under-ice.com - Scarlet's Ebb and Flow

Scarlet's ebb and flow

Why I write so much about periods

One of the bravest things I'd seen in a long time: promotion photo for Tori Amos' latest album, American Doll Posse,

I don't like to take it too seriously but over the years I suppose I have mythologised it somewhat. I can't help it, though. It comes to me in flashes of flickering, grainy blood-spattered black and white: a bike moving towards me with a squeak, its saddle a slab of meat, raw and glistening. Irresistible.

Then it all goes black, like a faint, before slowly sliding back into view: the bike lying by the side of a road, its seat being pecked at by crows, sometimes crawling with maggots and worms. It's at once macabre and funny, a gross thing I do, seeing how far I can embellish the image before crossing the fine line between humour and horror.

I call it my “menstrual cycle”, and it's rooted in truth. Something a bit like it did actually happen when I was at school. It was 1984, cycling proficiency day, and I got my period. I was 10, and although I'd been menstruating since I was nine, I still had to get used to a routine yet to establish itself.

I had a sanitary towel with me and wasn't expecting trouble; I'd endured numerous PE lessons on my period, mooching about among the skinny, one-dimensional little bodies of my classmates. I normally got soaked but always managed without mishap, so when red started coming through my blue gingham dress just before the test was about to begin, I was determined to ignore it.

It was only at the end when a voice asked, “What's that on your dress?” I looked down to see large streaks of blood down my dress and legs, a mess too much to hide or ignore any longer. My bike looked like it itself had had a period, its white saddle now pink, and it really was like that classic bad dream of being naked in public, only worse.

After a frustrating, tearful exchange with the headmistress I was whisked away for a change of clothing, mortified. Apparently kids were standing round my bike when Mum wrapped a carrier bag around the seat and put it in the trailer to take home. One of them said they'd seen blood pouring out of my leg. Bless.

I could have been bullied, but wasn't, for some reason. Very little was said. An object of curiosity, all I got was a mix of knowing and quizzical looks. Perhaps it wasn't that big a thing after all, or perhaps what had happened reminded everybody what would happen to them soon enough.

For me though, it was pretty hard to top. Some kids wet themselves, but I had to go the whole hog. And once you've been through something like that, it defines you for a while. Being the only kid to have periods for years before everyone else caught up had a huge psychological effect on me, and is probably why I write so much about periods now.

But in its own way it made sense. I had an earthy childhood, one all kids should have, I reckon. Living on dairy farms, we were surrounded by nature in all its full-frontal glory: animals shitting, pissing and mounting each other everywhere; dead cows by the front door, their tongues lolling, eyes glazed, stiff with rigor mortis, waiting to be collected by the knacker man; the slurry pit with giant nettles sprouting like triffids; holding syringes full of bull semen, ready to hand to Dad as he prepared to stick his hand up a cow's arse. There was no room for delicate ways or sensitive dispositions.

We grew up in country cottages and farm houses with agas and open coal fires, onto which I'd throw my used sanitary towels. Who knows what toxic fumes may have been emitted, but I lived to tell the tale. Pity me mum, though, with us 2 girls, having to buy sanitary towels in industrial quantities. At that time disposables were the way forward; it never occurred to me that there was any other option. And I needed so many; I always bled heavily, full-on, right from the start, staring down at the crimson maple leaf oil-slicks between my legs one morning 25 years ago.

My relationship with my period remains uneasy. I'd love to be one of the many, lucky women for whom it is a mundane non-event, but it never has been, and perhaps I've only myself to blame: as a coping strategy over the years I've romanticised, mythologised, mysticised so much that it's almost become a character in itself, a cross between a moody Brontean hero riding up on a dark horse each month, and a Kappa-clad hoodie looking for someone to mug (I know, I'm just an old perv...) Rather than winging about it, I decided to turn it into something positive. It's certainly given me something to write about.

And it's a tale I like to tell, even if no one wants to hear it, for whatever reason. Stephen King once said that the most basic form of horror is eating with one's mouth open, yet for many it's just the thought of a period. For others, it's yesterday's news, we should get over it. Even feminists don't want to know any more, they've hard it all before. Getting down and dirty about periods never was relevant, not even when hippies knitted their own meusli.

But I find it hard not to be fascinated: all that blood dripping between my legs a few days each month appeals to my warped side. Not that the use of human fluids in art is new - take Marc Quinn's blood sculptures, for example, or Tracey Emin's bed strewn with used condoms and dirty knickers, their gussets stained with discharge and menstrual blood.

I happen to think periods are as relevant as ever. Women in capitalist societies are menstruating more than ever before, and with sanitary towel companies targeting the third world, the problem of what to do with used disposable sanitary towels is becoming an increasingly urgent global issue.

Not only that, at 34, having a period feels like an act of defiance, a political statement, even. Everyone wants to see me up the duff. But then, it's easy to be subversive if you're a woman. In a world where we're encouraged to foster a fraught, anxious relationship with our bodies, because it makes people consume, even eating cake in public can be politicised, eroticised.

To bleed or not to bleed? Reproduction is the ultimate creative act, and menstruation is a reassuring visible sign of its potential, but here's the thing: deep down I think that, all risks eliminated, I would choose not to bleed. And perhaps eventually evolution will phase periods out. Here and now, however, I will have to content myself with feeling like a shoddy work in progress.

With so much negative press out there, anything which encourages us to reinvent our relationship with our bodies, and view them in contexts other than purely titillating, has to be a good thing. We all have a right to know our body as it is, in its purest state, within contexts other than sexual, and some form of positive engagement with periods is necessary to counteract the constant period-bashing which goes on with impunity.

It's a part of me that, try as I might, I can't ignore or control. Freud may have called me an hysteric; nowadays they call it “precocious puberty”, a medical condition caused by over-stimulation of the ovaries. Perhaps I will never know what caused my body to develop at such an early age, but it's nothing new: people my parents' age too recall girls having started their periods at primary school.

Like periods themselves, the words will keep on flowing until I've nothing left to say. When that day comes I'll mourn it like the real person my period has come to resemble.

Home