Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation (6 page)

Chapter 3

SO HOW DID WE GET HERE?

S
O HOW ON GOD’S SWEET EARTH DID WE GET here, anyway?

In a world beset by genuine problems, how did menstruation become the ultimate taboo? When did a woman’s monthly flow become so unacceptable that vast amounts of time, money, and effort are now spent annually trying to thwart it? In short, how has the civilized world managed to get its collective panties into such a bunch about menstruation?

The answer isn’t simply corporate greed, or scientific hubris run amok, or even that good old standby, American prudishness. In fact, to truly understand how and why menstruation became such anathema, one is compelled to look back—way, way back, thousands of years back, before the Discovery Channel, Charles Darwin, and Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Back before the concept of science was even articulated as such, people were compelled to come up with their own answers for all those pesky, niggly little questions that haunted their days. Why did the bright yellow ball appear in the sky every morning and disappear at night? Why did big, black woolly things fill the sky, let loose gouts of water, and occasionally go boom? Why did some green things taste good while others made you feel funny, lie down, and eventually stop breathing? And why did bright red stuff, the kind that came out of you when you were gored by a mastodon, ooze out of women every moon cycle, with no apparent harm done?

The way we see it, if you belonged to a people for whom the trickling of a river probably led to a great fear and lasting awe of the Water God, the ability to give birth to a living child must have seemed the most amazing, wondrous thing imaginable. And yet why did such a vast majority of ancient societies clearly look down on women, treating them as inferior beings? Why have the females, throughout history, consistently ended up with the hairy end of the lollypop?

Why have the females, throughout history, consistently ended up with the hairy end of the lollypop?

Was it because the women were usually hunkered down by the campfire, tending to the food and taking care of the offspring? Was it because the men were bigger, stronger, loaded with testosterone, and carrying the spears? Or was it all somehow triggered by that weird female bleeding? Was menstruation seen as some kind of imperfection? Some divine warning? A literal curse?

Whatever the reason, societies and religions sprang up worldwide that were overwhelmingly patriarchal, the hierarchy being invariably one that, surprise surprise, favored the guys. Being atop the social ladder not only allowed men all the advantages you’d expect, such as better access to goods and services, and greater freedom, it also put them in the position to create and reinforce myth. This, as you will quickly gather, was no shabby perk and may in fact explain why so many early religions and mythologies degraded, demonized, or simply ignored women—as if to pooh-pooh what must have seemed her eerily mystical power to create life. Just sling open your Old Testament, that bedrock of Judeo/Christian/Islamic faith. Right there in chapter 1, Genesis, God is most unmistakably male, a “he” with a capital H, and take it from us if you haven’t read it recently, there’s nothing even remotely feminine about that first week of creation. Yet long before the Bible was being laboriously etched on papyrus or carved on tablets, men had already set down complex stories about superbeings, gods and goddesses who were responsible for everything we pathetic mortals couldn’t begin to fathom.

The good news is that the female goddess character was often described as possessing great power. The bad news is that it was invariably portrayed as a negative, destructive force, one that more than outweighed her ability to create, effectively turning her into a sort of cosmic Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. Such a storyline reinforced the notion that while women may be able to bring forth life, they’re also responsible for everything awful that goes down afterward, as well.

Take the story of the goddess Tiamat, mother of ancient Mesopotamia, from Babylonian mythology. Tiamat is no mere goddess with a halo and a toga, but a horrifying, roiling ocean, a nightmarish embodiment of pure chaos. Flattering enough for you? She does manage to give birth to the first generation of gods, but must then be killed after she attempts a hostile takeover of the entire universe. Following this dubious model was Gaia, the incestuous Mother Earth from ancient Greece, who egged on her children to castrate their father/brother, Uranus. Then there’s the Aztec goddess Coatlicue (“the one with the skirt of serpents”), who to this day is still portrayed sporting not only her distinctive outfit, but also a festive necklace made of human hearts, skulls, and hands. She embodied both birth and death, and her own children ended up having to kill her.

So how did menstruation figure into any of this?

Back before anyone understood the finer points of reproduction, people were nevertheless on to the idea that women occasionally stopped menstruating, their bellies grew bigger, and they’d give birth, after which the bleeding would eventually start up again. It didn’t seem unreasonable to assume that the blood a woman retained during the swollen-belly stage was somehow transforming itself into a baby and that monthly blood was the residue of an unborn child. No wonder menstrual blood was both feared and considered sacred. Ancient peoples believed it was the very stuff that life came from.

This may explain why menstrual blood made its way into early mythology and became such an integral part of the story of creation. According to Hindu legend, when the Great Mother made the universe, her “substances clotted,” thereby birthing the cosmos. And in biblical lore, the name of the first man in Genesis, Adam, comes from the Hebrew word adamah, meaning “bloody clay.” Not surprisingly, the notion that the first man was somehow jury-rigged out of clay and menstrual blood didn’t end up making it into the King James Version. Today, most biblical scholars cite instead a vaguer reference to “red earth.”

Leaping sideways from early religion and mythology, we land squarely in the world of science and medicine and discover, unsurprisingly, that perceptions of menstruation weren’t so enlightened there, either. Back in the 300s B.C., the great scientific philosopher Aristotle also concluded that menstrual flow was excess blood that hadn’t yet been made into a fetus. Not that a woman actually created life; apparently, menstrual blood was inert and useless until it encountered semen, which added form and triggered fetal growth. To him, woman was basically just a passive receptacle, a container of gooey, formless matter that needed a man to bring order (namely life) to the chaos. What’s more, Aristotle believed that while a woman contributed to the physical aspect of a baby, it was the man who gave it its soul.

To be fair to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, their scientific and medical conclusions were seriously hampered not only by laws and religious strictures against dissecting human cadavers, but by prevailing sexism and unchallenged assumptions, as well. Male and female reproductive systems were considered mirror images of each other, with the female ranking a distinct second to the male. Monthly bleeding, after all, seemed to indicate the perpetual breaking down of tissue and was considered all but proof of a woman’s inherent inferiority.

The poor old uterus itself was considered the underlying problem: the source of all that gooey blood, the root of woman’s inferiority, and the cause of many, if not most, of her problems. In fact, the uterus was such a vivid presence to the ancient Greeks, it was literally assigned a character. Aristotle’s teacher, the philosopher Plato, wrote, “The animal within them (the so-called womb or matrix) is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease.”

Did you follow that? Plato wasn’t being all figurative and poetic when he wrote that the uterus “wandered in every direction”; he, and countless others, believed that the womb was literally autonomous, a strange little critter that freely roamed around the female body, in search of children. It had feelings. And it could get lonely.

In a moment of perverse inspiration, Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, theorized that the uterus was in fact the source of female emotions. If one were unfortunate enough to possess a temperamental uterus that decided to go rampaging through one’s body willy-nilly, this manifested itself as a condition called hysteria. This one notion turned out to be perhaps the ultimate gold star of misguided medical theories, a genuine keeper that lasted, horrifyingly enough, for centuries. But more on that later.

From the very beginning, ignorance about female anatomy and anxieties about sex built to a perfect storm of bizarre menstrual speculation. In A.D. 77, writer and philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia called Natural History, which included numerous hair-raising theories on menstruation. According to Pliny, menstrual blood could make seeds infertile, kill insects, kill flowers, kill grass, cause fruit to fall off trees, dull razors, and drive dogs mad. The glance of a menstruating woman could kill bees, her touch could make a horse miscarry, and contact with her blood would cause another woman to lose her child, as well. A menstruating woman could cloud a mirror, but, fortunately, fix it again if she stared really hard at the back of it. Pliny also advised men that sex with a menstruating woman during a full lunar eclipse was not only a bad idea, but a potentially fatal one.

Oh, those funny ancient Romans with their wacky, outdated ideas! The laughter, however, quickly dies on our lips when we take note that Pliny’s theories didn’t go officially unchallenged until 1492, more than a thousand years later. Many truly believed—still do, in fact—that menstrual blood was a poisonous, noxious substance that could wreak havoc on animals, plants, food, mirrors, and hapless men. As recently as the 1920s, menstruating women were barred from certain churches (since their very presence would defile the sacred place), from Mexican silver mines (since they’d cause all the precious metal to magically disappear), and Vietnamese opium labs (since they’d turn the drug bitter).

Similar prohibitions kept menstruating women far from food production, as well. In many countries, it was believed to be dangerous to eat anything prepared by a menstruating woman because her condition would poison the food. French sugar refineries felt she’d make the sugar blacken; German wine makers were convinced she’d make the wine turn sour; and in parts of England, it was believed a menstruating woman would spoil meat just by hanging around, innocently minding her own business. It was a given that the very presence of a menstruating woman would ruin a hunt. What’s more, if a hunter were dumb enough to actually have sex with a menstruating women before hand, the prey would somehow sense this and stay far away.

Funnily enough, even the. word “taboos” relates to menstruation.

Funnily enough, even the word “taboo” relates to menstruation. It comes from the Polynesian word tupua, which means“sacred”and is also used when referring to menstruation. In fact, menstrual blood has historically been reviled as the most evil and poisonous of substances, while being strangely revered as sacred and powerful.

Counterintuitive, no? And yet in her 1996 Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara Walker writes that menstrual blood was often a valuable, integral ingredient in ancient rituals and ceremonies—both in mythology and in the real world—used for everything from an ingredient in wine given to Greek gods, to both a beverage and bath for fellow deities of the Hindu Great Mother. Imbibing menstrual blood, whether literally or symbolically, was clearly powerful stuff, and not just in the stomach-churning sense. It could confer immortality to Egyptian pharaohs, Celtic kings, and even early followers of the Tao.

And yet anything considered that powerful—plutonium, nuclear waste, menstrual blood—inherently carries at least the threat of danger, as well, and from it must invariably arise rules about its strict containment. For centuries and in numerous countries, this often meant being shut away in a “menstrual hut” during one’s period, far from food, sex, and, presumably, pregnant horses, sugar and opium factories, mirrors, and wine makers.

So what do we make of this? Certainly, it can seem by today’s standards like the ultimate gender diss, being forced into a dark hut and treated like some kind of leper for four days each month, in some cases being forced to use special utensils so no one could catch your cooties. But who knows? Even though your typical menstrual hut was apparently a far cry from a day spa, perhaps women actually appreciated the time off, a time when they could routinely escape the rigors of daily life.

Historically, menarche, aka the onset of menstruation, has had rituals of its own. In The Curse: Confronting the Last Unmentionable Taboo: Menstruation, Karen Houppert listed various charming menarche rites from the distant past. If one were a British Columbian Indian, one would have been secluded, in the wilderness, for three or four years running. The more civilized natives of New Ireland kept their girls at home for the same amount of time, but in cages, where they could be easily fattened up to better display the family’s prosperity. The really rich families could afford to lock their girls up for years while they happily plumped them up, not unlike geese for foie gras. In other cultures, girls were variously kept under mosquito netting, buried in sand, or locked by themselves in tiny, dark huts. And even in supposedly civilized Western culture, upper-class adolescent girls were introduced to the painful rigors of corsetry, competitive coming-out seasons, and the unyielding societal rules that made all of Edith Wharton’s heroines so damn miserable.