The Middle Ages scientific authority Pliny the Elder wrote 2,000 years ago that hailstorms, whirlwinds and lightning could be “scared away” by a woman “uncovering her body while her monthly courses are upon her.”
In the 1800s, a renowned Harvard professor, Edward H. Clark, said college was too taxing for women when they were menstruating because gravity would pull too much blood from their brains.
Although some parts of the world revere menstruation, ripples of this stigmatizing language historically associated with periods have persisted into the 21st century. As a result, today, periods are shrouded in taboos, and people who menstruate are sometimes even hesitant to talk about it with their doctors. That has serious implications for health and gender equity.
However, some of these taboos have started to unravel in the past decade, says Alma Gottlieb, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of “Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation.”
“The feminist movement is challenging all sorts of taboos and the so-called menstrual taboo has been one of the last ones to be challenged,” Gottlieb told Salon in a phone interview. “There is now a global movement for what some people are calling menstrual rights, and it hasn’t yet taken hold at the popular level the way the #MeToo movement has, but it’s inching in that direction.”
In recent history, menstruation has gone by one of hundreds of stigmatizing euphemisms, including menstruators being “on the rag” or “in season.” Others call menstruation “the curse,” which can be traced back to the Biblical books of Genesis and Leviticus, in which menstruation and childbirth are depicted as the divine “curse” bestowed upon Eve, Gottlieb said.
“Christians liberally took parts from the Hebrew Bible in crafting what became the New Testament, and after that, Muslims also took liberally from the Hebrew Bible in crafting what became the Quran,” Gottlieb said. “These three religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — collectively account for a good portion of the world’s population, but even for people who don’t consider themselves Jews, Muslims or Christians, the impact of this ideology has really been global because of colonial expansion and accompanying missionary activity.”
In some corners of the world, periods are celebrated, says Kate Clancy, a biological anthropologist and author of “Period.” Certain ancient cultures saw menstrual blood as a gift from the gods. With etymological roots in the Latin word “mensis” (month) and the Greek word “mene” (moon), menstrual cycles were (and still are, to some) seen as a divine connection to the lunar cycle.
Today, in Ghana, family members bring gifts to menstruating young girls, who await them under ceremonial umbrellas. For the Beng, a group in the Ivory Coast, menstrual blood among humans is compared to a plant producing a flower: a sign of fertility that is nothing to be embarrassed about.
“In plenty of instances, menstruation was seen as sacred or as or as coinciding with a time of rest,” Clancy told Salon in a phone interview. “Or it was something that was a sign of a type of power that should be concentrated, and caring for the menstruating person was a way of caring for the entire community.”
That’s not the case in much of the U.S. Twenty-one U.S. states still charge additional sales tax on period products like pads, tampons and menstrual cups by classifying them as luxury items, whereas “essential” products like contact lenses and over-the-counter medications are sold tax-free. Where period products are sold, they’re usually marketed to be as discreet as possible, indicating periods are something that should be hidden away and not talked about.
Period taboo is detrimental to health. In one 2018 survey, nearly 80% of young girls who responded reported not talking to adults about period problems because they felt like it was something that should be kept under wraps. It even influences doctors: In one 2020 survey of pediatricians published in the International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health, fewer than half of respondents knew when the first period typically occurs and one-third didn’t discuss periods with teens who had already started theirs.
In a 2022 study published in Women’s Reproductive Health, adults surveyed reported feeling misunderstood when sharing concerns about their menstrual cycle. As a result, they were reluctant to go to health facilities, said study author Renske Mirjam van Lonkhuijzen, a menstruation researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
“[Historically,] living in a male-dominated society made it something private for women not to talk about and which men didn’t want to know about,” van Lonkhuijzen told Salon in a video call. “I think we’re still dealing with the consequences of that.”
This taboo is part of the reason why women wait six years, on average, to be diagnosed with certain conditions like endometriosis — because it’s still unclear what “normal” menstruation looks like and when to seek help.
“If people don’t talk to each other about how much they bleed, they don’t know if their experience is normal or abnormal,” Clancey said.
Menstruation cycles vary from person to person, but the average menstruating person will have about 500 of them throughout their lifetime. It’s already a full plate to handle physical menstrual symptoms, the economic burden of paying for products and the stressors associated with having “abnormal” periods. The energy it takes to conceal menstruation on top of that is excessive for a lot of people who could be putting that energy elsewhere, van Lonkhuijzen said.
“Women in our study went to great lengths to conceal their menstruation because discovery would lead to stigmatization,” van Lonkhuijzen said. “I talked to women about menstruation and the stigma surrounding it, and it was during those interviews women realized how big the stigma was but also how much energy they were putting in to not only manage their menstruation but also conceal it from others.”
People who are menstruating are often operating in settings that weren’t designed for it, which creates a sense of “otherness” that also contributes to stigma. While menstrual symptoms can be debilitating in their own right, a lack of support during menstruation can also be detrimental to careers, physical health and mental health. Some have recently argued the case for “menstrual leave," where workplaces offer accommodations for people menstruating. The idea is to provide additional time to rest or seek healthcare for people who menstruate to improve overall reproductive health.
“People do less physical activity, they go to the gym less and they go out less because our fast-paced life was not set up to accommodate things like menstruation, lactation and disabilities,” Clancey said.
For transgender men and intersex or nonbinary people, who may menstruate but not identify as women, these issues are often compounded by health disparities that make it difficult for them to access products, muddied by exclusive language that overlooks their unique experiences. Part of the menstrual equity movement is focused on ensuring people in prison and people who are experiencing homelessness have access to period products just as easily.
Gynecology, in general, is rooted in a racist history in which white men performed operations on unanesthetized Black women. Then, they took credit for “discoveries” about the female body that midwives caring for women had already been practicing for decades, if not longer.
Research for conditions that primarily affect women receives only a portion of the funding allotted to research for other conditions, which manifests into health disparities, especially for people of color, who have historically been excluded from such research.
Examples include endometriosis, which impacts 10% of women and requires invasive surgery to diagnose because it is still not completely understood. Bacterial vaginosis, in which bacteria in the vagina get thrown out of whack, affects 25% of women. However, the standard treatment of antibiotics doesn’t work for the majority of people, and few further treatment options leave women with pain and discomfort that can last for years.
Historically, many medications were designed for males without taking into account differences in the female body — like menstruation — that could change how they affect the body. One 2020 study in the Biology of Sex Differences looking at how 86 common drugs affected men versus women found women were often being overmedicated and were twice as likely as men to suffer adverse side effects from prescription drugs like antidepressants or cardiovascular medications.
Products used to control periods and keep them hidden can introduce new risks for people who menstruate as well. In the 1970s, tampons were made so absorbent that they were effective in preventing leaks but created bacterial environments that caused toxic shock syndrome, a potentially fatal infection. Various analyses have found vaginal douches as well as pads, menstrual cups and period underwear contain phthalates and per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or “forever chemicals,” which disrupt the endocrine system.
“The industry is affected by menstrual stigma is the one producing our products, and they are hearing people want the most effective product around,” Clancy said. “They are going to worry less about safety and whether pads should be off-gassing VOCs [volatile organic compounds], and yet we’re placing these things on or in our very thin genital skin.”
Evolutionarily, it has always been taught that the purpose of menstruation is to shed old uterine linings in the absence of a fertilized egg. This is often described as a “failed” attempt at reproduction, in which the body is “expelling” the “debris” of the uterine lining. However, competing hypotheses argue that menstruation may also occur to rid the body of pathogens and conserve energy.
“I suspect the reason it was so easy to accept the ‘useless’ hypothesis and reject the ones arguing for menstruation’s functionality has to do with the common refrain through the history of anthropology: female bodies and behavior are boring,” Clancey wrote in her book. “This is what happens when you just keep building upon a scientific foundation that used to think women were a secondary version of men and that vaginas were inverted penises.”
Although some argue society is in a “period positivity” era, there is a lot more work to be done before menstruation equity is achieved. When 21 states banned abortions after the overthrow of Roe v. Wade in 2022, it illuminated just how many are still fighting to restrict reproduction-associated bodily processes.
Still, the menstrual equity movement is gaining speed. Spain, Japan, Indonesia and a handful of other countries now offer menstrual leave. Scientists are breaking away from period taboos in research, and have turned to period blood itself to solve unanswered questions about endometriosis. Some early data in animal models suggests menstrual blood might have healing properties that can even repair tissue.
“The genie is out of the bottle now,” Gottlieb said. “Once these taboos are challenged, you can’t re-taboo them fully, and there’s a whole new generation now of young women who are really comfortable speaking about their periods.”
