“Why is having sex as a woman so punitive?” asks Andrea Panaligan. regla dust: the five stages of pregnancy scare demonstrates just why, as Andrea guides us through the harrowing, seemingly no-nonsense, and ingenious ways women have to go through to attain what is quite denied to them by the medical, political, and religious institutions in the Philippines: the rightful claim to body autonomy and self-determination. What Andrea achieves in this short, brilliant feminist discourse is a social treatise on women’s reproductive health that is tactical and beautiful in its audacious candor.
