Cycle Savvy: The Smart Teen\'s Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body
When the good women at MotherTalk mentioned that they were doing a blog book tour of Toni Weschler’s new book, I begged Andi to let me be one of the stops.

I credit Ms. Weschler with Noah’s arrival in our family. Like any good internet devotee, when we started trying to get pregnant I got online and started reading up. At misc.kids.pregnancy I learned about this fabulous new book called Taking Charge of Your Fertility. TCOYF (as it’s called on the internets) is about learning your fertility signs to achieve or avoid pregnancy. Not only was it informative and empowering, it was also strongly feminist. Some of my favorite parts of the book were her min-rants about the poor treatment she got from gynecologists. (Been there and done that, sister-friend!) And when I was done reading I said the same thing every woman I know said: “I wish someone had told me about this when I was a teenager!”

And now Weschler has taken our lamenting to heart with the publication of Cycle Savvy: The Smart Teen’s Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body.

I wondered how she’d get away with this. Empowering teen girls by teaching them their fertility signals? In the age of “just say no” sexual education??? Is Weschler mad??? Lemme tell you, I’d love to hear the conversations she had with her editor while they worked out the angle.

There are two things to look at market-wise when we’re discussing Cycle Savvy, the first is whether or not she’s done a good job educating young women about their bodies. I’d say unequivocally YES! It’s all there — how your cervical position, cervical fluid and temperature each change through your cycle. Nobody knows this stuff the way Toni does and she presents it in an accessible but detailed manner.

Now that you’ve learned about your body’s amazing fertility signs, you might be tempted to start observing them right away. The best way to do that is charting, which is simply the daily observation and recording of your fertility signs each cycle. Why chart? Well, knowledge is power, girls, and with that knowledge comes pride instead of embarrassment, confidence instead of fear.

Now personally I think it’s unrealistic to expect most teen girls to stick a thermometer in their mouths upon waking but like Toni says, knowledge is power and just because (I think) most teen girls aren’t going to bother doesn’t mean they shouldn’t know how to do it. But this leads us to the second issue when it comes to marketing Toni’s book: What will teen girls do with this information? Will they start having more unsafe sex? Will they (gulp) try to get pregnant? Shouldn’t we just stick with those awful Kotex pamphlets with advice on staying “tidy” and no mention of the word (whispering) sex?

Personally I think this concern is akin to lying to boys about their seminal fluid. You know, “If we don’t tell ‘em it makes babies, maybe they won’t buy the condoms and they won’t have the sex!” I think Weschler is right: The more girls know about their bodies, the more pride they can have in the way they work, and the more likely they will take care of them.

One of my jobs at ePregnancy was answering reader email. About 85% of the email I answered said either this: Could I be pregnant? or this How do I get pregnant? The folks who wrote me thought that if a woman wasn’t on her period, she was automatically fertile. They had no conception of what ovulation was or if they did, they thought arrived two weeks after menstruation instead of ten to fourteen days before. I recommended TCOYF pretty much every time I hit “reply” but many times I wish I had something else to offer because a lot of those writers? They were young women. “I’m eighteen and had sex with my boyfriend last week. When will I know if I’m pregnant?”

Doctors don’t even always know this stuff. When I was pregnant the second time (pre-Noah) I wanted a quantitative hCG but the doc said no because I hadn’t had a positive test. “I’ve had nineteen days of high temperatures,” I told her. “What’s having a fever got to do with it?” she said. (I did end up talking her into a test, which confirmed a miscarriage — something that would turn out to be important in my medical history further down the line.)

I want Madison to understand the way her body works and I want her to know it early because it’s her body and her right. When I told my friends about this book several of them hit Amazon to order their own while we were still on the phone. Our daughters deserve to have this information; thanks be to Weschler for getting it out there. I hope the abstinence only crowd make just enough noise about it to get the word out even further.

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