Let’s start with a quick period primer, just so we’re all on the same page. What is menstruation, exactly? Menstruation — aka having your period — is when a person’s uterus sheds the lining it’s built up during the course of the menstrual cycle - the lining that’s designed to cushion a fertilized egg. It exits via the vagina over the course of what’s usually a couple of days. It happens, on average, once a month. Most who get a period will have, on average, about 500 of them in a lifetime. That adds up to about 2,500 days, and if my math is right, 6.8 years of menstruation time: woo, that’s a frequent companion!
Throughout time, and pretty much the world over, we see cultural taboos about menstruation: customs and beliefs that make it ritually unclean, spiritually potent, and even dangerous. Lots of cultures have believed it has the power to pollute their surroundings and, specifically, to endanger men. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that if a woman with her period looked into a mirror it would cloud over, such was her force during that time. Menstruation not only affected her eyes, which after all were full of blood vessels, but also had the power to disturb and distort the air around her, forming a sort of angry female cloud.
Ancient Romans also feared the mystical power of menstruation. Pliny the Elder, bless him, wrote that if a woman got her period during a solar or lunar eclipse she could kill a man just by having sex with him. This is an idea we’ll see crop up throughout the ages: that period blood has the power to damage a male member. But it could also be a force for good...kind of. If a menstruating woman hiked up her skirts and walked through a field, she had the power to kill crickets, locusts, you name it. Apparently this phenomenon was first observed in Cappadocia during a particularly bad beetle infestation. A bunch of menstruating women walked through the fields with their skirts hiked up to their buttcheeks and those beetles fell dead right off the corn. This isn’t so much about period blood being a boon, per se, but about it being SO potent that it has the power to kill plagues. Sort of a backhanded compliment.
But wait: there’s more! Pliny has tons to say about menstruation:
“...there is no limit to the marvellous powers attributed to females. For, in the first place, hailstorms, they say, whirlwinds, and lightning even, will be scared away by a woman uncovering her body while her monthly courses are upon her. The same, too, with all other kinds of tempestuous weather; and out at sea, a storm may be lulled by a woman uncovering her body merely, even though not menstruating at the time. ” — PLINY THE ELDER
Who knew a strip tease had the power to soothe the ocean? Next time you’re caught in a storm at sea, you know what to do. Pliny also tells us that it’s a well-known fact that the touch of a menstruating woman does a lot of damage: it can make bees forsake their hive, turn boiling linen black, blunt razors, and contaminate anything purple. Alrighty.
Throughout history, we’ll see the idea crop up that menstrual blood itself is potent, even magical, but its properties are almost always sinister. In ancient Egypt, menstrual blood was considered a source of both good and evil. While an inscription at the Hathor temple says that one god listed among his chief dislikes a menstruating woman - rude - menstrual blood was also considered medicine. It was added to all sorts of drugs, ointments, and salves. One papyrus scroll suggests that if a woman had droopy breasts, for example, smearing some menstrual blood on them would perk things right up. Even our Roman friend Pliny has to admit that, “baneful as it is”, period blood has potentially useful applications. Especially when it comes to breaking spells. “Another thing universally acknowledged, and one which I am ready to believe with the greatest pleasure, is the fact that if the door-posts are only touched with the menstruous fluid, all spells of the magicians will be neutralized.”
It makes sense that period blood is often linked to magic. In times when we understood little about how our bodies worked, the whole thing seems magical indeed. It’s unique from other forms of blood: it doesn’t clot like a wound, and it can’t be stanched; it arrives and departs on a regular schedule and is typically associated with a particular sex. The period has also long been linked to the moon. Etymologically speaking, the word menstruation comes from the Latin word menstruare, from menstruus, meaning “monthly”, which stems from mensis, or moon. It’s been associated with the moon in several religions - makes sense, given it works on a monthly cycle - a moon deities are almost always depicted as female. In Mayan mythology, menstruation’s origin story comes from the Moon goddess, whose monthly flow was given to her as a punishment for sleeping with the Sun god when she’d been told not to. How dare you! Her blood was stored in thirteen jars, where it transformed into snakes, insects, poison, and myriad diseases used as an ingredient in potions. Many cultures around the world have seen menstruation as making a person more powerful. In North America, the Cherokee people traditionally believed that menstrual blood gave women special powers that let them destroy their enemies. Her blood makes her potent - it gives her spiritual powers. But that also means she might become a danger to the world at large.
It’s no surprise, then, that in many cultures those who menstruate have been kept isolated from the community during their monthly, sent off to huts to wait it out. This has been painted as something akin to period jail, but anthropological studies suggest this isolation isn’t always punishing. These huts have also served a space for rest and reflection, crafts and bonding, and a break from domestic demands. In some communities in the Hindu Kush, there’s a bashali (or large menstrual house), which serves as a kind of all-female clubhouse. It is a secret and venerated space; it’s even considered holy.
Some cultures haven’t made it either good or bad, but acknowledged its potent power. Amongst the West African Beng, women aren’t supposed to go into crops, but not because it might hurt the harvest: because mixing biological fertility with vegetable growth might actually mess with their childbearing. In the non-Western world, there are plenty of rituals surrounding a woman’s first bleed that acknowledge and respect it. Traditionally, amongst the Asante in Africa, girls getting their first period are celebrated, seated beneath a queenly umbrella and given gifts. The euphemism often used to tell an Asante queen mother that a girl in her community has gotten her first period is a phrase that translates to, “she has been made perfect.” The Ojibwe people of North America have a ritual for a girl’s first menstrual cycle: she fasts from eating strawberries for a full year, marking their transition from childhood to adulthood. It’s a time to learn wisdom from older women in the community, and to connect to one’s ancestors. A link to the future and the past.
And yet you’ll find that beliefs about menstrual blood’s destructive power are pretty pervasive. In England during Tudor times, there were those who thought that a woman’s menstrual blood was dangerous, even poisonous, and could seriously harm a male member. A child born from having sex during menstruation would end up - gasp! - a redhead, and potentially deformed.
Menstrual blood has been coveted for use in charms and potions of all kinds, most particularly love potions. In France during Louis XIV’s time, it was added to perfumes to attract a potential lover’s attention. One of the Sun King’s mistresses sprinkled such concoctions on his meals to keep him keen. The belief that menstrual blood might inspire fond feelings continues in some quarters. Try Googling “magical uses for period blood” and you’ll see what I mean. In 2009, an Indonesian maid appeared in a Hong Kong court accused of adding some to her boss’s food, hoping to make their relationship better. It seems it didn’t work the way she hoped.
BLOOD IS BAD, BUT PERIODS ARE NECESSARY
Part of the confusion in past eras about the period evolved from how little we understood the workings of our bodies. In 1540 English physician Thomas Raynold argued that surely period blood couldn’t be evil, as menstruation was clearly an ingredient in fertility. But very few women were writing down anything about periods until very recently. Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval nun and visionary, wrote about how she thought menstrual blood could cure things like leprosy. But she was the exception, not the rule. The less we talked about it, the more it became a mysterious secret, which only added to its mystical power and the anxieties surrounding it.
The act of menstruating has also been considered important for health. Greek physician Hippocrates tells us that because women are softer and more sponge-like than men, they run the risk of filling up with fluids. If not expelled, she could drown in her feminine essence, or be driven crazy by it. This is especially true of virgins. He says they often have bad dreams and visions during their first menstrual episode: yes, the “women on the rag be acting crazy” stigma goes alllll the way back. But don’t worry - he has suggestions for how to stimulate a lost menstrual cycle. It involves cow dung, beef bile, and myrrh. Ah, Hippocrates. He also has opinions about what the length of a woman’s period portends: If it’s longer than four days, then her eggs are probably delicate. Not good. But if it’s less than three days, women tend to take on a masculine appearance and are unlikely to conceive at all. That’s a pretty small window of feminine healthfulness! In an age when your ability to rear healthy babies was paramount, the length and characteristics of your flow were things you weren’t likely to advertise.
And yet it’s an issue that sometimes bleeds out into the public sphere, especially if you’re a public figure. Katherine of Aragon, English king Henry VIII's first wife, famously suffered from irregular periods, and a lot of people knew about it. France’s Marie Antoinette kept her mother back in Vienna well informed about how her downstairs area was flowing. Two centuries earlier, Catherine de Medici employed a wide range of people to document her daughter’s cycle. Ugh, mom!
One of the reasons periods have historically been watched so closely is because of its role in signalling the shift from childhood to adulthood, in some eyes, marking a person as ripe for marriage. England’s Margaret Beaufort got married and gave birth to future king Henry VII at the age of just thirteen. Oh my.
Let’s follow this swiftly darkening rabbit hole a little further to another troubling blood-related tracking device: The traditional practice of checking the sheets after a married couple’s first night together to see if the woman has bled, ensuring she went to bed a virgin. Yikes. The blood in this instance comes from the hymen: a thin tissue surrounding the vaginal opening. The idea is that when someone is penetrated for the first time, the hymen breaks, which causes bleeding. But here’s the thing: the hymen stretches. And it doesn’t ordinarily cover the entire opening, so really, there’s no need to break the thing in order to have penetrative sex. So hanging our hats on blood-stained sheets for signs of our virginity, which is really just a social construct anyway? These were seriously troubled waters for women of the past, and even now. Doctor-conducted virginity tests have been around forever, and are still happening. These tests, which the UN has called a human rights violation, have been recently documented in at least 20 countries. The results can determine whether someone can marry or get a job, and even test if she’s a rape victim. Not only is this a violating and traumatizing test, but the results aren’t in any way reliable. And yet those results have serious consequences. In Afghanistan, where sex before marriage is considered a moral crime, hundreds of girls have been subjected to virginity tests and been jailed for failing them.
THE CURSE
It’s interesting that, in some instances, a person’s period has been considered a matter for public discussion and interpretation, when we’ve spent millenia finding ways to make menstruation shameful. The Bible certainly didn’t do those who menstruate any favors. In most of our major religions, we see the notion of menstruation being ritually unclean. In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Genesis, explains that Eve disobeyed God by eating a forbidden apple, so he cursed her with the pain of childbirth. Leviticus talks a bit about the pains of menstruation and all the activities that menstruating women must not do. Over time, these two stories got tangled up, so that menstruation became a curse as well. The Old Testament also says that a woman on her period is considered “unclean” for seven days, and that any man who lies with her in that time will be considered unclean too. One biblical passage says they should both be cut off from the community. Period shaming goes back a long way. Maybe that’s why women have traditionally had a tough time in some of our major religions becoming authority figures.
Misinformation has long been part of the problem. Period blood isn’t a body’s way of flushing out toxins; nothing about it is damaging. It’s not even blood, really, but a mixture of blood, mucus, bacteria and uterine tissue. Not a magical, damaging substance that can kill bugs and damage all it touches. And yet feelings of shame and perceptions of uncleanliness are still holding pretty strong.
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