboo cloth, for example, which is more absorbent than cotton and has antibacterial properties, is also much more expensive.) Depending on your flow and period length, you may need 15-25 pads to get through your cycle, which would be about a $75-125 investment. They are cheaper, however, in bulk and if you purchase seconds, pads with small aesthetic flaws which generally go for about half price. If you have the resources, there are also many instructions and patterns for making your own menstrual pads.

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Themes of deception and insincerity are at the heart of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. One character who rarely gets accused of such motivations, however, is Don Ottavio. But is Don Ottavio truly a devoted, caring fiancé, trying his best to console Donna Anna and help her through her time of grief? Or is he as self-centered as the rest, concerned with shielding himself from his fiancée’s grief by trying to make her repress it—or even worse, putting his own comfort above her trauma and her need for time and space?

Don Ottavio certainly attempts to offer his comfort and support to Donna Anna many times over the course of the opera. But what are his motivations and intentions? His first attempts to help her (”My soul, console yourself!”1) after they discover her father’s body is immediately rebuffed with “Flee, cruel one, and let me die also!” Instead of acknowledging her pain and her mourning for her father, Don Ottavio attempts to make her focus on him: “Listen, my love, listen! Look at me for a moment! Your true love is speaking, the one who lives only for you.” He tries to reassure Donna Anna that she has “both a husband and father in me.” When she pleads for him to swear revenge, he will not swear by her father’s blood, but by “your eyes, and our love.”

Perhaps these actions could be seen as merely misguided: he wishes desperately to console her, but doesn’t know how, and so attempts to distract her instead of helping her face her grief. Certainly this awkwardness and wish to avoid facing the truth is something that many people do when faced with another’s misfortune. His actions as the opera goes on, however, gradually reveal that his main concern is not Donna Anna’s emotions and feelings, but his own.

In his aria “Dalla sua pace,” he reveals, “My peace depends on her peace. What gives her pleasure gives me life, and what gives her sorrow gives me death.” In the recitative before Donna Anna’s aria “Non mi dir,” he even goes so far as to accuse her of being cruel for delaying the wedding until she has properly mourned her father (and, although this is not explicitly stated, recovered emotionally from Don Giovanni’s attack). These are not the words and actions of one who understands and supports his love’s emotions – although his eventual consent to wait a year, as Donna Anna requests, is a promising start.

Countless opera directors and critics have painted Donna Anna as a cold woman, one who does not (or cannot) return Don Ottavio’s love, and perhaps one who is contemplating (or even carrying out) an affair with Don Giovanni while still attempting to retain the security of her relationship with Don Ottavio. Don Ottavio, in turn, is read as a comically self-deceiving cuckhold,2 perhaps even sexually impotent.3 Even Liane Curtis, in her wonderful essay on the problems of glorified sexual assault in Don Giovanni, suggests that Donna Anna has “simply emotionally outgrown Ottavio.”

Such interpretations ignore the fact that any apparent distance on Donna Anna’s part is a perfectly normal reaction for a woman who has just survived an attempted rape by someone disguised as her fiancé, who has just lost her father to that very attacker, and whose beloved fiancé will not allow her to mourn for even a single day because it makes him uncomfortable. Our desire to read Don Ottavio as a sympathetic and supportive figure, the only such male character in the opera other than the Commendatore, distracts us from his selfish behavior.

This article is the second in a series about Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The first is “Feminist Readings of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.”

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[after "console yourself" in the 2nd paragraph] 1. Translations from the Italian are my own. A complete Italian libretto is available online from Karadar Classical Music [url=http://www.karadar.it/Librettos/mozart_don_giovanni.html].

[after "self-deceiving cuckhold" in the 2nd-to-last para.] 2. See, for example, the interpretation of “Dalla sua pace” [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPXaOq-dpDA&feature=player_profilepage] from a 2008 performance of Don Giovanni at the Salzburger Festspiele, directed by Claus Guth.

[after "sexually impotent," right after n. 2] 3. Christopher Ballantine, “Social and Philosophical Outlook in Mozart’s Operas,” The Musical Quarterly Vol. 67, No. 2 (Oct. 1981): 518.

[after "emotionally outgrown Ottavio," right at the end of the 2nd to last para.] 4. Liane Curtis, “Sexual Politics of Teaching Mozart’s Don Giovanni,” NWSA Journal Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring 2000): 128.

The ongoing case of Roman Polanski has had an interesting and disturbing effect on the public perception of Hollywood celebrities. People who were previously disliked, or merely unnoticed, are suddenly showered with praise. The reason? They’re not rape apologists.

This is a sign of how low our standards have become, when the sign of being a good person is simply not supporting a child rapist.

A petition to free Roman Polanski was signed by many prominent actors and directors. Among them: Martin Scorsese, Terry Gilliam, Harrison Ford, Penelope Cruz, Natalie Portman, Guillermo del Toro, and Woody Allen (because if Woody Allen thinks child rape is okay… oh, wait). A much shorter list of celebrities speaking out against Roman Polanski includes Neil Gaiman, Kirstie Alley, Geraldine Ferraro, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Roman Polanski raped a child. None of this “had sex with” bullshit. None of this “well she was almost fourteen” bullshit about how they just have different sexual morals in Europe. It doesn’t matter how old a person is; drugging her, getting her drunk, ignoring her requests to stop, and using your power as an older person and authority figure to gain compliance is rape. Any one of those things alone would be rape. All of them together just makes the case that much more clear.

Polanski has apparently (according to his supporters) had a “hard life” living it up in Europe, protected by France and unable to visit countries that might extradite him. It’s somehow unfair to arrest him in a country where he’d thought he’d be safe from extradition, and where he traveled for a film festival, no less! These film festivals just won’t be safe anymore, what with the government swooping down and arresting convicted child rapists!

So he’s “paid his price,” and it’s up to the victim to get over it, because it happened such a long time ago. As if trauma goes away when the public keeps digging it up, painting it as your fault or painting you as a liar for not reacting in the “proper” way, and saying that your trauma doesn’t matter because the person who raped you is a good filmmaker. No, none of that is relevant. It’s always up to the victim to be the bigger person and to forgive and forget while their attacker defies justice, contributing to a system which screws rape and sexual assault victims over time and time again.

Roman Polanski deserves to go to jail. He doesn’t deserve to be raped in jail; please don’t start down that line of two-wrongs-makes-rape-okay crap that always comes up in these cases. But he deserves to pay for what he did the way he was supposed to pay before he skipped the country thirty years ago. He deserves it not just for his victim, but for the safety of other victims whose attackers might be deterred if they see that even rich and famous rapists will eventually see justice.

Roman Polanski’s arrest is encouraging because it shows that even a famous director who fled the country cannot escape justice forever, but it is also disheartening because of how transparent our society’s rape apology really is. It is disturbing, too, to see that some of his defenders are not denying the attack or its severity, but claiming outright that his artistic achievements should excuse him from the punishment for raping a child.

by Amy Hill Schaffer ‘09

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni is usually viewed from a male perspective and thus as more humorous – perhaps even tongue-in-cheek – than serious. The plight of the women that Don Giovanni deceives is all for laughs, and the women are held responsible for Don Giovanni’s assaults.

Numerous opera critics and directors, even in recent years, have suggested that Donna Anna is somehow complicit in Giovanni’s attempted rape and subsequent murder of her father; she wanted him, she invented the story of an attempted rape because she was ashamed to admit that she was really in love with Giovanni, and so forth.

In The Operas of Mozart William Mann writes that “[Donna Anna's] censorious anger against others is a juvenile trait… and it would be beneficial to her personal growing-up if she had been pleasantly raped by Don [Giovanni].”² In a recent production in Salzburg, directed by Claus Guth, it is implied that Donna Anna was having a consensual affair with Giovanni. With these interpretations, Donna Anna’s perspective and experience is ignored. A sexual assault victim is silenced for the sake of comedy.

Don Giovanni is not held responsible for seducing Donna Elvira and Zerlina through lies and deceit; rather, the women are held responsible for not knowing better, and Donna Elvira especially for continuing to show sympathy, an understandable and human characteristic that Giovanni lacks.

Much critical attention is focused on the duet “La ci darem la mano,” in which Zerlina gives into Don Giovanni based on his promises to marry her and make her a lady, but little note is taken of the incident only a few scenes later where he attempts to rape her. In “The Abduction of Opera,” an article bemoaning the awful interpretations of modern opera directors, Heather Mac Donald writes that “[in] a contemporary setting where a mandate of premarital chastity is unthinkable… Zerlina’s cries of desperation when Don Giovanni hustles her off for a conquest become absurd.”³

But even in a more traditional interpretation of the opera, the idea that “unchaste” women cannot be raped reigns supreme. It would be difficult, otherwise, to reconcile the rapist with the romantic hero that Giovanni is made out to be. Because Zerlina is more flirtatious than the other women, because she has given in to Giovanni before, because she is of a lower social class than the other women, clearly she cannot be raped and therefore Don Giovanni’s actions are hardly worth consideration.

If only we could set aside the prevalent viewpoint of Don Giovanni as a hero, a viewpoint which ignores or discounts the experiences of the opera’s women, and focus instead on his victims, we would have an entirely different picture of the opera. This new picture is one which empowers women and helps them find comfort when they have been sexually victimized.

The opera features three strong female characters. Donna Anna is passionate about finding justice for her assault and her father’s murder. Donna Elvira does not let any threat to her reputation stop her from denouncing Giovanni’s evil deeds, and does her best to help the women who might be harmed by him. Zerlina tries to make the best of her life as a peasant, believes Donna Elvira’s warnings and attempts to fight off Don Giovanni, and, in a rarely performed duet, seeks violent revenge by threatening to kill Leporello. These are not weak characters; their ineffectuality is merely a symptom of the undeserved power which a male-dominated society offers a criminal like Don Giovanni.

The way the women band together against Giovanni provides a comforting picture for women in similar situations; so does the way that Zerlina immediately believes Donna Elvira’s warnings, and Don Ottavio provides loving support for his fiance instead of doubting her story. In the end we finally see justice done: although it was impossible for the living characters, still manipulated by Giovanni, to carry out their revenge, the dead Commendatore was able to act in their stead. The Don’s refusal to repent is not heroic, but it is realistic. It helps provide a reassurance that even though men who harm women may not be punished in this life, they will be in the next. God does not forgive those who do not believe that they need forgiveness.

For a staging that takes the women’s stories at face value instead of presenting them as a laughingstock and Giovanni as a romantic hero, try the 1995 Glyndebourne Festival Opera production directed by Deborah Warner. By keeping the opera’s problems in mind and focusing on the female characters, we can develop new perspectives on Don Giovanni and new appreciation for the way Mozart and Da Ponte told their stories.