The Menstruation Circle
The manifestation of myths in period talk
Myths, defined as symbolic narratives, hold tradition when we talk about periods. They exist in all layers of society and take the upper hand when education is lacking. There is a significant gap between what we’ve learned about menstruation, and how most women feel when they are menstruating. In a patriarchal society with a longstanding tradition of misogyny, we turn to myths to explain behavior we don’t understand. In this essay, I will be dissecting a meeting I held with my friends where we talked about our experiences and beliefs around periods. I will be analyzing them and putting them in the context of spiritual, religious, and medical myths. I do this to investigate in which ways myths still influence us today.
We’re with 8 girls, varying from ages 21 to 23. We gather in Houthavens, Amsterdam. I prepared questions that regard menstrual cycles and birth control. I intend to create a safe space where my friends feel free to vocalize their opinions, so I can hear about things that normally stay unheard. We quickly started discussing menarche. Some girls describe being excited about the first time they got their period. They describe sharing joy with their friends, sometimes being relieved because they were a bit older. Most girls described the event, or the first years of being a menstruating girl, as being shameful and confusing:
“I was 11 when I first got my period, still in middle school. I think I only knew what menstruating was because my older niece got hers a few years earlier. I remember it vividly: she anxiously screamed for her mother from the bathroom, and everyone present laughed. She and my entire family were present, and thinking back it must have been embarrassing for her. When I got my period, I didn’t tell my classmates because I was certain I was the first one in my class. I was already taller, and curvier, and overall felt like I took up more space. We were in the changing room after gym and was justifying herself to all the girls. I jumped in to say that it was okay that she got her period because I already got mine as well. Knowing that she was not the only one destigmatized the whole situation.”
“I noticed a mystique when I first encountered period-talk which manifested in rumors. I was in 6th grade (groep 8) and talk was that one girl already had hers, possibly another girl too (I suspected that other girl did too, as I saw she had pubes already when we got dressed to swim in the backyard, this was new to me, and I had not seen it yet on girls my age). We speculated periods over which bathroom was used by whom and when. But also, the silence of said girls amplified this, their shame became our mystique or vice versa.”
“My mom only informed me that she would be in the mood for chocolate. The first time I got my period I thought I didn’t wipe my butt correctly. I was playing outside in my jersey; I really didn’t understand. I didn’t tell anyone the first time. It was a big taboo in my middle school and all the girls were still so small. I ignored it and convinced myself I wasn’t on my period. After a day it was gone so I thought it worked. I didn’t tell my mom; I was very scared to tell her. I was not ready to get my period this soon, so if I had told my mom, it would become a reality. I also tried to push my breasts down when I was young. I said to myself: I’m not going to be the freak that’s the tallest, has breasts, and has her period already. I refuse to.”
“I was home alone and saw blood when I went to the bathroom. I thought: what the hell is going on? I called my mom in a panic that she had to call me in sick for school. My mom came back from work, and I grabbed a pad from the bathroom and figured out that was for whatever this was.”
“I was sixteen when I first got my period. I knew what menstruating was, but when it happened, I didn’t recognize it. I thought I was dying.”
In 2021, Plos One published a research article where experiences of menstruation in high-income countries were systematically reviewed. All qualitative studies on experiences with menstruation in 9 databases, involving over 3800 participants, were captured. The research concludes that more than half of the studies describe menstruation as a stigmatized topic and women often reported that they lacked sufficient, accurate knowledge about menstruation, particularly around menarche. Mothers are the primary source of information and support around this time since menstruation is often experienced as something loaded with shame and worry. Overall, it’s viewed as a bother. This bother manifests in the mental burden of hiding menstruation from the outside world. We can associate these dominant feelings of shame with the persistence of religious myths centered around impurity. We can derive this back to The Hebrew Bible in Leviticus, the Bible’s third book, the pain of menstruation is named as the curse that’s put on Eve after she ate the apple. This book also lists required and forbidden activities during menstruation. With none of the girls having been raised religiously, you can see how centuries of religious policy of silence still influence us today. Girls become women and something inherently changes them that now sets them apart from male friends. This is something a few of the girls were not prepared for yet. Something inherently changes inside of them, but also how they view the world and get perceived. This change is hard to phantom when girls often get their periods at an early age, not yet having any biological education. Young girls turn to silence.
I ask my friends in which ways they associate the possession of a uterus.
Several words come up:
responsibility, unity, strong, connection, syncing, knowing yourself, fear,
transaction, cancer, parasite, failing me, disadvantaged.
We bond over irrational feelings and behavior in our cycles. This is something that makes my friends feel alien.
“The week before my period and during I can get so mad. If someone cuts me off on the highway I will start screaming, and I want to break stuff. I never do, but the tendency makes me feel like I’m psychotic. Everything is so intense, and I can’t comprehend that sometimes.”
“My mom always used to call me Jennifer when I would be on my period, it was like an alter-ego. I would get irritated and flip at the smallest things, run upstairs and cry my eyes out, go back downstairs, and do it all over again. When I feel on edge on my period and I’m in a work environment I would rather walk away and leave than explode and come back to explain that I’m on my period.”
We discuss how to deal with this stigma. Do we try to compose ourselves to avoid being put in a box? Do we give it different names, like being overstimulated, or should we refuse to explain ourselves and call it like it is? Be mad, be irrational, and say “Yes, I’m on my period. And what about it?”. One of the most persistent myths is the one of the “irrational female”. Part of this myth is the judgment that women are out of control during, and especially before, their period. Also often associated with PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome). It consists of stigmatized connotations of women being crazy and monstrous. It originates from the “wandering womb” that can be derived back to Ancient Greek. The term meant to describe the womb as something inside of the body without a home, being the source and cause of evil. The simple existence of the uterus has been used to explain menstruation symptoms and the neurological condition hysteria. Hysteria was the diagnosis for women in the 19th century, who were sent away to live and be exploited in asylums at the hands of experimental doctors. Hysteria has had a huge influence on the ways we view menstruation and the “irrational” behavior that comes with it. We can see this in the conversation with my friends where we continuously judge our behavior as out of control, irrational, or approach ourselves as something unexplainable. This is even more accentuated when I ask my friends how it feels to have a uterus.
“She also makes me feel like I have a parasite. She takes things that are not hers.”
“Having a uterus puts you in a box. There is a socialization that comes with being a woman, even though I might not feel like that even though I have a uterus.”
“When thinking about having a uterus and womb, I feel really strong on one hand. I feel a connection with women because we share this, even when I’m not great friends with them. We both have a uterus so there is already something that we have in common. On the other hand, it makes me feel weak or disadvantaged because the people with dicks are always more important.”
“The fact that I have a uterus makes me feel more feminine because I’m not having conversations with women who also have one and this unites us.”
“My uterus makes me feel more connected to nature, it made me see that I am a part of nature and not separated from it. It also made me realize that nature has an influence on me and the way I feel.”
Spiritual myths are often a way for women to associate with their menstruation positively and mystically. Period blood in spiritual myths is symbolic of power. Thor’s victory in reaching the magic land was celebrated with menstrual blood, just as in Greek mythology blood is used as a method to feed power. Current spiritual myths are often connected to the cosmic universe. This is especially popular in New Age spirituality. Examples of this are that the menstrual cycle’s connection to the lunar cycle (both being approximately 29.5 days) proves its harmony with the cosmic universe. In New Age spirituality all four phases are linked to the moon and categorized into two cycles: White and red moon cycles. Another popular belief is that cycles start to sync up when women start living together or spend more time together. Syncing periods among friends is a popular belief that lives among my friend group. For many of the women I have spoken to, this is a belief that brings a lot of comfort and a feeling of sisterhood. The two beliefs remain myths because they substantially lack enough evidence.
To debunk societal myths, we should ensure women feel at home in their bodies. Education is a must if we want this to happen. We need to invest time and money in researching the female body better, something that has been neglected. There needs to be more attention on the female hormonal system, and how we can include this knowledge in our school systems. Girls and boys should be educated together, from an early age, to learn about women’s bodies. This way we can make sure girls are informed substantially when they reach menarche, and schools will be able to demystify menstruation early on. For myths to have less influence, we need to prioritize the perspective of menstruation as a natural biological process. We should show them that talking about bodily fluids and processes is normal.
Bibliography
- Montgomery, Rita E. “A Cross-Cultural Study of Menstruation, Menstrual Taboos, and Related Social Variables.” Ethos, vol. 2, no. 2, 1974, pp. 137–70. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/639905. Accessed 14 Dec. 2023.
- Bobel, Chris, Winkler, Inga T, Fahs, Breanne, Hasson, Katie Ann, Kissling, Elizabeth Arveda, Roberts, Tomi-Ann, The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0614-7
Chapter 11 Menstruation and Religion: Developing a Critical Menstrual Studies Approach (115-127)
Chapter 14 Menstrual Taboos: Moving Beyond the Curse (143 -194)
Chapter 18 The Menarche Journey: Embodied Connections and Disconnections (201 – 212)
Chapter 19 Resisting the Mantle of the Monstrous Feminine: Women’s Construction and Experience of Premenstrual Embodiment (215 – 227)
Chapter 23 Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) and the Myth of the Irrational Female (287 – 298)
Chapter 25 (In)Visible Bleeding: The Menstrual Concealment Imperative (319 – 333)
Chapter 31 “You Will Find Out When the Time Is Right”: Boys, Men, and Menstruation (395 – 404)
Chapter 32 Menstrual Shame: Exploring the Role of ‘Menstrual Moaning’ (409- 418)
Chapter 56 Not a “Real” Period?: Social and Material Constructions of Menstruation (763- 782)
Chapter 62 Introduction: Menstruation as Narrative (865- 867)
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