I am a menstruating woman. Which is both to say that I am a woman who menstruates—and therefore neither one who has not yet started nor one who has ceased to menstruate—and to say that right now, this moment, as I write this piece, I have my period. Now 46, I’ve been getting my period approximately once a month for the past 33 years and seven months; I’ve had something around 395 periods, give or take a couple for pregnancies, anomalies and bad math. Factoring the length of my average period of five days, I’ve spent 1,975 days or just under five-and-a-half years on the rag, as it were.
Thus I know of what I speak. A lot of time has passed since my very first period at the age of twelve in August, 1975. Yet I still remember it as I remember very few specific days. I know that then, as now, my period appeared at around 5:00 p.m. I know that I was lying on my belly watching some program on my family’s tiny black-and-white television. I know that I felt an alien low-grade fire deep in my underbelly, a strange and unparseable pain that remains strange and unparseable to this day. I remember getting up, going to the bathroom, sitting on the toilet and finding that crimson smear in my white panties. I remember sighing heavily and then pragmatically and reluctantly donning the belt-and-pad contraption my grandmother had bought me some months earlier.
I remember feeling exactly how stupid that thing was with its weird bra-strap elastic and its strange little buckles. I remember hating the thickness of the pad and fretting over its visibility. I remember hating the whole kit-and-caboodle, this-girl-is-a-woman-now stupidity of it. I remember telling my mother, and I remember asking her not to tell my father, and I remember that she did anyway. I remember finding out about her betrayal when, after I said something to my dad about having a stomach ache, he turned to me from the driver’s seat of the car and said something along the lines of “Some ladies when they have their periods feel pain” and then launched into a disquisition about how female clitorises were actually larger than penises and I shouldn’t feel badly. I remember feeling absolutely mortified. As well as angry.
I remember the next day that I was supposed to go to the beach, and I remember spending at least two hours in the painful and ultimately triumphant endeavor of stuffing my mother’s super industrial-sized tampon into my twelve year-old vagina, something that took so long we never got to the beach. I remember crying with anger and pain in the process, and I remember crying with anger and pain later when I discovered that tampons also came in “slender,” the size I still use to this day. I remember the week of my first period as I remember few other swaths of time. Perhaps only one other week in my life retains the color-saturated details of my first menstrual week.
I’m fairly certain that I’m not alone in my ability to summon this specific memory, even without the aid of a sanguine Madeleine. The breathy anticipation surrounding the release of eighteen-year-old Rachel Kauder’s My Little Red Book, an anthology of first-person first-period stories, argues the power that these memories hold for women. The truism that we all are born alone and we all die alone might be modified to say that we women all go through our first period alone too, even if we are surrounded by people. On a fundamental level, it’s an experience that every woman has on her own, as much as it forms a bond between us.
I don’t have an issue with this book—it’s a fairly brilliant premise. I may read it; I may not. I don’t have a whole lot of patience with narrowly themed anthologies. But I can see the value in telling stories. Narratives provide frameworks for the ways we experience our lives, for the ways we can make order out of chaos, and for the possibilities we might change. With these points in mind, I do have a problem with this book being cordoned off as a women’s book, a book that needs to be passed around under tables like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was in middle school, and a book that—above all—needs to be kept out of the hands of men.
Such is the way that New York Times reviewer Dr. Abigail Zuger treats it in her review, “In The Open At Last, A Secret That All Women Share.” Giving the context of private dressing rooms in Victoria’s Secret, the presence of segregated “men’s and ladies’” bathrooms at the musical Hair, and the continued acceptance of teaching Sex Ed to both genders separately, Dr. Zuger seems to want to keep period-talk within the confines of the red tent.
“At this point,” Dr. Zuger says about a third of the way through the review, “male readers may want to go outside and toss a ball around for a while. No matter how sympathetic, how curious or how deeply interested in life’s little yuck factors you are, this collection is unlikely to hold more than the mildest intellectual appeal for you. But it is hard to imagine any woman, from the most straitlaced and body-denying to the most uninhibited and body-embracing, who will not read right through it with pure enjoyment, small flashes of recognition and the urge to buy it for every female preteen in sight.” Oh, dear.
This is the part where I get angry with Dr. Zuger (although to be honest I'm already peeved by the end of the article's title). Because she assumes that men need to be protected by the “yuck factors” of our mysterious women's bodies. Because she suggests that men—the very men who may become fathers—ought to busy themselves with masculine activities centered on balls, rather than worry their tender little heads with our “female trouble.” Because she seems to argue that nothing—nothing—illustrates the difference between men’s and women’s bodies like the fact that once a month for most of women’s lives, we bleed, and that it’s our job as women to hide that bloody light under an absorbent cotton bushel.
It’s actually kind of ironic that Dr. Zuger feels the need to perpetuate the hoary gender separation that generations have constructed around menstruation—especially since she chooses to mention by name Gloria Steinem’s essay “If Men Could Menstruate.” Our culture has come up with a colorful run of phrases to sidestep the point-blank utterance of “I have my period.” Whether “Aunt Flo is here to visit,” or we’re “riding the cotton pony,” or we’ve “fallen off the roof,” or we’ve simply “got our friend,” we chicks perform linguistic loop-de-loops to hide our ever-present embarrassment over our “monthlies.” Even “feminine product” advertising employs the ubiquitous and incongruous blue liquid in their ads. Should I ever peer down at a pad or a tampon and see the cool blue of radiator fluid, I’d be fairly alarmed. Our culture, like Dr. Zuger, M.D., likes to euphemize menstruation—as goes death, constipation, and incontinence, so go periods.
If you’ve gotten this far, you’ll not be shocked to discover that I, like Steinem, am really tired of treating menstruation like it’s some kind of sacred, if twee, rite. I don’t furtively buy menstruation gear. I have no problem sending my boyfriends out to pick up a pack of O.B. tampons for me. I’d like it if the world just grew up and got over their collective pool of ooginess about what women’s bodies do. For that reason, I think that if you do buy a copy of My Little Red Book for your pre-teen, as Dr. Zuger suggests you do, you should also buy one for any man with a close personal relationship to a woman. For the sake of women everywhere, and for the possibility of change in the future, your boyfriend, your daughter’s father, even your dad should probably read this book. Even if I don’t.
(You can find out-takes of My Little Red Book here, and you can even tell your own story, should you have one.)
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