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Tackling A Feminine Taboo
Courtesy of St. Martin's Griffin
In their new book Flow two authors take on a taboo topic—and target the new pills that suppress periods.
Through period-suppressing birth control pills, it’s now possible to avoid “Aunt Flo” entirely. So what busy, jaded women who don’t even have time to bother with menstruation will want to read an entire book on the topic?
The authors of Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation believe the answer is: a whole lot of them. When Elissa Stein and Susan Kim, both published writers in their mid-40s, finished preparing their proposal for their book, they thought mainstream publishers would compete to snatch it up. Twenty-five rejections later (some of which were particularly nasty, they claim), the authors were undeterred.
The authors hope Flow will reverse any revulsion we feel when “the tomato boat has come in” or “the Red Sox have a home game”; when a woman is “on the rag,” “saddling up old Rusty” or “riding the big red Cadillac.”
After all, the whole point of Flow, as they envisioned it, was to fight the stigma that still plagues frank discussion about menstruation. The “ick” factor that turned most publishers off, they say, is part of the reason that women are shockingly uninformed when it comes to their periods. Research shows few women can explain the physiological processes of ovulation and menstruation—and between 5 and 10 percent of girls have no idea what’s happening when they experience their first “time of the month.”
In many ways, Flow—published by St. Martin’s Griffin—is a breakthrough. Nearly all titles on menstruation are geared toward preteen girls or are dry and academic, published by small presses. Flow, though, targets a mainstream, women’s-magazine reading audience. It is a tome on all things period, from vintage advertisements for feminine hygiene products to tips on the latest eco-friendly sanitary products, such as reusable (yes, reusable) pads.
The authors hope Flow will reverse any revulsion we feel when (get ready) “the tomato boat has come in” or “the Red Sox have a home game”; when a woman is “saddling up old rusty” or “riding the big red Cadillac down the Avenue of Womanhood." Their goal is to help women understand menstruation in order to make more educated choices about how to handle it. “Women have different reactions to their periods, different symptoms,” Kim told The Daily Beast. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all bodily function. More meaningful discussions would allow women to feel like they’re owning their decisions.”
Today the most basic choice is whether or not to menstruate at all. Since Barr Pharmaceuticals (now owned by Teva) introduced Seasonale, the first period-suppressing birth control pill, in 2003, a steadily increasing number of suppressants has hit the market. The drugs allow women to menstruate just four or fewer times a year. And while some women take a suppressant pill to curb debilitating symptoms, for others, it’s a lifestyle drug. (Some doctors stress that the long-term side effects of continually taking hormones are still unknown, and could pose risks.)
To help readers understand where we are in the cultural story of periods, Stein and Kim devote much of the book to where we’ve been. The history of menstruation is a colorful one. For centuries, society was baffled by the phenomenon, wondering, Why does bleeding usually signify distress, but not so when a woman is undergoing menses? Ancient civilizations believed menstrual blood possessed supernatural powers--that it was both sacred and toxic.
In A.D. 77, the philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote that menstrual blood would make plant seeds infertile, kill insects, dull razors, and drive dogs insane—myths that lived on until the late 15th century. And as recently as the 1920s, menstruating women were banned from some churches for fear of “contamination,” and even from some wineries, due to a belief that they’d make the wine spoil.
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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Danielle Friedman has worked as a nonfiction book editor for Hudson Street Press and Plume, two imprints of Penguin Group. Her writing has been published in the Miami Herald, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and on CNN.com. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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Danielle Friedman has worked as a nonfiction book editor for Hudson Street Press and Plume, two imprints of Penguin Group. Her writing has been published in the Miami Herald, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and on CNN.com. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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Liz Goodwin is an assistant editor at The Daily Beast. She has written for the New York Sun, GothamSchools, the Tico Times, and Fodor's Travel Guides.
Danielle Friedman has worked as a nonfiction book editor for Hudson Street Press and Plume, two imprints of Penguin Group. Her writing has been published in the Miami Herald, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and on CNN.com. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
I will have a conversation about anything over coffee with my girlfriend, but this one is private to me.Nobody really wants to know details, Do they?
I don't know, do they? I think your comment is exactly the attitude the book is trying to analize.
I am buying this books.
I must agree. I certainly don't need to hear about other people's vital fluids. Perhaps because the "whole process" is not a mystery to me, but merely life.
Not sure what you mean by 'details' but my friends and I have routinely talked about headaches, cramps and how to get rid of them (sex!), how birth control affects it, the heaviness of flow, etc, etc. I've learned a huge amount from those conversations. I've also turned to them for sympathy. Not sure why that would be separate from any other ongoing part of our lives.
I think this hormone induced female system that funnels a lot of money to drug companies and suppresses the natural functions of women is dangerous. Humans survived with out these little chemical helpers for a long time - this amounts to a massive undocumented drug trial. Why not change the food supply to reduce bowel movements (messy and embarrassing) to once every 3 months or less? Why not put implants in brains to make sexual attraction, intercourse, masturbation, dating, marriage, divorce, and old fashioned methods of propagating the species not just unnecessary, but impossible? We could select the proper genetic material and produce replacements in the factory of birth. A master race could be developed without any sexual characteristics at all, ruled by pure logic they would terminate any non - productive humanoids like old, sick, or injured.....
Obviously, some women have troublesome menstruation and could benefit from medication, but defining normal female functions as a cause for drugs is just another way to make women second class citizens just like denying accommodations for pregnancy, breastfeeding, childcare and all other human family functions makes unnecessary conflict. At some point humans have to decide whether we give up being human or change our society to embrace humanity and whether we embrace our home planet or continue to punish it for not pleasing our every whim.
Because going to the bathroom for a bowl movement doesn't cause severe and debilitating menstrual cramps, headaches, depression and missed days at work and with family. A bowl movement doesn't cause me to stay in bed all day in the fetal position with heating blankets over my belly and in pain. I have no shame about the process of menstruation or even talking about it in public, I and many women like me have SEVERE menstrual cycles. And thus, I control my menstrual cycle via drugs. It's a personal choice and I am feel very lucky to have that option.
But thanks to the Catholic Bishops and Congress, birth-control pills will soon be considered abortion and banned in this country.
That's cool. I think is someone's symptoms are as debilitating as yours are, you SHOULD do whatever you can to make it better. I have been fortunate enough to have very light periods and minimal cramping. For me it has always been more of an inconvenience, which I don't think is a good reason to take drugs. For everyone it is so different and we should respect each other's choices.
I agree with ittybittykitty, i noticed as i got older, the asthma got bad right around my period, not that my period got worse, but my coughing got worse, and I got new medication to manage it without a second thought, thankful it was available, really. Someone just a couple of days ago told me I should try oil and give up the asthma medication, and I asked her if she had mal practice insurance :). So if you can find something that makes it better, I would go for it without thinking twice about it.
i switched to using the Diva cup about a year ago and loved it so much i couldn't help but mention it to my girl friends. turns out, it wasn't that weird to talk about. they were curious how it worked and the conversation wasn't awkward at all. i think it's the immaturity of guys that makes us think it should be embarrassing.
I tried the cup, but couldn't get it to work right and had no one to talk to about it. I didn't think about that until now. If it was anything else I would have asked my friends about it. Interesting.
I'm also a diva cup user and I love it. Saves me money, is convenient, and puts nothing in the landfill.
I used something similar in the 70s and 80s -- convenient but just watch out for urinary tract infections.
Don't forget, it's not just menstrual flow that is suppressed - it is a whole endocrine system. Somehow we have come to believe that taking oral contraceptives is as benign (and even healthy) as taking a daily vitamin. And even saying that is heretical - as if we cannot both believe in women's choice and control over reproduction, as well as questioning whether it is a good idea to replace the reproductive cycle with a synthetic hormonal suppressant drug for decades.
Check out the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research (SMCR) blog, for a response to Redbook's pan of this book: http://menstruationresearch.org/2009/10/30/introducing/
Definitely feminism lite, since Judy Grahn wrote this book already. It's called "Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Changed the World." However, I'm happy to see this book as outreach to the suppressed Americentric mainstream culture.
Hmmm, I'll have to check that title out.
For the under 35-set, seems like periods etc. aren't an unusual topic of conversation -- especially when you work closely with 3 other women and you all synchonize and get salt/sugar cravings at the same time (which is convenient as there are always goodies around when you need 'em)
There HAS been a fair amount written about menstruation and not all of it dry and academic or geared toward girls, but I agree, there's not enough and I welcome another title to the growing literature.
I am a member of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research--a collection of scholars, clincians, artist and activists that have been working to demystify the menstrual cycle since 1977 (and our work is not done yet, obviously) We recently launched a blog (called re:Cycling) to engender a wider conversation about all things menstrual, including, a cold, hard look at non-medically-indicated use of (what we prefer to call) cycle-stopping contraceptives. Check us out. http://menstruationresearch.org/blog/
I wonder if this book has a chapter on menopause. I'm going through it right now, and my own doctor couldn't give me an answer on how long it's supposed to last! I can't go by my mom cos she had a hysterectomy when I was 19. So is the duration of this different with every woman?
There are many good books on the subject, many good articles on the internet, and many good blogs and forums. You're not alone - and there is information out there. So start researching it today.
And yes, the peri-menopause duration is different for everyone. One thing I might can advise, and this is just my personal opinion, it might help if you had a female gyno at this point.
Here is a good site to start: http://www.power-surge.com/
It is supposed to be a year without your period, before you are officially dxed as menopausal. So the peri-menopausal is before, and post-menopausal is after, but those two periods, oops stages, are supposed to be pretty variable and your doctor may be afraid to guess. Usually people, ok women, have their last period around 51, but you start expecting it to end around 49, and you get it randomly for a few years, and for other women they say it stops just like that, so who knows if they are even saying what really happens considering people don't talk about it, it seems the ages are getting a lot more variable. Supposedly, the body is going through withdrawal from estrogen, so you get the hot flashes.
elldeen, for all you need to know about perimenopause, the transition to menopause, check out this site: www.cemcor.ubc.ca. The site is founded by an endocrinologist who has studied menstruation, ovulation and perimenopause for over two decades. Her book Estrogen's Storm Season is written in fictional form to tell the stories of 8 women whose experiences are quite varied. Good luck.
On average, it takes 4-9 years from the onset of irregular periods to the end of the 12 months after the last menstrual flow. Yes, it's variable. And if you don't keep records, it can be hard to remember how long it's been.
In the early 60s when I was in junior high, my girlfriends and I called our periods "George" after wondering how to signal to each other we were having "that time of the month" and that it was, therefore, the reason we could or couldn't do certain things.
I still recall the casualness and the seriousness in which we used that word - "George" - and the complete acceptance of any statement that followed. It wasn't so much that we were "afraid" any other girl would hear us utter the word "period," it was the fact that if boys overheard us we would have been endlessly teased about it. It seemed to work for us at the time.
Remember, any mention of the menses was still covered up by the media at this time, too. I can still recall those magazine ads of beautiful women in ball gowns that advertised sanitary "napkins" without once utilizing the word - "Modess...because" with "because" in italics. Before my periods began, I hadn't a clue as to what "because" meant.
With the new drugs to prevent the monthly menses, the one thing my friends and I have discussed lately was what took science so long? If blood somehow dripped out of a man's penis once a month as a natural bodily function, you can bet your life these pills would have been invented long, long ago.
I'm overjoyed that DBFan2009 and her friends refered to their menstrual periods as "George". George Patton
i think that women should be careful when deciding to take this kind of medication, because most likely it has side effects. I was for years on a birth control pill that wouldn't be even near the controversial Lybrel, and only when i stopped taking it(i took it for about 3 years) 2.5 yrs ago because i wanted to conceive, i realized that my abundant hair loss was due to the BCP and not to stress, as my hair started growing back, and my varicose that appeared during the years of being on the drug ameliorated a lot too. I decided that i would never put again ANYTHING into my body that it was not meant by Mother Nature, because it most likely affecting my health. The doctors these days don't take time to warn you of all possible negative outcomes of taking any kind of drugs, and NEVER encourage you to try alternative medicine solutions. Our society is driven by profit making and i see this drug as another 'solution' for women to help pharmaceuticals increase their profits...
I think people talk about the starting of it, and stopping of it, it is the in between women don't seem to talk about. I think though if guys had it, it would be talked about a lot more, they always seem to be freeer to talk about bodily fluids, or just about themselves even, women seem to dismiss other women if they don't have kids to talk about.
I think though people talk about if it hurts, if it is inconvenient, and don't think about it much if it is regular and doesn't get in the way of anything, and they can afford sanitary products.
Then when people start getting changes they talk about them again, and wonder if you are getting them too.
I think it might be different if we had to make our own napkins out of sheets or something, I wonder what people did before pads and tampons. My mother told me once, my grandmother used to tear up sheets or rags or something. But I never talked about something like that with my grandmother.
Then it would be a lot different.
I still think it is not politics that liberates people, it is technology, and politics adapts to our new freedoms. Even talking about this through our computers, would be something my grandmother would have never thought about doing, as a teenager, cross the ocean by boat.
The world has sure changed in a very short period of time.
I always liked it when the girl was having her period. Then i could go for a paint job.
Actually, I did/do not. Acording to the Laws of Moses the Teacher, during that 'time' cohabitive delight is not kosher. I follow those laws which have good medical reasoning behind them. I merely wanted to get in that line about "paint job."
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God you are disgusting.
Oh, do grow up, little boy.
How is it after all this time so few women still know the basics in the U.S.? I don't get that. Especially with the Internet. Is basic biology like this considered sex education and therefore controversial?
There's a creepy coyness, a thudding Wikipedia-inflected scholarship, and cringe-making "Come on gals!" tone to this article that makes me shake my head and check my watch - "Is it reeeally 2009?"
As a person possessing a penis, in perusing this page I was unpleasantly surprised to realize I'm somehow at fault regarding womanhood's general discomfort in discussing/ameliorating natural bodily functions. On behalf of the other half of the populace, do accept our apologies...
Thank you.
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