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Authors: Germaine Greer
Tags: Social Science, womens studies
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traumatic. 7 Women
still buy sanitary towels with enormous discretion, and carry their handbags to the loo when they only need to carry a napkin. They still recoil at the idea of intercourse during menstruation, and feel that the blood they shed is of a special kind, although perhaps not so special as was thought when it was the liquid presented to the devil in witches’ loving cups. If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby.
Menstruation, we are told, is unique among the natural bodily processes in that it involves a loss of blood. It is assumed that nature is a triumph of design, and that none of her processes is wasteful or in need of reversal, especially when it only inconveniences women, and therefore it is thought extremely unlikely that there is any ‘real’ pain associated with menstruation. In fact no little girl who finds herself bleeding from an organ which she didn’t know she had until it began to incommode her feels that nature is a triumph of design and that whatever is, is right. When she discovers that the pain at- tending this horror is in some way her fault , the result of improper adaptation to her female role, she really
feels like the victim of a bad joke. Doctors admit that most women suffer ‘discomfort’ during menstruation, but disagree very much about what proportion of women suffer ‘real’ pain. Whether the contractions of the womb are painful in some absolute sense or could be rendered comfortable by some psychotherapy or other is imma- terial. The fact is that no woman would menstruate if she did not have to. Why should women not resent an inconvenience which causes tension before, after and during; unpleasantness, odour, staining; which takes up anything from a seventh to a fifth of her adult life until the menopause; which makes her fertile thirteen times a year when she only expects to bear twice in a lifetime; when the cessation of menstruation may mean several years of endocrine de- rangement and the gradual atrophy of her sexual organs? The fact is that nature is not a triumph of design, and every battle against illness is an interference with her design, so that there is no rational ground for assuming that menstruation as we know it must be or ought to be irreversible.
The contradiction in the attitude that regards menstruation as di- vinely ordained and yet unmentionable leads to the intensification of the female revolt against it, which can be traced in all the common words for it, like the curse , and male disgust expressed in terms like having the rags on . We have only the choice of three kinds of expres- sion: the vulgar resentful, the genteel (‘I’ve got my period’, ‘I am indisposed’), and the scientific jargon of the menses . Girls are irre- pressible though: in one Sydney girls’ school napkins are affection- ately referred to as daisies ; Italian girls call their periods il marchese and German girls der rote König . One might envy the means adopted by La Dame aux Camélias to signify her condition to her gentlemen friends, but if it were adopted on a large scale it might look like a mark of proscription, a sort of leper’s bell. There have been some moves to bring menstruation out into the open in an unprejudiced
way, like Sylvia Plath’s menstruation poem. 8 Perhaps we need a
film to be made by an artist
about the onset of menstruation, in which the implications emerge in some non-academic way, if we cannot manage a public celebration of a child’s entry into womanhood by any other means.
Menstruation has been used a good deal in argument about wo- men’s fitness to undertake certain jobs: where women’s comfort is concerned the effects are minimized—where the convenience of our masters is threatened they are magnified. Women are not more in- capacitated by menstruation than men are by their drinking habits, their hypertension, their
still buy sanitary towels with enormous discretion, and carry their handbags to the loo when they only need to carry a napkin. They still recoil at the idea of intercourse during menstruation, and feel that the blood they shed is of a special kind, although perhaps not so special as was thought when it was the liquid presented to the devil in witches’ loving cups. If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby.
Menstruation, we are told, is unique among the natural bodily processes in that it involves a loss of blood. It is assumed that nature is a triumph of design, and that none of her processes is wasteful or in need of reversal, especially when it only inconveniences women, and therefore it is thought extremely unlikely that there is any ‘real’ pain associated with menstruation. In fact no little girl who finds herself bleeding from an organ which she didn’t know she had until it began to incommode her feels that nature is a triumph of design and that whatever is, is right. When she discovers that the pain at- tending this horror is in some way her fault , the result of improper adaptation to her female role, she really
feels like the victim of a bad joke. Doctors admit that most women suffer ‘discomfort’ during menstruation, but disagree very much about what proportion of women suffer ‘real’ pain. Whether the contractions of the womb are painful in some absolute sense or could be rendered comfortable by some psychotherapy or other is imma- terial. The fact is that no woman would menstruate if she did not have to. Why should women not resent an inconvenience which causes tension before, after and during; unpleasantness, odour, staining; which takes up anything from a seventh to a fifth of her adult life until the menopause; which makes her fertile thirteen times a year when she only expects to bear twice in a lifetime; when the cessation of menstruation may mean several years of endocrine de- rangement and the gradual atrophy of her sexual organs? The fact is that nature is not a triumph of design, and every battle against illness is an interference with her design, so that there is no rational ground for assuming that menstruation as we know it must be or ought to be irreversible.
The contradiction in the attitude that regards menstruation as di- vinely ordained and yet unmentionable leads to the intensification of the female revolt against it, which can be traced in all the common words for it, like the curse , and male disgust expressed in terms like having the rags on . We have only the choice of three kinds of expres- sion: the vulgar resentful, the genteel (‘I’ve got my period’, ‘I am indisposed’), and the scientific jargon of the menses . Girls are irre- pressible though: in one Sydney girls’ school napkins are affection- ately referred to as daisies ; Italian girls call their periods il marchese and German girls der rote König . One might envy the means adopted by La Dame aux Camélias to signify her condition to her gentlemen friends, but if it were adopted on a large scale it might look like a mark of proscription, a sort of leper’s bell. There have been some moves to bring menstruation out into the open in an unprejudiced
way, like Sylvia Plath’s menstruation poem. 8 Perhaps we need a
film to be made by an artist
about the onset of menstruation, in which the implications emerge in some non-academic way, if we cannot manage a public celebration of a child’s entry into womanhood by any other means.
Menstruation has been used a good deal in argument about wo- men’s fitness to undertake certain jobs: where women’s comfort is concerned the effects are minimized—where the convenience of our masters is threatened they are magnified. Women are not more in- capacitated by menstruation than men are by their drinking habits, their hypertension, their
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