What does it really mean to be #LikeAGirl?

As published June 2014, Marie Claire, US edition

Always™ and its corporate owner, Procter & Gamble, have been receiving a lot of praise around the interwebs these days for their #LikeAGirl campaign, launched June 26, 2014, with a video produced by Lauren Greenfield. The video has been viewed 37 million times and counting. Last week, HuffPo actually called it “a game changer in feminist movement”, which I suppose reveals how little Huffington Post knows about feminist movements, more than anything else.

But before you applaud the efforts of Always to raise girls’ self-esteem, remember that they’re also the people who bring you these ads. Because that stench of girl never goes away, and you can’t spend all day in the shower, use Always.

Where have all the menstruators gone?

Guest Post by Lauren Rosewarne, University of Melbourne

Exploring missing menstruation on screen

Periods are depicted far more often on screen than I could have ever imagined; perhaps the biggest surprise I got from spending a year researching the topic.

Less surprising however, was that most presentations depict menstruation as the messy, embarrassing, sex-interrupting, mood-swing-inducing week-long hell ride that women have grown to expect from Hollywood.

While 200 scenes were many more than I expected, given that nearly all women will menstruate monthly for some thirty-odd years, 200 scenes actually isn’t all that many.

While most of Periods in Pop Culture focuses on what those scenes themselves reveal about society’s fraught relationship with periods, one chapter in fact explores the why so few portrayals. Given how very common and normal it is, why is the topic so frequently eschewed?

I proposed a handful of reasons including Hollywood’s aversion to telling female stories, narrative distraction, and the show don’t tell nature of the screen. In this post I offer  two other explanations: menstruation as a non-event and political correctness.

As one of the millions of girls who got an (albeit long outdated) menstrual education from Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?, I learnt that some girls apparently eagerly await their first period kinda like Christmas. I wasn’t like Margaret. I didn’t pine for it, and when I got it I didn’t look down at my underpants and throw my head back in delight like Debbie (Nell Schofield) in the Australian film Puberty Blues (1981): for me it was a non-event.

The non-event nature of menstruation appears a central explanation for its absence.

In an episode of sitcom The Golden Girls (1985–1992), Sophia (Estelle Getty) reflected on her periods: “I got it, no one told me. I didn’t get it, no one told me. I figured, this is life, and went back to my meatballs.” In this scene, Sophia reflects that many women don’t see any overwhelmingly need to talk about menstruation or complain about it or even to honor it, but that it is simply something that needs to be gotten on with.

Aside from those times when pregnancy is feared or desired, there are few occasions when menstruation is experienced as particularly memorable or gets bestowed with any great significance. I think this fact significantly underpins its absence on screen.

Thinking of menstruation as somehow naturally insignificant or uninteresting however, would be premature. In the film To Sir With Love (1967), there is a scene where teacher Mark Thackeray (Sidney Poitier) reprimanded girls who he believed burnt a menstrual product in his classroom: “A decent woman keeps things private. Only a filthy slut would have done this!”  Here, Thackeray refers to the most important rule of menstruation: concealment. On screen, if audiences see menstruation or if a character identifies as bleeding, she has neglected her most important gender burden. By infrequently portraying menstruation, the secrecy imperative is upheld. When women downplay the significant of their periods, when they believe their periods are uninteresting, internalized sexism is highlighted.

Another explanation for missing menstruation is so-called political correctness; that avoiding it reflects the contemporary dictums of liberal feminism: shunning topics which play up differences between men and women.

Given that menstruation is so common and that so many taboos exist surround it, it might be assumed that including it in narratives would be a feminist act. The flipside of this however, is that doing so might do gender equality a disservice; that presenting it reminds audiences of biological inequalities between men and women.

In a scene from the series Californication (2007-), Hank (David Duchovny) is about to have sex with his daughter’s teacher Mrs. Patterson (Justine Bateman). As they undress, Mrs. Patterson says, “Just so you know, I’m on my period.” Mrs. Patterson didn’t – and likely in our culture couldn’t — automatically assume that Hank would be fine and thus gave him an exit strategy. By mentioning menstruation in a sex scene, it existed as a glaring biological power imbalance; that an opportunity was offered for Hank to reject her on the basis of her biology.

By excluding menstruation, a female character can be interpreted as having the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with her male counterpart; that she can be as sexually aggressive as she likes and not have to query whether her partner is bothered by her period. In turn, she doesn’t get limited by her biology.

Predictably, there are some serious limitations to this argument. On screen and off, women’s biology is ever present. Eliminating reference to menstruation certainly doesn’t make female characters any less female; in fact, disproportionate inclusion of, and focus on women who are stereotypically feminine demonstrates that biological differences between men are women continue to be crucially important on screen.

Over 200 scenes of menstruation did indeed surprise me, although admittedly it’s quite a bit sad that it did. Given how common menstruation is, given that the good majority of women cope each month without drama, fanfare or hijinks, one might expect that more presentations – notably more normal presentations – would redden our screens.

 

Dr Lauren Rosewarne is a political scientist based at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of four books; her newest, Periods in Pop Culture: Menstruation in Film and Television, will soon be published by Lexington Books.

Menstrual Moments in Modelland

Guest Post by Jaime Hough

 

Tyra Banks wrote a young adult fantsy novel. And it’s a NYT bestseller. The book, titled Modelland, is about the journey of one awkward-looking girl who is whisked away to a magical boarding school which trains girls to become supermodels with superpowers, known as Intoxibellas. It’s kind of like Harry Potter, if Harry Potter revolved around modeling and was a battle between conventional and unconventional beauty rather than good and evil.

But I’m probably making it sound bad and it’s not, really. Modelland is the story of Tookie de la Crème,¹ a girl unnoticed by her classmates and mostly ignored by her family, whose life is turned upside down when she is recruited for Modelland. The reader follows Tookie to and through her first year at Modelland as she, along dozens of other girls, trains for the chance to become one of seven Intoxibellas, supermodels with superpowers, in her graduating class. At Modelland Tookie makes her first real friends while becoming embroiled in a mystery involving the school’s headmistress, known as the BellaDonna, and the world’s mysteriously missing foremost supermodel, Ci~L.²

I read Modelland because I was curious and because I have long been fascinated by the public persona of Tyra Banks. What can I say? We all have our guilty pleasures. Most of Modelland is, for the most part, what you would expect, especially if you’re familiar with Tyra’s moneymaker, America’s Next Top Model. However, I was completely surprised by the fact that Banks chose to use menstruation as a key plot device to develop Tookie’s character. Below are excerpts from the book dealing with menstruation and my brief analysis of how these menstrual moments [MMs] function in the novel and could potentially function for the intended reader.

 

MM1: Not Yet A Woman

Menstrual Moment One comes near the beginning of the book when Tookie has just come home from her day at school and the readers are being introduced to her dysfunctional family. In particular, we’ve just met Tookie’s younger, dumb blonde little sister, Myrracle.

“Don’t laugh at me!” Myrracle said, frustrated. “I’m on my periodical right now! It makes me forgetful!”

“It’s period, not periodical!” Tookie growled.

Myrracle smirked. “How do you know? You haven’t even gotten yours yet!”

Tookie turned away, her face flooded with heat. Myrracle never resisted the urge to reminder her that she had gotten her period already, even though she was two years younger.³

 

MM2: Menarche

In Menstrual Moment Two Tookie has just spent her first night at Modelland and is about to start her first day of classes. We follow her as she prepares for class.

 

Disoriented, Tookie stumbled into the large, sterile-looking community bathroom. As she did, a dull pain shot through her legs, hips, and stomach. She doubled over, feeling as though she was about to vomit. Perfect, she though. I’m sick on the first day of school. . .All at once , every single girl in the bathroom doubled over in pain, gripping her stomach and back just as Tookie had. . .Tookie shut her eyes, wincing again with another pain. “Piper, my back and tummy are killing me!” she whispered.

Piper shrugged. “Join the club, Tookie. Every new Bella started menstruating at the exact same time this morning.”

“Wait. What?”

“You’ve never heard of menstrual synchrony, or the dormitory effect?” Piper asked. “Menstrual synchrony is a theory that suggest that the menstruation cycles of women who cohabitate-think army barracks, female penitentiaries, convents, and university dormitories—synchronize over time. It usually takes months for the alignment to occur but her at Modelland, it seems to have happened in twenty-four hours.”

“But I’ve never gotten my period before this,” Tookie whispered.

“Well, Tookie, looks like you’re a woman now,” Piper said.

Tookie was about to protest—there was no way she was any more womanly today than she had been the day before—but all of a sudden, she felt that perhaps something in her had changed. Those abdominal pains made so much sense, after all. And that certainly made them more bearable—for once, she felt normal, like everyone else.⁴

 

 

MM3: Menopause, Modelland Style.

Menstrual Moment Three comes shortly after MM2 when, after the first class, a statue of the school’s headmistress (who is seen in person only once a year) tells the girls that they will no longer have periods.

 

The BellaDonna continued. “This cycle you had this morning will be the last period you will ever have . . . for the rest of your lives!”

There was silence. Turned heads. Questioning looks.

“We want no excuses for you missing class or shoots or shows, so Modelland is ridding you of the pain and suffering of your menstrual cycles and cramps forever,” the BellaDonna masthead explained. “You will each have the ability to procreate as you reach adulthood but no more periods. Period.”

The Guru beamed at them. “Isn’t that grandissimo?”

Almost everyone cheered, although Chaste looked strangely forlorn and confused, clamping her mouth shut and biting her bottom lip nervously. And Tookie felt another kind of cramp in her stomach . . . one of loss and regret. I finally reached womanhood, she thought. I finally got something that Myrracle has teased me about so much. And now it’s gone.”⁵

 

 

None of the ideas presented in the text about menstruation are new, but they are interesting. First and foremost, it’s interesting that Banks chose to include menstruation at all, let alone make it so integral to Tookie’s character development.  Because Tookie’s thoughts and feelings about menstruation revolve around ideas of belonging and normalcy her journey from menarche to Modelland-menopause works within the narrative as a journey from not belonging anywhere to belonging in Modelland.

 

In MM1 Tookie’s lack of menstruation indicates to the reader that even amongst her family Tookie is second place. All the attention goes to the younger Myrracle who has already joined the ranks of “women” through her “periodical.”

 

In MM2 Tookie receives her period to the Modelland’s souped-up menstrual synchrony. A run down of the basics of menstrual synchrony may seem a little odd (it practically gave me whiplash when I first read the novel) but this moment between Tookie and her friend Piper serves as Tookie’s initiation into womanhood, complete with a trite “You’re a woman now.” However, not only is this Tookie’s menarchal moment, she also learns something about socio-biological theories of menstruation. We often presume that this type of moment and type of knowledge is shared between mothers and daughters at home. However, it is clear from MM1, and other portions of the book dealing with Tookie’s family, that this type of moment is not available for her at home or at her previous school. The fact that this longed-for initiation into womanhood takes place between Tookie and Piper at Modelland subtly cues the reader that Modelland is Tookie’s new home and her friends are her new family.

 

This theme of community based around menstruation is carried into MM3 when the BellaDonna magically eliminates all future periods for the freshmen class. While Tookie is unsure how she feels about her new “normalcy” being taken away this moment actually establishes a different type of community between the students at Modelland. They are no longer healthy, menstruating young women. Now they are possible future models. The implications of the last two sentence are terrifying and I wonder if Banks, who advocates for being comfortable in one’s own skin throughout the rest of the novel fully realizes what she did in that passage.

 

For all the work menstruation does in Tookie’s character development in the early part of the novel, it certainly gets a bad rap. Menstruation is associated first with forgetfulness, then with pain akin to sickness, and finally as a bad excuse for unacceptable behavior, such as being tardy. In addition, the cheering of the young girls who have just been told they will never again have a period suggests that, for most girls, the period was an unwelcome part of their lives; at the least it was a nuisance, at the most it was a painful burden.

 

Of course, none of this is new or particularly original. Menstruation is often viewed as burdensome, involving pain and negative side effects such as forgetfulness or mood swings. Banks is simply recycling common menstrual tropes of U.S. popular culture. Tookie’s ambivalence about menstruation mirrors the ambivalence many women feel in relation to their periods. A girl or woman who does not menstruate is lacking, and somehow diminished. However, that which bestows womanhood, menstruation, is also that which diminishes the abilities and personhood of the woman by making her forgetful, late, or weakened by pain. This is the condition of the feminine in a patriarchy; that which makes us female defines us by diminishing us and few things are considered more feminine than menstruation.

 

For my part, I remain ambivalent about my relationship to Modelland, especially its menstrual moments. Part of me is simply grateful that Banks brought menstruation to the table. This is, believe it or not, a New York Times best-selling novel. Thousands of girls are reading this and I sincerely hope it is causing them to think about their own relationship to their periods and perhaps have discussions about menstruation they may not have had otherwise. However, part of me is frustrated by Banks’ clumsy handling of menstruation. One notable example is the utter lack of discussion of how the models-in-training deal with their periods. Do they use tampons? Diva cups? Pads? This error seems especially glaring in light of the fact that there is a discussion, sentences earlier, of what toiletries are magically provided for the girls all of whom have been whisked away to Modelland without time to pack. More importantly, why do the figures of authority in Modelland repudiate any use value or worth to menstruation aside from its role in the reproductive cycle?

 

What do you think of Banks’ incorporation of menstruation in Modelland? How does it stack up against other young adult novels that portray menarche and menstrual issues? Leave a note in the comments section!

 

1. This is, honestly, the character’s given name.
2. Also the character’s given name.
3. Tyra Banks, Modelland (New York: Delacorte Press, 2011), Kindle edition, 701.
4. Tyra Banks, Modelland (New York: Delacorte Press, 2011), Kindle edition, 2872-2881, 2901-2116.
5. Tyra Banks, Modelland (New York: Delacorte Press, 2011), Kindle edition, 3055-3067.

 

Jaime Hough recently completed an MA in communication with a graduate minor in Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has been a member of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research since 2009.

“It means there’s blood flowing out of my uterus!”

httpv://youtu.be/FTEOpEGvcKA

So says 15-year-old Judy to her boyfriend Johnny on the occasion of her first period, in this vintage film about menstruation, Linda’s Film About Menstruation. This 18-minute treasure was produced in 1974 by the Creative Artists Public Service Program of the New York State Council of the Arts (CAPS), a program that ran from 1970 to 1981.

Would that cities and states still had arts budgets for these kinds of projects!

Golly! Molly is growing up.

Preparing for class discussions this week about sex education policy in the U.S. found me flipping through the Prelinger Archives, where I found this gem: Molly Grows Up. It’s a menstrual education film apparently intended for girls in about the sixth grade, made in 1953. Along with a basic explanation of the physiology of menstruation and puberty, the school nurse assures the girls that no one can tell when they are menstruating. But then she offers them this advice visible in this screen shot — and recommends the girls wear their best dresses and take extra care with “hygiene”.

You can view the film here.

Menstrual Cups for African Girls

Rhoune Ochako, a research officer at APHRC, explains how the cup works in this photo from the APHRC web site.

At re:Cycling, we’re interested in all kinds of menstruation and women’s health issues, all over the world. We have written several times about the need for menstrual pads for girls and women in developing nations, like the Kasissi Project Girls Program producing M.A.K.A. pads in Uganda and Sustainable Health Enterprises making pads from banana trees for women in Rwanda, and LunaPads’ Pads4Girls program, which collects and donates reusable pads to girls in several African nations as well as Mexico and South America. We’ve also suggested that cramps and menstrual pain may cause girls to miss school as much as lack of menstrual supplies.

So it was with great interest that we read about a new pilot program of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) that will distribute menstrual cups to girls in Nairobi.

Women and girls in Korogocho slums have been identified who will use the cup for up to four months, after which they will be interviewed about their experiences,” explained Rhoune Ochako, a research officer at APHRC.

The study will also assess acceptability of the cup, as many girls were intimidated to use the cup. A teacher at Our Lady of Fatima Secondary school initially queried 400 students, of whom only three were willing to participate in the study.

Celestine Awino [age 17] is among girls who agreed to participate in the project that started about a year and a half ago and has been using the cup since then. “At first I was afraid. I waited until a friend used it, then I tried. I have now been using it for over ten months,” she says.

Awino says she is able to engage in school activities during her periods while wearing the cup. “I take part in sports, cleaning and learning activities without any problem. It is better than missing school because one lacks sanitary pads,” she says.

Given the economic and environmental advantages of menstrual cups (not to mention their reliability), this experiment has great potential to make a big difference.

New “Protectasil” Vaccine

Brought to you by Smerck.

Painful Periods as Predictor of Endometriosis?

A cross-sectional study published in the November, 2010, issue of Fertility and Sterility reports that very painful menstrual periods during the teen years (that is, period pain so severe that girls miss school) may be predictive of an increased risk of developing deep infiltrating endometriosis (DIE), the most extensive form of endometriosis.

In a study of 229 women undergoing surgery for endometriosis, French researchers found that those with the most extensive form — known as deep infiltrating endometriosis (DIE) — were more likely to have had particularly painful periods as teenagers.

As a group, they were four times as likely as women with non-DIE endometriosis to have used birth control pills to treat severe menstrual pain before the age of 18. And they were 70 percent more likely to say they’d missed school days because of menstrual symptoms.

Although these findings may help women receive a diagnosis of endometriosis sooner,* it is unclear whether progression to DIE (what an unfortunate acronym!) can be prevented. And there is no real cure for endometriosis.

*As we reported previously in writing about Kate Seear’s research about the diagnostic delay in treating endometriosis, the delay is non-trivial: research estimates an average delay of 8 years in the UK and 11 years in the US.