It's Only Blood_Shattering the Taboo of Menstruation Read online

  Nor does Saudah stay home from school when she gets her period. She walks home, changes, washes, and walks back. The two teenagers in Bwaise will not show up among the statistics that the decision makers lean on. On paper, it does not show that they make themselves small.

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  OUR SHAME

  My shame as an adult: I hesitate to say the word ‘period’. My voice falters. It is as if it diminishes me to admit that I menstruate; it makes me vulnerable. I am governed by a biological phenomenon that I cannot control and that separates me from the others, those who do not menstruate – those who are in control.

  One of the researchers I interview in Uganda says that she feels a ‘chill’ or ‘twinge’ of embarrassment when she asks her partner (who does not menstruate) to buy menstrual products. Even though they both work with menstruation, lecturing and writing articles.

  I feel that twinge when I am buying menstrual products from a young man at the pharmacy or when the guy with the charming dialect is manning the checkout counter at the supermarket. Sometimes I hide the tampon on my way to the bathroom, in a closed fist if I have no pockets. It is rarer now, but it happens.

  Shame, embarrassment, confusion, and fear were some of the most common feelings that roughly 50 people from 34 different countries on six continents listed when they described their first period. In the study ‘Women’s Menarche Stories from a Multicultural Sample’ from 2004, several people also speak of joy, pride, and excitement, but the negative emotions – like shame and embarrassment – were always present. From continent to continent, country to country.

  My teenage shame could look like this: I had calculated that I would get my period during a basketball tournament in Finland – this was before I had started using tampons. However much I wanted to go, it was not worth the risk that someone could glimpse the thick pad through my shorts when I was in the middle of a game. The week before, I struggled with tampons in the bathroom. It was a pain. My insides were dry. My period had not started yet. Still, in order to be able to go to Finland and play basketball, I had to make sure that it would work.

  Why was it so important to hide my period? I did not want anyone, except one or two of my closest friends, to know that I was menstruating. Partly, it was about the lack of control. The blood finds its way out, impossible to hold back while waiting for a bathroom. It was also about other people’s disgust, a sense of dirt. Yet perhaps it was (and is) mostly about gender? Becoming a woman in the eyes of others, with all that it implies: the image of a childbearing, sexualised being who is also a deviant.

  My strongest memories from the basketball trip to Finland are a blood stain in my shorts and the initial panic that transformed into relief when I realised that it was only on the inside, and the basketball coach who stood outside the bathroom and asked whether I could play, while I was crying from the pain in my abdomen. I would never ever tell him.

  The shame becomes a part of the self, of one’s identity. It clings to both the mind and the body. To suffer from shame. To stand shameful. These are various degrees of revulsion or disgust with oneself, seen through the annihilated eyes of others.

  Not everyone is ashamed of their period. Perhaps there are even entire groups and places without menstrual shame. Perhaps there are those who have not even felt the milder kind of embarrassment, to be ashamed without the feeling taking deep roots. Those who feel nothing in particular. Those who feel pride and strength. For many, the negative emotions are dampened over the years, subsiding completely for others. The menses can be a relief and a sign of good health.

  But the shame is very much present in the research I study, in books I read about menstruation, in advertisements for menstrual hygiene products, in films I watch, and when I talk to people about menstruation. It is the reason why Saudah and Phiona feel horror at the thought of getting blood stains on their clothes. The reason why they cannot think of anything else when they menstruate. To feel the irritating dampness, the thick fabric that chafes, not being able to change overflowing menstrual protection in school – these things are certainly stressful. But it is shame that causes the paralysing fear.

  * * *

  Outside Café Javas in central Kampala, armed guards are posted. The rich residents of Kampala come here to have lunch and coffee. With their cups of latte and Belgian waffles, they become obvious targets for potential terrorists. In Uganda, the terror threat is a part of everyday life. The capital saw two suicide bombings in July 2010 with more than 70 dead, people who had gathered to watch Spain and the Netherlands play in the football World Cup final. The Somali terror group al-Shabaab claimed responsibility and warned of more attacks as a consequence of Uganda’s participation in the African Union peacekeeping mission to Somalia.

  Charlotte Akello does not belong to the rich, but she has suggested Javas as a meeting place to make it easy for me. Everyone knows it. And air conditioning is guaranteed.

  She is 21 years old, studies medicine at the university in Kampala, and wants to become a researcher. Charlotte Akello blogs about menstruation, writing short exhortations about taking menstruation seriously, long explanations about rights and discrimination, and poetry about girls who stay home from school.

  They have no option. But to quit school. Just to avoid shame. Mockery. And embarrassment.

  When she got her first period at age 10 and asked her mother what was happening, she was met with an evasive: ‘You’ll learn about that in school.’

  ‘And the first thing we were taught about menstruation in school was that we’re not supposed to tell our fathers or brothers. It was all “hush-hush”, especially in front of the boys. But if we remain silent, nothing will change.’

  She explains what happened when she returned to the student residence after participating in an action on International Menstrual Hygiene Day in Kampala.

  ‘Some boys asked what I’d been doing. And when I started telling them, they said that menstruation shouldn’t be talked about and that it’s something dirty. They were medical students!’

  The boys and men reappear in Charlotte Akello’s blog posts. The importance of making them listen, learn, rethink, and, in the end, act so that everyone can have a ‘dignified’ period, as she says. They are, after all, the ones who hold all the power. The ones who maintain the shame by laughing, taunting, and – like the medical students – branding menstruation as something dirty.

  She takes out a handkerchief and carefully wipes moisture from her face. The bright green sweater matches her headband.

  ‘I have to do more and try to reach outside the group that is already “converted”. I’m currently working on a small book or pamphlet about menstruation.’

  What about her then, the menstrual activist – is she free from shame? It has gotten better. She still checks her skirt a little too often when she is menstruating. In the past, she often stayed home from school during her period, but when the stakes got higher she forced herself to go anyway. She learnt to persevere.

  ‘But I always have a bad feeling when I’m on my period and I’m out moving among other people. It’s as if it shows – no matter what I do.’

  * * *

  In the equation that leads to shame, dirt is central. For Saudah at the school in Bwaise, the jibes that the girls with the blood stains have to endure are a direct consequence of the fact that they have failed to stay clean. Fourteen-year-old Juliet, whom I meet in Nairobi in the neighbouring country Kenya, explains the boys’ laughter in the same way: the girls have not managed their own cleanliness.

  It is a short conversation. Juliet does not like to talk about herself, but she says that a couple of her classmates are always away when they get their periods. Probably because they cannot afford menstrual products. The only time Juliet gets personal, or at least talks about her own experience, is when she describes her mother’s reaction to the daughter getting her first period.

  ‘She just said that I should avoid boys, that I could get pregnant and have to quit school.’r />
  A self-evident piece of information.

  When a group of teenagers in the countryside in Siaya in western Kenya were asked about menstruation, it turned out that the worst thing was not just getting caught menstruating, but specifically getting caught with blood stains. The fact that they had gotten themselves dirty became a double shame. Another version of this was the fear of smelling badly: ‘You do not want to sit next to your teacher, maybe you are smelling.’

  In southern India, in a secondary school in Bangalore, 13 girls sit lined up on benches and agree that the hardest part about menstruating is ‘feeling dirty’. Neither of them really wants to say much more. There are scattered words and short sentences about the first period: fear, shame, embarrassment, joy about becoming an adult – together with the feeling of being dirty.

  In reply to a direct question about the perception of menstruation, 70 per cent of the 750 menstruators who participated in a study in Senegal said that they thought of menstruation as something dirty. In several of the country’s languages, the very sentence ‘I am not clean’ also signals menstruation.

  Twiine, a woman in her fifties who lives in Kampala, explains that it does not matter how often she washes the old shirt sleeves she uses as menstrual protection.

  ‘They still feel dirty.’

  And it is about more than what is visible to the eye, a dirt that goes beyond the actual stains.

  ‘Men think it’s disgusting because the blood comes from the genitals,’ Twiine says.

  For her, sharing two small rooms with a man and two children, it is not easy (but necessary, she explains) to dry the newly-washed menstrual protection without anyone seeing it. She gets the used shirt sleeves from a seamstress in the area where she lives. To be able to throw them away, when the supply exceeds the monthly demand, is a relief.

  ‘I maintain that menstruation is disgusting,’ the journalist Anna E. Nachman writes in an op-ed about menstrual activism, published on the Swedish public television broadcaster’s opinion pages in September 2015. ‘To be a woman is to have stale, smelly blood flowing from one’s insides once a month for 40 years’ time. It doesn’t mean that the one who bleeds is disgusting, however.’

  But is it that simple? Can we separate our bodies’ dirt and disgust from ourselves as people? Can they even be expressed separately, without getting mixed up with the one who bleeds?

  In the documentary We Who Bleed (2014) by Zayera Khan, 20-year-old Lina explains how menstruation only became shameful for her when the boys in her class said that it was disgusting. When the teacher talked about menses, the boys made various noises to emphasise their disgust. As a consequence, Lina and the others who menstruate ‘tried to hide it to the point of death’.

  In the book Issues of Blood: The Politics of Menstruation (1990), the researcher Sophie Laws pursues the thesis that men are able to define menstruation on the basis of their position of power as a group. The British men whom she has interviewed about their views on menstruation say that there is ‘a measure of impurity’ about the menses, something that is expelled through an ‘excretory mechanism’ and thus differs from other blood. One of the men says that he thinks of menstrual blood as something dirty: ‘not something I’d like to be touching … whereas ordinary blood, I wouldn’t bother at all.’ At the same time, several of the men explain that they think of menstrual blood as any other kind of blood.

  Perhaps the ideas about dirt are at their most explicit in advertisement. ‘A kind of play-back of current attitudes,’ Sophie Laws writes. If there is one theme that all the world’s suppliers of menstrual products focus on, it is precisely that we should be clean and feel fresh – which they have long been criticised for. The word ‘fresh’ often occurs in a kind of subheading to the brand itself: Dailyfresh. Fresh Active. Freshness. ProFresh. Ultra Freshness. The menstrual products give you ‘a clean and fresh feeling’ and may offer ‘odour control’. Several are scented or have ‘odour-neutralising technology’.

  Or, like the model for one of the tampon companies said: ‘Sometimes I can pretend to be beautiful, or pretend to be a superstar. But I can never pretend to feel fresh when I’m on my period.’

  And so, the circle is closed: those who do not menstruate think that menstruation is dirty, we who menstruate feel unclean and ashamed. Those who make money from menstrual hygiene products have a powerful selling point that confirms our sense of dirt.

  * * *

  Among the selling points from the menstrual product companies I also find this sentence: ‘We love women and want to celebrate womanhood.’ Menstruation is, without a doubt, gendered. Even though there are many women who do not menstruate (after menopause, because of various physical conditions, or those who are not cis women, for example) and many who are not women who do menstruate (including trans men and non-binary individuals). Menstruation is something that makes you what we call a woman.

  In Zayera Khan’s film Menstruation with/out Gender (2014), three trans/non-binary persons talk about experiences of menstruation. Twenty-nine-year-old Charlie, who no longer menstruates, says: ‘If I men-struate it means that I’m a woman, and I’m not a woman, so therefore it became a rather difficult thing.’ Twenty-seven-year-old Robin, who menstruates but who is not a woman, chooses the opposite perspective based on personal experience: ‘I think that menstruating doesn’t necessarily mean being a woman.’

  I make a habit of asking everyone I interview for this book where they think menstrual shame comes from. Where does it originate? For some, the answer is rather simple and can be explained in a single sentence like: ‘Girls have it but boys don’t’; ‘It’s a unique female experience’; or ‘It’s the shame of being a woman.’

  It is a ‘gendered shame’, as the American menstrual activist Jax J. Gonzalez notes when I meet her at a conference about menstruation and human rights in Boston in 2015. For a few days, researchers, activists, and artists from all over the world gather at Suffolk University to talk about menstruation. The shame is not just theoretical. The artists’ contributions lead the university management to require that the windows be covered up, because the menstrual blood, menstrual products, and naked bodies that figure in the artwork could be perceived as ‘offensive’. Red paper is taped up.

  Several of those who are interviewed about their first period for the study ‘Women’s Menarche Stories from a Multicultural Sample’ express a resistance or reluctance against being labelled as a ‘woman’. ‘I can never forget my experience. It was that day when I realised that I could not escape from the fact that I am a woman,’ one of them says. Another: ‘I remember I think what upset me most about it was the fact that my father and I were very close. All of a sudden this separated me from him.’

  Jax J. Gonzalez has blue hair and wears a bow tie. She is a PhD student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As one of the organisers behind the conference in Boston, Jax is forced to walk from one lecture hall to another, putting up red paper. In an inverse situation, she goes on stage and recounts the unvarnished story about her most embarrassing experience of sex and menstruation, when she and her girlfriend left the white sheets in an apartment they rented overnight covered in blood.

  For her, the deconstruction of the connection between gender and menstruation, or ‘to queer’ menstruation, is a strategy for combatting shame.

  ‘If you say that menstruation is an experience that both men and women have, you open up for a conversation about why menstruation is so gendered and perceived as negative. If it’s no longer categorisable, it’s harder to control.’

  It is far from just a question of strategy, however, but also an obvious way of including everyone.

  ‘Like, for example, using the term menstruator instead of woman, to avoid excluding people. Anybody who experiences menstruation has dealt with the menstrual taboo or menstrual shame,’ says Jax J. Gonzalez.

  * * *

  With gender comes sexuality. Menstruation signals that you can bear children – a strange notion for man
y teenagers. But it is also a reminder about sex. In Sara Olausson’s (ed.) graphic anthology Women Only Draw Comics about Menstruation (2014), Anna Sjögren adds sexuality to this process of gendering: ‘I thought it was embarrassing that it became so obvious that I was a woman and not a girl anymore, that my body could suddenly bear children. I sort of became a sexual being, I thought.’ She goes on to write that it was also a cool sensation, that she was proud at the same time.

  The sexual shame lurks behind the admonition to stop playing with boys when the period arrives, like both Saudah and Juliet have been told. Unspoken yet rather obvious, it is repeated in studies from Zambia and Senegal: ‘You’re a big girl now,’ and ‘You need to watch out for boys.’ The Indian social worker Manjuala Yuvaraj, who teaches courses in menstrual education, explains that rules about girls not leaving the house alone for a few months after the first period is a question of ‘sexual attention’ from boys and men. The responsibility is put on the girls, who are supposed to keep away.

  Everything that has to do with women and sex becomes shameful, notes Nazneen Huq, who works with women’s rights in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, partly from a menstrual perspective.

  ‘If a boy and a girl have sex, it’s always the girl who is left with the shame, regardless of what lies behind it.’

  And maybe, Nazneen Huq ponders, menstrual shame and silence are part of the parents’ efforts to protect their daughters from an even worse shame, one that presupposes that they are seen as sexually available. As long as they keep the menses a secret, they remain children to their surroundings and cannot be asked to take on the same responsibility for sex, which, in the eyes of the world, is inappropriate.

  * * *

  Has it always been like this? Shameful and embarrassing. It is hardly true for all kinds of blood. Nor is it necessarily true for all bodily fluids that are associated with the reproductive organs, like urine and sperm. Menstrual blood is in a league of its own.