Why is menstruation so dirty?

[IceBeing]

I got so much interesting information from my last thread I thought I would try again!

I mean I know the answer is 'the patriarchy' but....

why do I feel so repelled by all things menstrual? I am pretty sure I'm not alone...but while I would have no issue whatsoever with someone seeing a blood stain on my arm (from a cut or something) I would actually die from shame if anyone saw my menstrual blood.

How do I stop my DD from being infected with the idea that menstruation is dirty?

How do I cure myself?

I have managed to cure myself of the idea that armpit hair is dirty...and leg hair...but this seems an order of magnitude harder!

Rivetingrose Well done.

I agree it's personal rather than dirty or down right disgusting, Thanks for that Mum

I do not connect menstrual blood with dirty, it's just the womans room (womb) changing time, this is how I explained periods to my children (washing moon cup out with them in the bathroom, stuck to my skirts like limpets when they were small). The womans room changes the 'bedding' just like I change our bedding, they accepted this and have never been squeamish at the sight of period blood.

It's all about attitude.

I like my cycle, the time during my periods I enjoy the 'going inwards' that it brings, a time of peace and quiet.

DS1 is 4, and he was worried that I was hurt at first, and did object to me being in the bath with him with a string dangling (I think he felt it fell under the category of clothes somehow), but after a very simple explanation that I was fine, and that it was just something that happened to women sometimes, he shrugged and carried on with life.

He is a fairly un-curious child about most things though. DS2 will be more challenging, and I suspect baths will not be a good idea as he'd tug on it. DS1 already has to get pants on fast or DS2 chases him and tries to yank on his willy.

Er…because it stinks? And it's different to blood that comes from a scratched arm.

I don't think it's difficult to understand that many of these beliefs stem from times when personal hygiene was difficult to maintain and menstrual blood can smell pretty rank after a day or two, if you don't have the benefit of warm running water, soap, clean clothes daily and modern sanitary products, be that a tampon, a pad or a mooncup.

It isn't dirty per se, but it will make you feel dirty if you are not in a position to keep yourself as fresh and clean as you would like. Hundreds of years ago it would have been very obvious if you were menstruating and people would have been able to smell you at 10 paces after a day or two, not to mention see it, before we thought to make pads out of straw or wool or whatever absorbent material was to hand. I guess women must have just stayed home for a few days each month, sitting on a pile of straw or something.

I don't think it is particularly taboo, just private/personal, like taking a shit is also quite private and personal for most people. We don't announce to anyone but our nearest and dearest that we are having a period any more than we get up from our desk and announce to our colleagues that we are off for a shit, or offer them a close up look at the snot in our tissue or the earwax on the end of a cotton bud.

I don't understand why you feel we should be needing to 'de-stigmatise' it any more than we should be trying to de-stigmatise shit or snot. All of them are inevitable, none of them are especially pleasant.

Hundreds of years ago pretty much everybody and everywhere stunk to high heaven from what I've read (in the UK anyway), so not sure that's the reason. And people lived much closer together with little privacy so I'd think they'd be more not less relaxed about bodily functions.

I think what we have now are some very old ideas about menstruating and sin mixed up with modern standards of privacy and hygiene - a perfect storm of disgust.

The thing which shocked me was how horrified the world was by the Britney Spears up-skirt paparazzi photo which quite clearly showed she had leaked into her knickers.
Now, what woman has not done this? Are we are filthy cows? You'd think so from how vitriolic the comments were on her. I mean, it was a bit silly of her to wear a short skirt perhaps, but you'd have thought we had not moved on from baying crowds of 10th century villagers shouting 'unclean' and pointing at her.

Nothing has moved on. We pretend it has, but it hasn't.

Well that's just the paparazzi being intrusive nasty arseholes. It's nothing to do with menstruation specifically, they'd have done the same if she'd flashed some cellulite or had greasy hair or sweaty armpit marks on her t-shirt.

Hundreds of years ago it would have been very obvious if you were menstruating and people would have been able to smell you at 10 paces after a day or two, not to mention see it, before we thought to make pads out of straw or wool or whatever absorbent material was to hand. I guess women must have just stayed home for a few days each month, sitting on a pile of straw or something.

So.... hundreds of years ago, there was no soap and water and only menstruating women stank?

Goodness.

I don't think the 'hundreds of years ago it was obvious/people stank' thing stands up.

People used to make 'medical' potions with menstrual blood (and plenty of horrible things other than that). So their squeamishness was differently directed from ours. I don't mean they didn't find it disgusting, only that I don't think it can be explained away as a rational reaction to smell or sight.

Also, fairly sure soap is thousands of years old.

I know I've said it already up thread, but I'm really surprised that a couple of posters have said that their menstrual blood "stinks"
Mine doesn't, and surely if it does, that's a sign of infection? Not normal.

It seems to me that if cleaning up a period was so impossible, then poo must have been a problem too, so certainly everyone must have stunk.

Alternatively, I'm sure that as soon as rags were available, women would have been using them to absorb flow, and would have been no dirtier than any other person of the time. Just like now.

Soap is thousands of years old but general access to suitable washing facilities is not. Pretty sure that in some periods of our hitory (Elizabethian times?) washing your body was considered to be detrimental to health and dirt good. Plus, for the rich, many fabrics weren't very washable so only your linens got washed. Add to that the fact that the slops all got tipped into the gutter and I really don't think menstruating women would have been detectable at all.

I didn't say that at all, did I? I said 'if you don't have the benefit of warm running water, soap, clean clothes daily and modern sanitary products'. Which is hardly the same as saying that no-one had any water or soap at all.^ It was just harder to come by and therefore more labour intensive to bathe and wash your undergarments.

And I agree everyone would have smelled compared to today, but menstrual blood is much more difficult to control than other types of 'dirt.' At least if you need to empty your bowels you get some warning, you can hold it in if you need to and then you can go off, do it, wipe yourself, come back. Menstrual blood is constant and it's not possible to contain it using your muscles. Even if you had access to hot water and soap every day you'd still have new blood running down your legs every ten minutes. I don't know at what point the first women started utilising some sort of absorbent materials to stem the flow, but given that even modern products are not always capable of totally preventing leakage, I can't imagine they were terribly effective.

Btw, this is by a bloke, but good and interesting: www.gregjenner.com/a-brief-history-of-menstruation/

This is an interesting whiz through the history of sanpro.

Sorry, back, didn't mean to offend you - I was just commenting about the soap thing. I do think it would have been harder to wash.

But, I don't think menstrual blood really is that much dirtier. I'm sure women have been using pads of some kind for thousands of years (and the link I posted suggests so too).

Interestingly (well, it is to me), there's an anecdote in Peggy McCracken's book ('The Curse of Eve'), where she talks about a twelfth-century story of a woman whose lover climbs in through her window, cuts his hands on the window bars, and leaves blood on her bedsheets, which immediately makes everyone accuse the woman of adultery. The woman says no, the blood isn't from wounded man in her bed, it's from a nosebleed. McCracken points out that her students always ask her why on earth the woman didn't just say 'oh, I have my period'.

We can't know the answer, but it occurs to me that surely, if periods were that messy, blood on a woman's bedsheets wouldn't be remotely noteworthy?

"I don't know at what point the first woman started utilising some sort of absorbent materials to stem the flow"
Bloody early on I would imagine!

I've read that Egyptian women way back when used the pith from papyrus stems to absorb menstrual flow. Tribal women in some tundra areas used moss/lichens 100 years ago, so have probably being doing so for thousands.

There is a difference between blood from a cut and menstrual 'blood'. Not that menstruation itself is 'dirty' - it's just a fact of life - but the bodily fluids are different. Menstrual blood isn't really blood. It's a mixture of a small amount of blood, cervical mucus, vaginal secretions and lots of endometrial tissue.

I'd lick the blood off my cut finger but no way I'd put menstrual discharge in my mouth. It's not just blood.

I think this is the only discussion in which it would possibly be relevant to disclose that I like the smell of my menstrual blood. A nice mix of iron-y blood and spicy cunt smell, plus something sweet- maybe blood sugar? .

As Germaine Greer famously said: "No woman is truly liberated until she has tasted her own menstrual blood on the penis of her lover" (or, has tasted her own lover's menstrual blood I suppose). By that standard I'm not liberated either though...

I am frequently surprised by discussions on here that suggest that women are all at sea without access to modern sanpro- I used to live in a commune in the mountains of Italy, and we simply made our own towels out of folded rag, and re used them- it was perfectly fine. However, that did rely on having pants to put them in I suppose- I'm no advocate of free bleeding, it sounds highly uncomfortable!

I did read once that impoverished mill workers in the N. of England used to just free bleed, although thinking about it that sounds massively inconvenient- you'd just have to spend more time washing your shift/ petticoat, which would have soaked up most of the flow....

It's quite common to get menstrual blood in the mouth during cunnilingus I expect. Not unclean and has never killed anyone as far as I know.

^that was to lovereading

Gosh, Germaine Greer has a talent for making both sex and feminism resolutely unappealing.

I think it's just the unusualness of seeing menstrual blood.

How many of us have ever seen another woman's?