Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(7)

One time, I noticed that the little waxy strips you peel off the maxi pad adhesive were printed, over and over, with a slogan: “Kotex Understands.” In the worst moments, when my period felt like a death—the death of innocence, the death of safety, the harbinger of a world where I was too fat, too weird, too childish, too ungainly—I’d sit hunched over on the toilet and stare at that slogan, and I’d cry. Kotex understands. Somebody, somewhere, understands.*

Then, each month, once my period was over, I would burrow back into snug denial all over again: pretending my lady-parts didn’t exist and that nothing would ever, ever come out of them, to the point where the blood would surprise me all over again, every month.

Twelve years later, I finally said the word “period” out loud in public.

Part of that anxiety came from the fact that, particularly in my youth, I was a hider, a dissociater, a fantasist. It was easier to bury myself in stories than to deal with the fact that the realities of adulthood were barreling down on me: money and loneliness and self-doubt and death.

Part of that anxiety came from the fact that, as a fat kid, I was already on high alert for humiliation at all times. When your body itself is treated like one big meat-blooper, you don’t open yourself up to unnecessary embarrassment. I was a careful, exacting child. I hoarded my dignity. Even now, I watch where I step. I double-fact-check before I publish. I avoid canoes.

The most significant source of my adolescent period anxiety was the fact that, in America in 2016 (and far more so in 1993), acknowledging the completely normal and mundane function of most uteruses is still taboo. The taboo is so strong that it contributes to the widespread stonewalling of women from seats of power—for fear that, as her first act in the White House, Hillary might change Presidents’ Day to Brownie Batter Makes the Boo-Hoos Stop Day. The taboo is strong enough that a dude once broke up with me because a surprise period started while we were having sex and the sight of it shattered some pornified illusion he had of women as messless pleasure pillows. The taboo is so strong that while we’ve all seen swimming pools of blood shed in horror movies and action movies and even on the news, when a woman ran the 2015 London Marathon without a tampon, photos of blood spotting her running gear made the social media rounds to near-universal disgust. The blood is the same—the only difference is where it’s coming from. The disgust is at women’s natural bodies, not at blood itself.

We can mention periods obliquely, of course, when we want to delegitimize women’s real concerns, dismiss their more inconvenient emotions, and perpetuate the myth that having outie junk instead of innie junk (and a male gender identity) makes a person an innately more rational and competent human being. But to suggest that having a period isn’t an abomination, but is, in fact, natural and good, or—my god—to actually let people see what period blood looks like? (This is going to blow a lot of you guys’ minds, but: It looks like blood.) You might as well suggest replacing the national anthem with Donald Trump harmonizing with an air horn.

Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it’s annoying and gross, but it’s not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It’s not more gross than feces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all—in my mother’s professional opinion—phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny.

This is just a wacky idea I had, but maybe it’s not a coincidence that, in a country where half the population’s normal reproductive functions are stigmatized, American uterus-and vagina-havers are still fighting tooth and nail to have those same reproductive systems fully covered by the health insurance that we pay for. Maybe periods wouldn’t be so frightening if we didn’t refer to them as “red tide” or “shark week” or any other euphemism that evokes neurotoxicity or dismemberment. Maybe if we didn’t perpetuate the idea that vaginas are disgusting garbage dumps, government officials wouldn’t think of vagina care as literally throwing money away. Maybe if girls felt free to talk about their periods in shouts instead of whispers, as loudly in mixed company as in libraries full of moms, boys wouldn’t grow up thinking that vaginas are disgusting and mysterious either. Maybe those parts would seem like things worth taking care of. Maybe women would go to the doctor more. Maybe fewer women would die of cervical and uterine cancer. Maybe everyone would have better sex. Maybe women would finally be considered fully formed human beings, instead of off-brand men with defective genitals.

Maybe I wouldn’t have had to grow up feeling like a strip of wax paper was the only “person” who understood me.

I don’t remember how I got over it. Just time, I guess. I just waited. Eventually I moved from pads to tampons, and eventually I moved from tampons with applicators to the kind of tampons that you just poke up there with your finger, and eventually I was able to ask a female friend for a tampon without dying inside, and eventually I was able to have a tampon fall out of my purse on a crowded bus and not construct an elaborate ruse to frame the woman next to me, and now I’m just a normal adult with a husband she’s not afraid to send to the store for o.b. super-pluses. Ta-daaaah.

The truth is, my discomfort with my period didn’t have anything to do with the thing itself (though, to any teenage girls reading this: yes, it is gross; yes, it hurts; no, it’s not the end of the world; yes, sometimes it gets on your pants; no, nobody will remember)—it was just part of the lifelong, pervasive alienation from my body that every woman absorbs to some extent. Your body is never yours. Your body is your enemy. Your body is gross. Your body is wrong. Your body is broken. Your body isn’t what men like. Your body is less important than a fetus. Your body should be “perfect” or it should be hidden.