“Menstruation is the only blood that is not born from violence, yet it’s the one that disgusts you the most.” —Maia Schwartz
الحيض هو الدم الوحيد الذي لا يولد من العنف، ومع ذلك فهو الدم الأكثر إثارة لاشمئزازك “.
-مايا شوارتز
Those of you decrying “ewwww” and “booo” to this image are ignorant to the fact that in many countries, menstruation is taboo. It is a common myth held by many religious people and institutions that a woman cannot offer prayers, take part in religious ceremonies, and is forbidden from touching sacred objects or being permitted to enter a place of worship.
You are ignorant to the fact that in many places, a menstruating women is considered cursed, impure, or sick.
You are ignorant to the fact that many women and girls are excluded from social groups and certain environments, including from their families and homes. Many women and girls are sent to “menstrual huts” during menstruation.
Women’s very lives are sacrificed to the altar of menstrual myths and social exclusion based on our bodies and its functions.
She bears the cross of her ultimate sin, her femaleness.
I remember in anthropology going into great lengths about different cultures and views on menstruation. One of my favs that always stuck with me was a native american one, forgive me I cant remember which tribe at the moment, who saw menstruation as the time a woman was at her most power. It was in this time when she bled for days and didn’t die that they could do the most incredible of feats. I feel bad because I cant recall the exact tribe but I do remember they were a materarical society.
OKAY SO LISTEN UP
I’m Hindu.
When a woman is in her period, she’s not allowed to touch almost anything. Not her clothes, not food, not people. And someone else cannot touch things touched by you.
If someone else does touch you, they cannot touch anyone or anything until they bathe and change all their clothes.
Your clothes are handed to you by someone else as you cannot touch your wardrobe clothes. Someone else gives you your food, and you have to finish it or throw it away because someone else cannot have the leftovers because it has become impure as you have touched it. We cannot utter prayers to the gods,touch any holy article or go into temples or holy places. (Note that most Hindu homes will have a small ‘temple’ inside). Hell, most temples have an innermost room where women are not allowed at all times.
Needless to say, I dreaded getting my first period. When I first got my period, my mother made me sleep on the floor on a mattress and an old blanket kept aside for especially this purpose. She told me I was lucky sleeping in my room, because my cousin’s parents made her sleep on the couch.
This was new to me and I wondered what I had done to be so impure. I remember crying till 4 A.M, and then deciding that I was not going to give one fuck and touch everything I wanted (for which I got several scoldings and an occasional beating, of course)
So yea, FUCK YOU IF YOU IGNORE THIS SHIT THAT GOES ON AROUND THE WORLD IN DIFFERENT CULTURES. WOMEN DO NOT DESERVE THIS.
Men take the very thing of power and wealth we have and desecrated it, made it our greatest shame and sin.
Without proper sex ed, men will assume that we have our periods for the sole purpose of inconveniencing everybody around us.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
Oh yes, we definitely shove cotton cylinders up our vaginas or wear a half diaper because we just never thought to just force it all out while on the toilet! Dude, like, I tried that when I first got it, at eleven. Does not fucking work that way. Not the same hole, not the same muscles, not the same process, like literally nothing about menstruation is like peeing aside from the fact that liquid is flowing out of an orifice.
I was inspired by severalarticles about the Tampon Tax recently and some of the protests against the categorization of tampons as “luxury items,” so I made this up. It’s funny because it’s true.
Tampons are a “luxury item”
Once I worked as an intern in the state capital. One of the representatives I worked for was this middle-aged guy. And he hated the tampon and napkin machines in the women’s bathrooms. Hated them. He insisted that they weren’t necessary.
I found out why after I’d been working there, oh, about a month. My period started suddenly, as it sometimes does, and I asked to excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room. He wanted to know why. I told him.
He started ranting about how lazy women were. How we wasted time. How we were so careless and unhygenic, and that there was no call for that. He finished by telling me that I certainly was NOT going to the ladies’ room and that I was just going to sit there and work. He finished this off with a decisive nod, as if I’d just be told and there could be no possible argument.
“If I don’t go,” I said in an overly patient tone, “the blood is going to soak through my pants, stain my new skirt that I just bought, and possibly get on this chair I’m sitting in. I need something to soak up the blood. That’s why I need to go to the bathroom.”
His face turned oatmeal-gray; an expression of pure horror spread across his face. He leaned forward and whispered, “Wait, you mean that if you don’t go, you’ll just keep on bleeding? I thought that women could turn it off any time that they wanted!”
I thought, You have got to be kidding.
Several horrified whispers later, I learned that he wasn’t. He actually thought a) that women could shut down the menstrual cycle at will, b) that we essentially picked a week per month to spend more time in the bathroom, i.e. to goof off, and c) that napkins and tampons were sex toys paid for by Health and Human Services. I didn’t know the term then, but he believed that tampons were dildos. Which was why he and a good number of his friends considered them luxuries.
And that’s how, at twenty, I had to give a talk on menstruation to a middle-aged married state representative who was one of my bosses. American politics, ladies and gentlemen.
OH GOOD GRIEF!
YOU WERE WARNED –
I had a TEACHER in SCHOOL tell me the same thing. “I need to go to the nurse, I need a tampon.” “Just sit and stop, we’re taking a test.”
Every single girl in class looked up with the face of “You’re an idiot.”
This is literally the most absurd shit.
I… I’m just… I have seriously never in my life met a man that absolutely god-awfully stupid. That isn’t to say they don’t exist, I just never actually thought they could before now.
With all this ‘white feminist playing and making art with their period blood’ on my dashboard, I did some research and came across this South African artist who uses her own menstrual blood to address the queerphobia and violence she has experienced with being a South African lesbian, Zanele Muholi.
Through her use of menstrual blood in her show Isilumo siyaluma (Period Pains, 2006-2011) in Cape Town, Muholi sought to tell the story of black lesbians in South Africa and represent “curative rape.” She wrote of the project in a press release for the exhibit:
Isilumo siyaluma is a Zulu expression that can be loosely translated as “period pains/ periods pain”. Additionally, there is an added meaning in the translation that there is something secretive in and about this blood/“period in time.”
At one level, my project deals with my own menstrual blood, with that secretive, feminine time of the month that has been reduced within Western patriarchal culture as dirty.
On a deeper level then, my menstrual blood is used as a vehicle and medium to begin to express and bridge the pain and loss I feel as I hear and become witness to the pain of ‘curative rapes’ that many of the girls and women in my black lesbian community bleed from their vaginas and their minds.
Between March – May 2011, three (3) young black lesbians under the age of 25 were brutally murdered in various townships [….] As we continue to live and survive in troubled times as black lesbians in South Africa and within the continent, where rampant hate crimes and brutal killings of same gender loving women is rife, this ongoing project is an activist/artist’s radical response to that violence.
Knowing that your classmate is coming from a place of Liberal Feminist bias, she could be saying that to discredit Radical Feminists?
They drink it in their dark ungodly rituals, praying for men to be violent towards transwomen (source: Everybody knows)
@kananotabi That’s a new one. I prefer soft drink (soda) and energy drinks (both are bad for me).
I think she probably heard weird lies about menstrual art (which is a form of feminist art but not very common). Here is an example.
I know some anti feminist trolls made fake posts pretending to be feminists who are consuming our own menstrual blood and posting pictures of berry coloured food. Radfems made fun of this.
Celtyradfem 