Revealing the red mark


There is a scene in the fourth season of Game of Thrones where Jon Snow tells Ygritte, who is a warrior, that girls “swoon” and “faint and collapse” at the sight of blood. Ygritte is bewildered. The conversation goes like this:

Ygritte: Why would a girl see blood and collapse?

Jon: Well … Not all girls are like you.

Ygritte: Girls see more blood than boys!

Ygritte’s tone is cheeky, and the moment turns into cute banter between the two. It’s an easily forgettable scene in a show as dynamic as Game of Thrones, but the night that episode aired, many women took to the internet to share their amusement. It is very clear that Jon Snow knows nothing — about periods.

tamponThere is a common misconception that women and girls faint at the sight of blood, which doesn’t make sense. Once every month, millions of uterus-owners bleed from their bodies. This bleeding is often accompanied by soreness and cramps, and yet, women and girls are expected to have a fragile constitution when it comes to blood.

Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation aims to make sense of the misperception of periods.

“The sad fact is that menstruation — the process, the images, the word itself — is as unspeakable and undercover as it ever was,” write authors Elissa Stein and Susan Kim. “In fact, although you can watch buckets of fake blood merrily sploodging out of heads and torsos … rarely will you ever see a single drop as a result of menstruation.”

Stein and Kim are appalled by the way society has forced women to talk about periods: “You’re on the Rag. Your Friend’s in Town, or maybe it’s your Aunt Flo Who’s Come to Visit.” In Finland, premenstrual syndrome , with symptoms including mood swings, tender breasts, food cravings, fatigue, irritability and depression, is called Mad Cow Disease.

When someone is over-emotional, we call them hysterical, as in someone who suffers from hysteria. What most people don’t know is that hysteria comes from the Greek word hysterikos, which means “of the womb.” How misogynistic is that?

Perhaps there is so much confusion around periods because they’re considered taboo. In school, girls talk about their periods in hushed terms. Grown women hide their tampons and pads in purse pockets, lest a glimpse of the packaging offends a man or two. (Trans men who have not had sex-reassignment surgery and have periods also must hide their tampons and pads for fear of being outed to the world as transgender.)

On Instagram, where pictures of mostly-naked people are acceptable and venerated, a picture of an artist lying in bed with a period stain in view was taken down twice. A 2015 photo series in the Cosmopolitan had to be tagged as “Not Safe for Work” because it prominently featured period blood.

Viagra ads talk about erectile dysfunction, but tampon and pad ads aren’t allowed to use the word “vagina.” Note that the former is an ad for an elective medicine and the latter is an ad for necessary “feminine hygiene” products.

For Stein and Kim, the lack of easily accessible information about periods is something to be concerned about.

“What happens when your period doesn’t quite play out like a tampon ad? What if you secretly have real questions? What’s the point of getting a period? What did women do before pads and tampons? What about new drugs that promise to end periods — a hot idea or not? Sex during your period: gross or a turn-on? And what’s normal, anyway?” write Stein and Kim.

Stein and Kim wrote Flow because they couldn’t find “a single book that [modern] women could relate to.”

Here are the five things the authors didn’t know before writing Flow:

– A period on the Pill isn’t really a period.

– Doctors once stimulated patients to clitoral orgasms as treatment for hysteria.

– Bloodletting came about to mimic menstruation, which has been seen as a way to relieve bodies of noxious blood.

– Hormone replacement drugs are made from the urine of pregnant mares.

– There’s a thriving menstrual porn industry.

As for what I didn’t know about periods before reading Flow? Well, that could fill up an entire book.

Noorhan Maamoon is a junior majoring in print and digital journalism.  Her column, “The Hijabi Monologues,” runs on Thursdays.