Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation (22 page)

Through Margaret, girls read about the frustrations of having a body that didn’t develop fast enough, the confusion of not fitting in, the fear of being left out and left behind. Blume provided one of the few places girls could get information about menstruation that hit home more profoundly than any lecture in health class or corporate-sponsored film shown in fifth-grade assembly. Her characters talked about what bleeding actually felt like, about crying jags and mood swings, the embarrassment of buying supplies (especially from a boy cashier!), the anxiety of being the last to get one’s period.

In 1970, the dialogue about menstruation may have been light-years removed from the tight-lipped exchange that had usually passed for sexual education in previous generations; still, discussing it openly was no walk in the park for either the preme-narchal girl or her mother (who was probably toting plenty of her own baggage when it came to repression and embarrassment). Consider the fact that since 1980, Blume’s book has been one of the top one hundred books that parents regularly try to have banned from school libraries.

In her 1975 book, Menstruation & Menopause: The Physiology and Psychology, the Myth and the Reality, Paula Weideger points out that when a girl hits puberty, she’s pretty much on her own. As her face breaks out, breasts balloon, hair sprouts in weird new places, and emotions carom, she’s more often than not sans support as she struggles to understand what’s going on and why she has zero control over a body that suddenly appears to be going apeshit. She has no choice but to be swept along—proudly and happily, or kicking and weeping—into adulthood.

One day a little book was put on my bed while I was gone. Next to it were some maxipads and a belt. I assume it was from my mom, but we never talked about it. The bookwas one of the first editions of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and I’m pretty sure my mom would have been horrified if she knew what was really in the book.

—Beth H. (46)

Kimberly-Clark

Getting one’s first period is, of course, one of the most powerful transitions in female life: the flashing light that indicates one is most assuredly leaving the country road of childhood and merging onto the interstate of adulthood. Authors have traditionally pounced on this moment to forcibly remind the lucky young girl of exactly what she’s supposed to be feeling, in no uncertain terms. From Mary McGee Williams and Irene Kane’s popular On Becoming a Woman: A Book for Teenage Girls (1958): “One of the reasons that menstruation sets off an explosion of emotions is that for perhaps the first time in your active, tom-boy life, you must accept the fact that you are a girl. For most girls, this acceptance is an exciting, who-wouldn’t-want-to-be kind of thing, something you’ve looked forward to from the time you saw your mother nursing a baby brother, or dreamed about a kitchen of your own, or imagined yourself a well-loved wife.”

McGee Williams and Kane choose not to mention the fact that for other girls, getting one’s period is not only confusing and frightening, but often downright depressing as it signals the end of presexual freedom and the joys of childhood itself. Some of us actually enjoyed being active tomboys and were horrified to learn we would now be expected to give up our swashbuckling ways. And in fact, first blood isn’t even the point of their book, despite its educational-sounding title. While they dutifully spend a grand total of two pages discussing menstruation, the gist of the book consists of chapters like “The Teen-Age Crush,” “How to Get—and Keep—Boys Interested,” and “It’s Not Too Soon to Dream of Marriage.”

When you have a bat mitzvah you become a woman—at least that’s what they tell you in Hebrew school. Which is the same thing they tell you in that fifth-grade film about menstruation: when you get your first period, you’re a woman. When I was studying for my bat mitzvah, the two twisted in my head and I started having nightmares that I’d get my first period at my bat mitzvah. I dreamed I was standing up on the bimah, in my short-sleeved white lace gown trimmed with pink satin ribbons, when blood started gushing down my legs. I didn’t know what periods were actually like, how much blood you lost, that it didn’t happen all at once. In my dreams the blood raged down three steps and into the congregation. Everyone just sat and stared at me. I never told anyone and dreaded my thirteenth birthday—far more afraid I’d bleed in public than screw up my Torah portion.

—Elissa S.(43)

To say young girls have different reactions to their first period is perhaps the biggest understatement of the century. Yet whether they’re over the moon or deeply depressed, scared or elated, all girls are invariably told in no uncertain terms—after all that anticipation and buildup that leads to the first period—to keep their blood to themselves. Save for a best friend or two, no one is ever supposed to know when it’s happening, or even if it’s happening at all. So what kind of lousy rite of passage is that, anyway?

And yet in other eras and across the world, first bleeding has been treated as something else entirely: as an important, even solemn transition to be celebrated with elaborate rituals and ceremonies. In rural India, a girl was given a ceremonial bath and covered in jewels and special garments before participating in a special ceremony with her family. In Japan, a girl’s family still traditionally celebrates her first period by serving red rice and beans. In Sri Lanka, a girl is ritually bathed and dressed in white before being honored at a party, where she receives gifts and money. A Balinese girl is blessed at a temple and is then the guest of honor at a special feast. The Asantes of Ghana also throw a party, replete with singing and dancing, where the girl is given gifts and treated like a queen.

I had been expecting a royal trumpeter to unravel a scroll announcing “its” arrival—turns out there was no regal decree. I simply thought I’d been injured internally somehow and now I was dying slowly. I told my best friend, who confirmed that I was not, in fact, hemorrhaging.

—Lerato S.(37)

These, of course, are the cultures with the fun traditions. Other societies regarded a girl’s first period as a more arduous hurdle, the appropriate time for her to prove her physical strength, since she’d obviously need a lot of it as an adult. A Nootka Indian girl would be rowed out to sea and dropped overboard, the expectation being that she’d swim back by herself. Her tribe would wait on shore ready to cheer her return … or mount a hasty rescue-and-recover mission.

Some ceremonies lasted for days, even weeks or months. The Mescalero Apaches threw an annual eight-day-long ceremony, the most important of the year, for all girls who started menstruating that year. The first four days were devoted to much public feasting and dancing, while the latter four were set aside for the girls to privately ponder their new status as women. In fact, many cultures believed the time surrounding first menstruation was highly spiritual. Seclusion was considered an invaluable time to meditate, dream, and receive visions, an important part of many puberty rites for both girls and boys.

In Malawi, the Ngoni tribe traditionally secluded each girl for up to three months. Then her face and body would be daubed with white flour, signaling her spiritual and physical split from the community. She sat, naked, in shallow water until the womenfolk determined she could get out and begin her life as a woman. Pygmies in Africa traditionally sent their girls into seclusion to learn about motherhood from an older female relative. Afterward, a celebration was held, often lasting a month or two, so faraway relatives could have time to visit, honor the girl properly, and pay their respects.

According to an old Eastern-European tradition, a mother slaps her daughter across the face when she gets her first period. There are different explanations: to ward off evil spirits, for good luck, to let the girl know the pain of being a woman, or to bring the color back into her cheeks. Whatever the reason, most women who have had it done to them generally remember the moment quite vividly.

As harsh as it may sound, slapping is a walk in the park compared to the rituals other cultures use to mark a girl’s entrance into adulthood. In the Tiv tribe in Nigeria, for instance, four lines were traditionally cut in a pubescent girl’s abdomen, supposedly to make her more fertile. We don’t even want to get into female genital mutilation (FGM), a widely practiced tradition with its roots in North Africa. In FGM, a girl’s clitoris and labia are maimed or even removed outright, in an incredibly disturbing ritual practiced on females as young as four all the way up to grown women.

One could argue that even the most extreme ritual exists in the first place because there’s something inherently compelling about not only a woman’s sexuality, but her monthly blood … something powerful, frightening, perhaps even mystical. There have even existed puberty rites for boys that blatantly mimicked menstruation—hands down, the most queasy-making being one called subcision. Subcision, in which the penis was cut along its length so that it bled against the unfortunate boy’s lower body, was allegedly a tradition in New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines, and Africa. Blood coming from a sexual organ has clearly been a powerful symbol of adulthood, whether it came about naturally or surgically.

I was twelve years old. It was summer and I was wearing white Wrangler jeans shorts—the kind we rolled up at the knee. I had a great red-and-white sleeveless gingham top that came just above my waist with ruffles, just like the one Ann-Margret wore in Bye Bye Birdie. I was out on the deck, lying on a chaise with my legs wide open when suddenly, my mother called me to come inside. She pointed out that my beautiful white jeans were stained with deep brownish blood. I was shocked and so embarrassed. We went to the bathroom and when I took off my shorts my mother slapped me, gently, across the face. I freaked out and my mother laughed. She said that it was an old Jewish custom, the slap somehow warded off evil spirits, but I just wanted to cry. She explained that her mother slapped her, too. It was something every mother did when her daughter got her first period. Years later, I was glad that I had a son. That would have been a tough custom to carry on.

—Stephanie F. (53)

Depending on the culture, the first period has been the cause for celebration or resignation, and has therefore been ritualized, commemorated, or, in our society, basically ignored. While some families manage to muster up a small gift or special dinner, for the most part, American girls get a terse and generic “congratulations, today you are a woman” speech from one or both parents and are pretty much left alone to figure it out for themselves. It’s not surprising that the average girl may be totally at sea when it comes to what’s going on with her changing body, what to expect, what’s normal, and how she should feel about it all in the first place.

So what’s going on with that first period, anyway?

The technical term for the onset of menstruation is “menarche,” which stems from the Greek words mene (meaning “moon”) and arche (“beginning”). Ancient civilizations took note of how the monthly cycles of the moon seemed to mirror women’s monthly bleeding; and today, we ourselves find basing such a word on moon imagery quite poetic, even if the final result sounds disturbingly like “malarkey.”

The Periodic Cycle, Modess, Johnson &Johnson