inContext explores all kinds of topics related to women’s lives and how women are represented in literature. One topic that is largely missing from literature is that of menstruation. Outside of basic instruction for adolescents, it seems adult women don’t read or talk about something that, for most of us, occurs ever single month for more than thirty years of our lives. No one ever gets her period in a novel or a film, unless it is her first period, which is typically a part of the plot if it’s shown. In FLOW: THE CULTURAL STORY OF MENSTRUATION (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009), Elissa Stein and Susan Kim lament that even the famous Kinsey and Hite reports don’t mention sex during menstruation.
Stein and Kim ask us and ask along with us: what is it that is so bewildering and unmentionable, all at once, about women’s cycles? Today, we have the option of chemically stopping our periods entirely, or at least for months at a time. The authors of FLOW cinch the argument precisely when they ask, “is this one giant leap forward for womankind…or just a step backward—that by ridding ourselves of an intrinsic part of being female, we’re just trying to make ourselves more like men?” Of course, they ask us to answer that question both individually and collectively. What do you make of the latest drugs on the market that are purported to reduce menstruation to four times per year or suppress it entirely? Can drugs like these free women from their biology? A deeper question might be: why is it that we wish to be free of our biology?
Advertising definitely contributes to women feeling “funny” about menstruation. The ads are always (and always have been) aimed at solving the “embarrassment” of menstruation. We are able to be carefree and active if we use x,y,z product to keep it all under “control.” There are little purses and carrying cases meant to hide tampons and pads. These have always struck me as silly. I mean, what ELSE would a long case hold inside it than tampons? The case isn’t long enough for pencils, or short enough to be a change purse. And, what are we hiding and why anyway? It should really not be a mystery to our fellow female friends, nor the males in our lives, that once a month we menstruate. Far from being abnormal, it is the most normal thing, like breathing, eating, eliminating waste, or blinking our eyes.
The women’s movement in its third wave seems to be based mostly around individual and personal choices. Feminism today is not collectively focused on equality for large groups, about change on a mass scale or about altering the dividing line of socioeconomic status that still separates women, regardless of religious, sexual, ethnic or racial differences. In our desire for ultimate autonomy, we seem to have lost the ability to question what we sanction and whether anything is “off-limits” for the individual.
There is so much taboo in our society around issues of women’s individual choices. We don’t want to spout too many facts about the horrors of c-section or not breastfeeding, lest we take away these as options for women who want to choose them. We can’t say that a woman choosing something is not making that choice from a stance of being educated and liberated. Most women who take surveys about breast augmentation, for example, say they’re doing it for themselves. And, who are we to argue? Yet, there is a creeping feeling for some of us that these “choices” are really about something unseemly beneath the surface of our society. We want c-sections supposedly because Grandma is visiting and lives so far away, so why not let her meet her grandchild while she’s here? We choose not to breastfeed because we, individually, do not want to feel any more tied to our babies than our partners are. If we bottle feed, our partner can get up every other night to feed the baby, right? In our never-ending pursuit of being politically correct and supportive of the singular desire of the individual, we might be missing something.
While FLOW puts out a lot of information, it leaves many questions for the reader to ponder. One has to wonder how we go from wishing for our periods so that we feel normal and some camaraderie with our junior high classmates a la Judy Blume’s ARE YOU THERE GOD, IT’S ME, MARGARET? (Yearling, 1970) to bringing an ad from a magazine to our gynecologist’s office seeking to just make it all go away. Rather than worrying about offending one another, we need to set aside our defense mechanism for our choices and discuss the reasons we make the choices we do. We need to talk with one another without judgment. I propose we talk about menstruation together now. How do you feel about menstruation? Are you glad for it? Do you wish it would go away? How do you feel about menstrual suppression via prescription? Feel free to comment and contribute to the discussion of this much-ignored aspect of women’s lives.
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