A Quiet Celebration of the Horny Menstruator

Guest Post by Lauren Rosewarne

Courtney Cox shocked America in 1985 when she became the first person to say “period” on TV. Period, at least, in the context of menstruation and not punctuation.

 

Tampax, 1985-style

 

Flash forward a couple of decades and this year the same daring word (along with a couple of other doozies) ruffled a few feathers in a Carefree ad. At least it did initially. The furore quickly dissipated and the ad now runs regularly, uneventfully, in Australia. We’ve seemingly learnt how to cope without the conniptions.

 

“That bit of discharge” ad, 2012

 

I daresay it’s the ingratiating of the Carefree ad – with its references to the bits of ladyhood ironically considered least feminine – into our landscape that’s paved the way for another revolutionary down-there-business ad going undetected. Undetected and surprisingly, unwhinged about.

 

Libra “Bootcamp” ad, 2012

 

The new Libra ad dares use the P-word again – sure, itself a euphemism but a) “menstruation” is probably too many syllables for a short ad and b) I’d still rather hear period than any other sanitised circumlocution.

The truly startling bit about the ad however, is the way female sexuality is presented.

For most of last year I was living and breathing menstruation while writing a book on it. My focus was on media presentations and sex n’ blood got treated to a whole chapter.

While there are signs that our culture has become more menstrually mature – we’ve evidently learnt not to dial 000 when discharge is mentioned on TV for example – some menstrual taboos remain. Menstrual sex is a biggie.

On one hand thinking of the menstruator as sexy seems outlandish in the context of film and television. A couple of wonderful Californication scenes aside, periods on screen invariably and inevitably disrupt sex lives and give women – and men – an excuse to restrict it to spoonin’.

On the other hand, feminine hygiene ads are in fact full of attractive ladies peddling products to help menstruators stay sexy all month long. In advertising, the idea of the bleeding woman as outwardly desirable is effortlessly detected.

A much more shocking – and far more insteresting – construct however, is the idea of the menstruator herself feeling sexy. By sexy here, I’m not referring to the way others see her – to her objectification – rather, to her being in touch with her own horniness at a time when women often feel – biologically or because society has coerced it – dirty and out-of-action.

“It’s like a crime scene in my pants” – No Strings Attached (2011)

 

The Libra ad involves a woman who, while initially reluctant because of her period, eventually joins her friend to perve on male boot campers.

Lecherous ladies in advertising are nothing new of course; Diet Coke has long been flogged with some mildly hideous Sex and the City-style male sexualisation:

Diet Coke, 90s style

 

Diet Coke, 00s style

 

My concept of feminism doesn’t deem women panting over men as something inherently progressive. It’s not the ogling in the Libra ad however, that interests me. Rather, it’s the act of ogling for the purposes of arousal while the woman has her period.

I can’t help but be charmed by TV offering us a horny menstruator.

While a niche genre, menstrual-themed porn – here, I refer to the indie material, rather than, say, the buckets-o’-blood-fetish stuff – hints to the idea that some women are, shock horror, actually randier during their periods. Mainstream pop culture and vanilla porn however, routinely give the idea a wide berth. As in No Strings Attached (2011), menstruation is apparently a time when a bloke is just not gonna get a look in.

Just as I’m delighted when I see a woman on TV who deviates from the young/thin/white archetype that pop culture so adores, equally happy am I to see an example of female sexuality presented as a little more complex – and a tad more messier – than what’s normally on offer.

A small win, but I’ll take it.

Republished with permission from The Conversation

Help Trixie Films Go All the Way

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7190594&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

All the way to $10,000, that is. Work on the new production from Trixie Films, How to Lose Your Virginity, is nearly complete. This film promises to be an innovative exploration of the American obsession with virginity and an outstanding classroom teaching tool:

It’s a quest to dig beneath the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t double-speak of a culture that cynically encourages both virginity and promiscuity. How can young women wade through these mixed messages–like a reality show that auctions off virgins to the highest bidder or Disney starlets flashing purity rings while writhing on stripper poles–and act instead on their own needs and desires? What’s behind this strange moment in American culture?

The road to understanding our obsession with virginity takes me to places I never thought I’d go–from the set of a Barely Legal porn movie shoot in the San Fernando Valley to a Love & Fidelity Abstinence Conference at Harvard to the fitting rooms of David’s Bridal.

Can you help?  Independent women’s media needs support, and lots of small contributions add up to a big total. Visit the film’s fundraising page, and give what you can. Thanks to kickstarter.com, almost $5000 has been raised. But there are only 23 days left to reach the $10,000 goal or they’ll get none of it (which is how Kickstarter works).

Be part of the next edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves

Our Bodies, Ourselves is seeking up to two dozen women to participate in an online discussion on sexual relationships.

Stories and comments may be used anonymously in the next edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which will be published in 2011 by Simon & Schuster.

We are seeking the experience and wisdom of heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans women. Perspectives from single women are encouraged, and you may define relationship as it applies to you, from monogamy to multiple partners. We are committed to including women of color, women with disabilities, and women of many ages and backgrounds.

In the words of the brilliant anthology “Yes Means Yes,” how can we consistently engage in more positive experiences? What issues deserve more attention? And how do we address social inequities and violence against women? These are some of the guiding questions that will help us to update the relationships section in “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

The conversation will start Sunday, Feb. 14 (yes, Valentine’s Day) and stay open through Friday, March 12.

Participants will be invited to answer relevant questions (see sample below) and build on the responses of other participants. We’ll use a private Google site to post questions and responses.

Personal stories and reflections are welcomed, along with updated research and media resources. While we hope to use some of the stories and experiences in the book, names will not be published.

We hope the open process* will spark robust discussion. We expect new questions to arise that challenge us to re-work this section even more.

If you would like to participate in this conversation, please e-mail OBOS editorial team member Wendy Sanford: wsanford@bwhbc.org

In your email, please tell us about yourself and what you would bring to the conversation. We need to hear from you by Feb. 5 Feb. 3 and will let you know soon thereafter about participation. Thanks for considering this!

*We have thought a great deal about privacy. If you want to share a story or information, but do not want to participate in the private Google site discussion, please indicate that in your email. We may send you questions that you can answer on your own.

* * * * * *
Sample Questions
Participants can suggest other questions

How do you define — and express — intimacy?

What are you looking for in a relationship? What kind of relationship do you seek at this time in your life — monogamous, non-monogamous, long-term, short-term, one partner or more than one? How is this related to being a woman or to your gender or sexual identity in the society(ies) and culture(s) to which you belong?

What do you enjoy most about being sexual?

What are your experiences in a relationship that spans differences such as class, race, age, physical or mental ability, chronic illness, other?

How does it affect your relationships when you are with someone whom the world gives more or less power than you have — because of race, income, gender or disability?

What role has love played or not played in your relationships?

Describe a time when you realized that despite the romantic images you may have grown up with, a relationship you intended to stay in over time was going to be work.

What are some obstacles that can get in the way of our relationships? What images or stereotypes in popular culture add to the difficulties?

What helps? What books or other resources do you trust to speak honestly about relationships?

What is it like to be in a relationship with a man/with a woman when you don’t like some or all of your own body?

How have specific acts of sexual violence against you, or general societal/cultural acceptance of violence against women or LGBT people, affected your intimate sexual relationships?

If you have been in intimate sexual relationships with both women and men, are there special dynamics and challenges that you have noticed in each?

If you have experience with online dating networks, what would you want someone to know who was just starting to explore that venue? What are the safety issues?

[Re-posted from Our Bodies, Our Blog]

Period Sex is a Bloody Good Time (says college newspapers)

Back in November, we commended a bold student columnist for taking on menstrual sex in the student paper at Chico State University. In yesterday’s edition of The Faster Times, columnist Veronica Mittnacht advises a reader about how to broach the subject of period sex in a casual relationship, and works to normalize menstruation – even heavy flow.

Fortunately, most men, even if they don’t really like it [menstruation], know enough to pretend not to mind, because, after all, most women do it, and there’s not much men can do about it.  And for your purposes, for now, pretending is enough. There’s still the occasional guy who can’t handle blood, but the bell curve compensates by giving us the occasional fetishist or enthusiast to make up for it.

Sex and the Univer-sity

The trend of sex columns in student newspapers is no longer new (although the student newspaper at the school where I teach lacks one): the first sex column in a student newspaper was published in 1997, at (where else?) University of California-Berkeley. The phenomenon and the controversy surrounding the new trend in college journalism were covered in the fall 2002 with splashy stories in both USA Today and The New York Times.

More recently, The Nation published an essay about the politics or lack thereof in college newspaper sex writing. Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, the writers and editors at most college newspapers do not consider writing openly and honestly about sex/sexuality a political act.

Reimold told me that for 90 percent of sex columnists, the only “political” point they are trying to make is that sex is OK and something we should talk about. Bess Davis of “Bess Sex” agrees that “sex really has nothing to do with politics…that’s just an impression built up by the media,” and views her column as serving a purpose in opening up discussion in an underreported subject.

[. . . .]

Politics are part of the equation, yet it’s not an issue of a simple left-right political divide–liberal media beyond the campus level have done comparatively little quality sex journalism, while even the comprehensive sex education courses the right wing loves to hate are rarely particularly progressive, sex-positive or comprehensive. Reimold conceptualizes the resistance to student sex columns as an authoritarian and protective parental mindset that reacts against “the student generation taking back control of the sexual messages targeted at them.” This rings partially true; after all, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the ’60s was also about student activism versus the control of the administration and older generation. But–again, as in the ’60s–antagonism stems from fellow students as well.

At its core, the sex column phenomenon is a radical progressive movement in the sense of pushing against traditional silence and the status quo, which is a source of concern for many administrators, parents and even students.

In other words, it really is political. Certainly it’s political in the Foucauldian sense of power relations: “What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.” In other words, we like to pretend sex is a big secret that we shouldn’t talk about, but in reality, we can’t stop talking about. We use bodies and sexual relationships to sell any number of products but at the same time we delay as long as possible teaching our children about sexuality and sexual relationships. We deny that there are power relations embedded in our sexualities and sexual relationships. I always publish this quote from History of Sexuality v.1 on the front page of the syllabus of my ‘Sex, Sexuality, and Communication’ course:

Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? What are the links between these discourses, these effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by them? What knowledge was formed as a result of this linkage?

When college students write newspaper columns about sex and sexuality, they frequently are challenging power structures about sexuality. Often these challenges are material as well as discursive, as student editors face censorship challenges from within and without the university. They are, at least implicitly, investigating what has been said about sexuality and in bringing it out of the bedroom, showing some of the linkages of power, pleasure, discourse, and their effects.

All of which is long-winded background for expressing my own pleasure in discovering  yesterday’s sex column by Jeanetta Bradley in The Orion at Chico State. It was all about sex during menstruation: Bradley explains that it’s not harmful or unsanitary, and in fact can be beneficial and pleasurable.

None of that is news to us at re: Cycling, but how surprising to see it in a college newspaper, written by someone who appears to be half my age. Bradley is breaking taboos in talking about menstruation, about sex, and about menstrual sex.

And that is a political act.