What if There Isn't a Menstrual Taboo?
I think I’m writing about taboo, book marketing, and situational art. I think they are all connected, but by the end of this, dear reader, you may say I’m wrong. That’s okay. I’m often wrong.
I’m working on a summary for the book club (okay I guess one of the ‘study groups’) I’m in on a chapter of We Are Dancing for You, Native Feminism and the Revitalization of Coming of Age Ceremonies. The chapter deduces that “a menstrual taboo doesn’t exist”. Whaaaaaaaat!? There goes years of research and my next book…
I was talking this week about the marketability of my next book, which it not very marketable and I’ve essentially avoided sending updates to the publisher for a year and 4 months. (Update—sent it yesterday!) The small press world is wonderful like this in my experience. I once thought I was a person who needed things to move quickly—now I need enough time to forget about something so I no longer cringe about it.
I think in the last few years, I’ve become more comfortable writing the unmarketable book. I might even be proud to write them. At least today. It’s that balance between being seen and unseen, that provides a liminality of comfort.
In her chapter on the politics of taboos, Cutcha Risling Baldy discusses (in different words) the flattening of taboo (tapu) from sacred and profane to just profane. I think about this a lot. I talk about it almost as much. I want to say that this reduction is why a menstrual taboo becomes complicated. When the meaning of a word changes, the relationship complicates, particularly across cultural and languages. “Western scholarship,” she writes, “has constructed a historical version of Indigenous cultures that uses taboo as a political project in service of settler colonial desires for assimilation of Indigenous peoples and lands.” (106)
Coded in “settler colonial desires” is both the theft of land and the eradication of female power and solidarity. In the flattening of taboo, we get “sanitary napkins” and scented period products designed to make body odor worse so we change them more often and thus purchase more of them. We get full-body deodorant and no discussion of a period as a natural gift full of stem cells and nutrients. Marketing of fake filth can be cruel.
Risling follows anthropologists Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb’s idea, “the specific meanings of menstruation in a given culture can by no means be presupposed, even in the presence of menstrual taboos. They can be determined only through sustained and particularistic analysis of the case at hand.”
So I think my questions become: how do we separate the modern concept of a taboo as a device used to silence, alienate, and other something from the “original” tapu of sacred and profane? And if we’re looking at individual cultures, what gives the greatest context to our relationship to ancient menstruation, not the modern religiously infused view?
We’ve been watching a comedy about an Egyptian Irish man whose wife is hit by a bus and he’s left to raise his three daughters. He’s a fuckup out-of-work comedy writer. In the most recent episode, the middle daughter doesn’t want to go to school because she is sick. She bleeds through her tights and skirt. A boy at school gives her a jacket to tie around her waist. Her little sister thinks she is dying. She can’t stand the idea of another death. The fuckup father buys her a bag full of basically everything in the period care aisle. It is perhaps funny in that it is sad; the grieving girl, cramping and constantly mad at her father, later feels guilty about her behavior. It’s relatable. That’s how comedy works. It might also be how the patriarchal distortion of reality works—it’s relatable because it’s familiar.
In class this week, we practiced “situational art.” Sometimes this is also called “environmental” or “land art” though I think it’s more connected to happenings than land art. We each took ten minutes to find an object or place in the building to create a gesture of. After creating our gesture we went on a silent gallery walk in which we each arrived at our object and embodied it through a gesture everyone mimicked. We filled the hallway with fire extinguishers that looked a little like “I’m a little teapot.” We did chair sits to become the ADA chairs in the hallway (please don’t move us, it’s illegal!) We sprung up like the tulips outside the atrium window. In the cafe, we leaned like a vase of roses and between the elevator and vending machine, we got on our knees and turned the invisible knob on our chests before spitting up gumballs. It was one of those Wonka-esque moments that seems too good to be true.
Afterward, we determined situational art could be disruptive, but the kind of disruption that leads to play. A disruption to sacralize the mundane. One student noted that it was uncomfortable, but perhaps less uncomfortable than if we had said “Now we will get on our knees and act like gumball machines.” There was no acting, we were gumball machines.
I’ve long had a theory that the “danger” of menstrual flow was invented by women to tell men to fuck off for a few days and do their own thing. I think this aligns with Camilla Power’s theory of The Female Cosmetic Coalition and could explain the women’s house becomes a sanctuary. Perhaps the trouble here is today, the notion of a “manipulative woman” works against the individual and collective. Any manipulation of the truth and we’re suddenly living in a reality between Hester Prynne and Abigail Williams.
In Baldy’s analysis of the politics of taboo, she wants readers to stop calling a women’s house a menstrual hut. I am guilty of this reduction, primarily in emoji form 🛖🩸. This kind of simplification with its negative modern connotations reminds me of the teenage game MASH in which the “goal” was to land on the “M” to live in a mansion or your life was somehow destined for failure if you landed on the “S” for “shack”. Blady goes on to elaborate that the women’s house is not only for menstruation but meditation after birth or miscarriage. It’s a space of female support and spiritual care. It might be exactly the kind of thing a patriarchy would want to tell its women that doesn’t exist, reducing their potential for collective care and solidarity to single-dwelling “huts”. This I think also boils down to a class system, private property, and the idea that a dwelling is never enough, there is always room for improvement. In my generation, this might be the fault of The Sims and MTV Cribs. Blame, however, does not lead to progress.
Baldy ends the chapter with a story from her mother about her grandfather telling her repeatedly she “is not sick” when she gets her first period at school and is sent home “sick”. He sends her brothers to get “sanitary napkins” and shows how vital it is to have support, especially from the men during this time. He makes the rest participate. This might be part of what Baldy is really getting at—menstruation as a collective.
I think to say there is no menstrual taboo might be as reductive as saying there is one. It might not. The thing I want to consider most is that if something holds so much power, patriarchal structures want to shame, silence, and punish it from pink taxes to scented tampons, it means more than what we can conceptualize in words.