I Don't Like It. Period

A friend reported that her adolescent daughter had just gotten her first period, and asked for ideas regarding how to celebrate this momonstrous--I mean, momentous--event. I told her to first tell her to go to her father and make him apologize for contributing an X chromosome, because it's his fault she became a girl in the first place. "Y?" she should ask him. "I want to know Y!" After he has explained that, at the time of contribution, the letter X, or rather three of them in a row, was what he was thinking about, she should immediately make him go and buy tampons.

I got my first period when I was 11, the night before a Very Important Spelling Bee. My mother, who was very Catholic, seemed to regard the human body as something sinful, and appeared to be resentful about my blossoming body, as though I had intentionally willed my breasts to burst and my thighs to develop a soft roundness. Really, all I wanted to do was focus on my spelling bee career, and I was annoyed at this crampy, bloody distraction. I was also very fearful that my mother would embarrass me or become angry that I was now, in a biological sense, fully a woman at such a young age. "Mary didn't have her period until she was at least 15," she would snipe accusatorily, "and that's only because God wanted her to! What's your excuse?" I reluctantly tried to muster up the courage to tell her, but she was sacked out on the couch, Johnny Carson blaring on the television. I spoke briefly to Johnny and Ed, desperate to tell someone of this unfortunate development. "Hey, guys, I just got my period," I whispered. "HEY-O!" exclaimed Ed McMahon, and the audience exploded into hysterics. Mortified, I ran from the room and into my bedroom. However, I lived in a trailer, and through the millimeter-thin wall between me and the living room, heard Johnny announce, "In honor of this occasion, we have Joan Embery here from the San Diego Zoo to discuss the menstrual cycle of the bonobo. It is weird, wild stuff." I cried myself to sleep.

The next day, I was crampy, cranky, and nervous. Too worried about my mother's reaction to steal her supplies, I had fashioned protection out of a hundred sheets of toilet paper and fastened it to my underwear with Scotch tape. To my horror, every time I took my turn at the front of the stage, I could feel my makeshift pad move dangerously out of place. "F-U-C-K" I spelled silently to myself. The last thing I needed was a bunch of sixth graders and their proud parents to witness my bloody backside. I took a powder on the Most Important Spelling Bee of My Life, misspelling "harridan," a word from the list that I had practiced many times. This is one of the many trials of being a woman--you sacrifice your career to stay home with the potential of having a kid. I moved carefully throughout the rest of the day, and decided when I got home that I would indeed swipe my mother's Stayfree. I suspect that she was in denial that I had transitioned from an innocent babe into a debaucherously developed devil, because it took her a full year to notice that her pads were depleted much faster than they should have been. She first accused my older sister of taking them, and after her staunch denial, confronted me in the hallway. "You got your period," she said. "Why didn't you tell me?" I briefly considered telling her about the nervousness, the shame, the potential that God didn't want me to bleed. Instead I grumped, "I didn't feel like it," and stomped away. That was the end of any acknowledgment that I had a uterus until we had my sex talk. This also occurred in the hallway. It consisted of "Don't let boys touch you down there." I said, "Ma, I'm 15. I'm trying to get boys to touch me down there." This time, she was the one who walked away.

I won't even discuss the dirty look I got when I said I wanted to use tampons. But it was worth it. Oh yeah, OB.

So anyway, back to this celebration thing. Said friend reported that her menses are a time for introspection and reflection. She explained that her period represents the Goddess in her. I love the woman, but in my clinical opinion, she is 100% a nutter. I see this Goddess stuff as cognitive dissonance, a way of comforting oneself about a horrible thing to endure by telling oneself that it is a really cool event that underscores one's Significance in the Universe as Woman. It's almost as if she sticks a rose in there--okay, wait a minute, thorns, ouch; let's say she sticks a water lily in there every month and sits spread-eagle on her doorstep to display to everyone the Beauty that is Feminine Flow. This cognitive "Goddess" nonsense overrides the mess, the odors, the staining of your favorite underwear (some of us have "period underwear," which sounds like they are starring in a Merchant-Ivory film), the anxiety that one must acknowledge the existence of that horrible word "panty" in order to buy panty liners. We are told by commercials and magazines that we are dirty during our periods and must use feminine hygiene products like sprays, yet we are also told that we cannot use them because they are bad for our vulvic health. We sit, dismayed, disgruntled, and defeated on our panty liners and pads, which remind us of a Swiffer refill. We agonize over our use of bleached tampons, about which many an alarmist e-mail forward has warned us of tainting our. . .taints with dioxins. Then when we go to the hairy hippie health food hovel to purchase some "natural" tampons, we are taken aback at the price of keeping one's vagina as pure as the springs from which Evian is drawn. Staring at one's bank balance, we decide that it is okay if our yonis rather resemble a municipal water supply.

Men do not understand these trials. On our first visit to Target, my boyfriend refused to abide having a box of tampons in the otherwise empty cart. He told me I had to hold them until he found something else to put in there that he could hide them under; something suitably manly, like an air compressor. Gloria Steinem, in a famous essay entitled "If Men Menstruated," opined that men would hail their periods as a monthly display of masculinity, and would actually regard "men"struation as a competitive sport. I strongly disagree. I think that those pathetic men who complain that there are no "Men's Studies" classes would rise up and whine that they have to have sensitive balls; do they really have to deal with periods too? They would not say that menstruation represented the God in them; they would report on the staining of their new white Calvin Klein boxer briefs and how nobody in the board meeting had a manpon that they could "borrow" (I am opposed to the use of the word "borrow" in the discussion of menstrual products. That's just gross). I think men would react to menstruation the same way women do; however, there would have historically been no abandoning of men in menstrual huts, and tampons would often have a front-of-store display.

Okay, I have to admit that there are a couple of good things about menstruation. One, your period lets you know that you are not pregnant. And you can convince your clueless male gym teacher that you can't swim for six weeks because you have your period, when really your self-esteem is so low that you won't be seen in a swimming suit in public. Not, you know, that I did that or anything. Sorry, Mr. Luoma.

Of course, I am a bit of an androgyne. If I possessed more femininity, I might be more in favor of menstruation. In the early days of my psychology residency, the director offered feedback that my life would be more difficult because people expect certain things of women, and that I lacked a certain "feminine effervescence." I waxed about egalitarianism, the empirical studies that reported greater intelligence in androgynes, and the feeling that one could be assertive. I declined to tell him that I was having a feminine effervescence right there in my pants, and glided off, femininely, to secure a tampon.