Typically, men associate the spilling or the sight of blood as the by-product of accident, sport, or war. Blood, for men, is often romanticized and likened to ritual, honour, and a sign of one’s masculinity and courage. When a woman bleeds during her monthly cycle, it is a symbol of coming of age, of fertility, a sign of her sex. We honour people who spill blood in defending their cause or their nation, yet since time began we have found the most curious, inventive, and offensive ways to vilify women for shedding their monthly blood — the same blood that they have needed before or will need again to build the very beginning of a nest inside the body for the earliest promise of human life.
Men in ancient Greece, and surely beforehand, seemed befuddled by women’s blood. They knew that they — men — would be in serious trouble indeed if they bled like women did. If men bled for days on end, it was surely the result of illness or injury and they would likely perish. So how could women bleed so profusely and regularly and still not die? This apparent imperviousness to mortal weakness might have been taken as a sign of women’s power, or of magical qualities barred to men, or of some sort of gender superiority. But for the most part, men found a much more self-aggrandizing theory: monthly bleeding was proof of women’s inferiority.
In the fourth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle noted in his treatise On the Generation of Animals that men’s blood was superior to that of women. In the human body, Aristotle wrote, heat transformed nourishment into blood. Males, who had sufficient heat, were then able to embark on an additional step: they could “concoct” (or transform) the blood into semen. On the other hand, Aristotle claimed, women were colder and thus lacked sufficient heat to produce semen. Aristotle’s exact words were that “the woman is as it were an impotent male, for it is through a certain incapacity that the female is female, being incapable of concocting the nutriment in its last stage into semen in women.” Because women lacked this ability, Aristotle said, they ended up with extra blood in their blood vessels and had to expel it during menstruation. Aristotle’s meditations about the blood of men and women helped entrench notions of male superiority and female inferiority that have lasted more than two thousand years.
We can’t blame sexism on Aristotle alone, nor can we suggest that he was the first to obsess about women and blood. In The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation, Janice Delaney lists a litany of other theories by classical Greek and Roman male philosophers about the fundamental problems associated with the blood of women. In the fifth century BCE, Empedocles, best known for theorizing about earth, water, air, and fire, said women evacuate blood because their flesh isn’t as dense as the male’s. In the same century, Parmenides — founder of a school of philosophy and author of the poem “On Nature” — said women are hotter than men (this in opposition to Aristotle’s later theory about women being cold) and thus produce an excess of blood, but that they gradually get colder until they reach menopause. Galen, the celebrated Greek physician and surgeon, theorized in the second century BCE that women menstruate because they are idle, live continually at home, and are not used to hard labour or exposure to the sun. Other theorists in the eleventh and seventeenth centuries CE speculated that through menstruation, blood escapes from the weakest point of the woman’s body, essentially describing the womb — as Delaney notes — as a “defective barrel.”
I so wish that these classical philosophers had been around today. Imagine the expression on Aristotle’s face if he were disinterred, reanimated, and required to travel — let’s send him by Greyhound bus — to Marymount Manhattan College. Why? In June of 2013 at that august institution, he would have been exposed to “Red Howl Moon” — dubbed as the world’s first menstrual poetry slam. Today, many people will appreciate the organizers’ intentions to, as they say, “bring down the red tent of shame.”
Alas, the biological differences are unlikely to change, and for me, one of the most fascinating things about it is how thoroughly clued out, for the most part, men are with regard to the monthly cycles of women. It wasn’t until I started researching this book that I learned of the psychologist Martha McClintock’s 1971 paper for the journal Nature, in which she put forward her theory of menstrual synchrony — that women who live together tend to menstruate at the same time. When I asked my wife and daughters about this later, they replied, “Larry, how could you not know this?” and went on to say that my own ignorance was typically male.
WHILE THE CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHERS used menstruation as a way of calcifying the idea that women are the “weaker sex,” religion has further advanced patriarchal notions by focusing on the notion that women’s monthly bleedings indicate a lack of cleanliness or purity. In a 2008 issue of the Internet Journal of World Health and Societal Politics, co-writers Mark A. Guterman, Payal Mehta, and Margaret S. Gibbs argue that the world’s five major religions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism — all place restrictions on menstruating women. The article, “Menstrual Taboos Among Major Religions,” notes that each religion makes statements about menstruation and its negative effect on women, leading to prohibitions on physical intimacy, cooking, and attending places of worship, and sometimes requiring women who are having their periods to live separately from men.
In the Old Testament, in Leviticus 18:19, we find the following prohibition about menstruation: “You shall not approach a woman in her time of unclean separation, to uncover her nakedness.” This rule, which influences Christian thinking as well, underpins the “Laws of Family Purity” in the traditional Jewish code of law. These laws forbid physical contact between males and females during the days of menstruation and for a week thereafter. Physical contact means passing objects between each other, sharing a bed, sitting together on the same cushion, eating directly from the wife’s leftovers, smelling her perfume, gazing upon her clothing, or listening to her sing. Although these ancient rules have contributed to contemporary prejudices and negative assumptions about menstruation, it must be said that Conservative Judaism has modified the laws of menstrual purity, and Reform Judaism has abolished them as irrelevant, archaic, and offensive to women.
The article’s authors note that most Christian denominations do not follow rules about menstruation, but that Western civilization — which is predominantly Christian — has a history of menstrual taboos. Menstruating women have long been believed to be dangerous. In 1878, the British Medical Journal postulated that a menstruating woman would cause bacon to putrefy. How that was determined, I would like to know. Bacon has always done a pretty good job of putrefying on its own — particularly before the advent of refrigeration technologies.
Two vivid examples of the isolation of menstruating women were circulating online recently. In June 2013, the New York Times reported that the old Hindu tradition of chaupadi (requiring a woman to leave home to stay in a shed, stable, or cave while she is having her period) is alive and well in western Nepal. In addition, in April of the same year, female and male Cambridge University students in the U.K. took to the streets in a campaign called “I Need Feminism Because . . .” One of the students had herself photographed carrying a poster that obscured her face, and said: “I need feminism because my family wouldn’t let me attend my grandad’s memorial because MY PERIOD made me UNCLEAN.”
Traditions and superstitions around bleeding women have seeped deeply into our culture, from myths surrounding the death of plants touched by a menstruating woman to sailors’ stories about the dangers of having a “bleeding wench” on board. They are behind one of the most common slang phrases for menstruation: the Curse.
Still today, the notion of the Curse is tattooed on the collective psyche. In 2012, for example, a man named Richard Neill posted a message on the Facebook page of U.K. maxi-pad maker Bodyform, complaining that happy advertisements about managing menstruation misled him as he stepped into a sexual relationship with his girlfriend.
He wrote, and I am excerpting just the core of his message: “As a
man, I must ask why you have lied to us for all these years. As a child I watched your advertisements [about] how at this wonderful time of the month the female gets to enjoy so many things. I felt a little jealous. I mean, bike riding, rollercoasters, dancing, parachuting, why couldn’t I get to enjoy this time of the month. Dam [sic] my penis! Then I got a girlfriend . . . and couldn’t wait for this joyous, adventurous time of the month to happen . . . you lied! My lady changed from the loving, gentle, normal skin-coloured lady to the little girl from The Exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin. Thanks for setting me up for a fall, Bodyform, you crafty bugger.”
Bodyform responded by posting an online clip featuring a fictional CEO named Caroline Williams who replied directly, and playfully, to Richard Neill. In the video, the fictional CEO pours herself a glass of liquid tinted blue, looks straight into the camera, and says, “Hello, Richard . . . we read your Facebook post with interest, but also a sense of foreboding, and I think it’s time to come clean. We lied to you, Richard, and I want to say ‘sorry’. . . . You’re right. The flagrant use of visualization [in our advertisements] such as skydiving, rollerblading, and mountain biking — you forgot horse riding, Richard — are actually metaphors. They’re not real. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but there’s no such thing as a happy period. The reality is, some people simply can’t handle the truth.”
At this point in the video, we see images of men in maxi-pad focus groups reacting in horror as they are presented with details that the CEO enumerates. She says: “The cramps, the mood swings, the insatiable hunger, and yes, Richard, the blood coursing from our uteri like a crimson landslide. So we knew we’d have to change our strategy . . . We have managed to maintain this illusion. But you, Richard, have torn down that veil and exposed this myth, thereby exposing every man to a reality we hoped they would never have to face. You did that, Richard. You. Well done. I just hope you can find it in your heart to forgive us.” The actor sips from a glass of tinted blue water — the same sanitized stuff used countless times in advertisements about the absorbency of pads and tampons (blue, of course, appearing cleaner and less offensive than the colour of blood) — raises it as if to toast Richard, and lets out an unmistakable fart. She says, “Oh, sorry, Richard. You did know that we do that too. Didn’t you?”
Culturally there has always been a taboo around bleeding women. An argument could be made that because women have been socialized to think of their own menstruations as unclean, it suits them to keep men in the dark about what they might be going through, or that they might be having a period, or what that might involve.
The Globe and Mail reporter Stephanie Nolen caught the essence of this strange dynamic in an article that she wrote last year about a man in India who discovered that his wife was forced to use unsanitary and makeshift means to catch the flow of blood during her period. Arunachalam Muruganantham found his new wife sneaking around the house one day carrying old rags and newspaper. He asked her what was going on, and she brushed him off. When he insisted, she admitted that she was menstruating. He asked her why she wasn’t using sanitary napkins and she said that they couldn’t afford them. Muruganantham embarked on a long quest to develop an affordable sanitary napkin for Indian women, a process which included parking himself outside a medical school and asking female students about their periods, and walking around with a blood-filled goatskin strapped to his body, which was connected by means of a tube to his underwear. From time to time, he would squeeze the goatskin and force it to release blood, to see if the napkin he had made — and was wearing — would absorb the flow.
Muruganantham’s efforts to invent the perfect — and affordable — sanitary pad were judged sufficiently insane to prompt his wife, mother, and sisters to move out. They came back after he won a prize from the Indian Institute of Technology for his invention of a tabletop machine capable of shredding cellulose fibre and shaping it into sanitary pads with a hydraulic press. Instead of trying to make a bundle of money by selling his invention to a company, he sold it at barely above cost to some rural Indian women who started production in a rented garage. The women who purchased the equipment now make the pad and go door to door explaining its use and sanitary qualities, and Muruganantham also delivers the machines to isolated mountain villages so that girls in schools can make their own pads and make some money in the process. As Nolen said, miraculously, in a country where men are not known for meddling in the monthly affairs of their women, Muruganantham has become known as the sanitary-napkin man.
The American feminist and activist Gloria Steinem jokes about how different the world would look if it were men, instead of women, with menstrual cycles, in “If Men Could Menstruate,” an essay in her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. To begin with, she says, “Men would brag about how long and how much.” In addition, she predicts, “Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (‘men-struation’) as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat (‘You have to give blood to take blood’), occupy high political office (‘Can women be properly fierce without a monthly cycle governed by the planet Mars?’), be priests, ministers, God Himself (‘He gave this blood for our sins’), or rabbis (‘Without a monthly purge of impurities, women are unclean’).”
These are but a few examples of how the bleeding that differentiates the genders gave rise to negative social stereotypes that still permeate our societal beliefs and values today. But sadly the divisive nature of blood does not end there.
The necessity of access to safe and affordable methods of dealing with menstrual blood is not limited to developing nations. In 1980, epidemiologists began reporting cases of toxic shock syndrome related to the use of a super-absorbent Rely tampon that Procter & Gamble had manufactured for use in the United States. The tampon had been designed to contain a woman’s entire menstrual flow without leakage or replacement. The Rely tampon was meant to contain nearly twenty times its weight in blood, and to expand into the shape of a cup as it filled. The company recalled the product, but later it was demonstrated that the super-absorbent tampons of any manufacturer were linked to increased risk of menstrual toxic shock syndrome. TSS, as it is known, results from bacterial infection. Although it can present in otherwise healthy individuals, it can lead to stupor, coma, organ failure, and death.
Men just don’t have to think about these things. Many are proud to shed their blood in sport or war as a badge of courage and proof of devotion to a noble cause. But men do not have to consider how to deal with regular, healthy monthly bleedings. Jerry Seinfeld thought it was funny enough to crack this joke: “TV commercials now show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem.”
The joke is custom-made for men, for whom blood in clothing often results from sport or war. But blood in clothing and laundry, for women, is a fact of life.
WE HAVE TRAVELLED A LONG JOURNEY in coming to understand the way that blood works in bodies. The things we can do with blood seem nothing short of miraculous. We know how to withdraw it, how to break it into its main parts (red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and plasma) in a centrifuge. We store it safely and transport it around the world. We treat and analyze it to ensure that it is free of diseases. We carry out millions of transfusions each year around the planet. We employ dialysis to clean the blood of a person whose kidneys don’t work. We manufacture insulin and a variety of pills to help diabetics maintain acceptable levels of sugar in their blood. We have developed artificial blood-clotting products designed to prevent people from dying of bleeding disorders.
But there are still countless ways that our blood can betray us. As much as our blood works to regulate itself and help repair or maintain the health of our bodies, it can also circumvent its own rules, turning on us in potentially lethal ways. We have bleeding problems s
uch as hemophilia and von Willebrand disease, cancers of the blood or bone marrow such as leukemia and lymphomas, and disorders such as anemia and sickle-cell disease, in which blood fails to carry oxygen properly from the lungs to the rest of the body. Blood disorders affect millions of North Americans each year, straddling all boundaries of age, race, sex, and socio-economic status. In addition, we are facing an epidemic of diabetes, a disease manifested by a surplus of sugar in the blood. When sugar (or glucose) levels remain too high — either because the pancreas is not producing insulin or because the insulin is unable to do its proper job in controlling blood sugar levels — the body begins to break down. In the worst-case scenario, nerve endings fray, body extremities have to be amputated, organs begin to fail, and the patient dies.
An exogenous agent can also corrupt blood. Your body doesn’t choose to break down, but a foreign visitor forces it to do so. This can take place through a variety of means, such as sex, blood transfusions, the use of infected needles, and mosquitoes.
In 1989, I was working as a volunteer with Crossroads International in the landlocked country of Mali, in West Africa, when I became aware that I was sick, and nauseated, and feverish, and that my bones were aching terribly. How to describe the symptoms: it felt like the worst flu I’ve ever had. I had been faithfully taking Aralen, an anti-malarial prophylactic — the most awful-tasting pill I have ever put in my mouth, by the way — but it did not prevent me from acquiring malaria. It is possible, however, that it kept the disease from becoming fatal. I took refuge in the house of my good friends Francine and Pierre Baril in Bamako. I let them take care of me, and I believe I took some quinine. Other than that, I lay under a ceiling fan and drank lots of water and waited out the flu-like symptoms. They held me in their grip for about a week, and then they let go, and I recovered.
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