Oh.. are we not supposed to go there? Would you prefer we hadn’t brought it up?
Aunt Flo, shark week, red ribbon, things, yolks, crimson wave, time of the month, women’s trouble, flowers, the painters. Here is a helpful list of about 1,000 alternative words you can use. Because it’s a well-known fact that if you say the word “period” out loud, you will explode and die.
The question is, why would we rather talk about just about anything than our periods. Why is it a dirty little secret?
Us period havers spend 3-5 days per month on our periods, from the average age of 12 to the average age of 51. This means that over an 80-year life span, you will spend roughly 1,872 days in a biological and natural state that we are not supposed to talk about.
So you’re having lunch with your friends, and you reach in your bag for your phone, and a tampon falls out. And you are MORTO because now everyone knows. You would rather people discover that you still sleep with your Teddy Bear Justin (after Bieber of course), or that you cried bitter tears at the fact Keeping Up With The Kardashians ended for good!
In AD 77-79, Pliny the Elder wrote about the effect a period has on a woman:
Her very look, even, will dim the brightness of mirrors, blunt the edge of steel, and take away the polish from ivory. A swarm of bees, if looked upon by her, will die immediately,” he writes. The Bible states that anyone who touches a woman on her period will be “unclean until evening
and Bishop Theodore of Canterbury (690 AD) took this one step further and forbade menstruating women from even visiting a church.
Since then, (Thanks a bunch Pliny, you DOPE!), in the unwritten “period” rules, we must never, ever, mention the p-word in front of a dude. Never, for they will shrivel into a ball and melt into the pavement. So, therefore, we humans are agreed that they will pretend they don’t know about them, and we will continue to pretend not to get them.
Thousands of movies have been made since the dawn of time about war or violence, and we have all seen gallons of blood spilt through violence and anger but not many drops of menstrual blood has been ever seen on screen. What’s that about?
Periods are not glamorous, they suck, and sometimes they hurt. But they are a normal part of life and until we can talk about them with each other, they will continue to make life so much trickier to navigate, and we have enough to be dealing with.
Why can’t we all take a leaf from Camp Gyno’s book?
Periods are reminders that we have the power within us to create life, as and when we feel it is the right time for us to do so. We are powerful and beautiful creatures. Period.
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