Why don’t we call menstruation by its name? Euphemisms serve a purpose. They give us words to talk about things that are considered culturally taboo. The impact of typical menstrual taboos is clear: they can lead to significant challenges in menstrual management, adverse reproductive health outcomes, social ostracization, disease, and even death.
Menstruation stigma is a form of misogyny. Negative taboos condition us to understand menstrual function as something to be hidden, something shameful. And by not naming a thing, we reinforce the idea that the thing should not be named.
But have periods always needed code words? Where did these words come from, and how did they come about? Were periods always considered a negative experience?

Menstrual euphemisms and taboos are old. But not all societies view menstruation negatively.
Menstrual taboos are found in the Quran:
“go apart from women during the monthly course, do not approach them until they are clean” Quran 2:222,

…the Bible:
“…in her menstrual impurity; she is unclean… whoever touches…shall be unclean and shall wash his clothes and bathe in water and be unclean until evening” Leviticus 15

…and in the first Latin encyclopedia (73 AD):

“Contact with turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.” (1).

Taboos are likely pre-agricultural, pre-modern-brain, and likely even pre-language (2, 3).

Menstruation, after all, far predates language. Our lives as the earliest evolving humans centered around survival, reproduction and biological functions: birth, death, sex, hunting. These elements were central in shaping language, not the other way around. And that’s where anthropologists do their research into menstrual taboo: at the intersections of evolution, behavior, and biology.

But while menstrual negative taboos are nearly universal, there are exceptions, and taboos themselves are variable. Certain societies operate with positive menstrual associations and euphemisms. Some modern-day hunter-gatherer societies, for example, hold an understanding of menstruation as being powerful, healing, protective and sacred (4, 5). These groups are also more likely to have a degree of gender egalitarianism (2, 5).
Some menstrual customs can act as tools that enhance female autonomy, granting social control and relief from work, among other benefits (4, 6, 7). The Mbendjele tribe of Central Africa, for example, still uses sayings like “my biggest husband is the moon” (8). The biggest grass hut of the Mbuti tribe in Zaire is the menstrual hut, where women go when they have their first period, accompanied by other girls and female relatives. There, having a period is considered powerful and blessed by the moon (9).

Even ancient Egyptian medical texts, including the Kahun Gynecological papyrus, ~1800 BCE, and the papyrus Ebers; ~1500 BCE, use the word hsmn for menstruation, which, some argue, also meant “purification” (7). Menstruation, in these texts, is seen positively. Cures for amenorrhea are offered, and menstrual blood is used as an ingredient in ointments, like in one for saggy breasts (hmph)(10, 11).
The creation of menstrual taboos took place independently and repeatedly across different peoples and geographies. But scholars don’t agree about why.

The origin (and function) of negative menstrual taboo is still debated. Freud said it was our fear of blood (12). Allan Court argued the taboo began, in part, because early humans found menstrual blood to be soiling (or, as he put it in 1963, having “a depressive effect on organic materials”) (13). Anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum theorized in 1972 that taboo was a form of natural population control, limiting sexual contact with “pollution” stigma (14). In 2000, Historian Robert S. McElvaine coined the term non-menstrual syndrome or NMS to describe the reproductive envy that led males to stigmatize menstruation, and to socially dominate women as “psychological compensation for what men cannot do biologically” (15).

All of these theories are tied to the time and place in which they were developed, and many were formed with a presumption of menstrual negativity. Clellan Ford postulated that the menstrual taboo was developed because early societies knew of its “toxic, disease-causing effects” (16). Of course, we now know that menstrual blood is not toxic. But this view persisted in science through the 20th century. In 1920, Dr. Bela Schick coined the term menotoxin after concluding that flowers handled by a menstruating nurse wilted more quickly (5). Harvard researchers Olive and George Smith (pioneers in the fields of gynecology and estrogen treatment) injected animals with bacteria-latent menstrual blood in 1952, killing them (16). According to The Curse: A cultural history of menstruation, the Smiths continued to attribute the deaths to a menotoxin for several years, even after other research found that the animals died from bacterial contamination of the blood, rather than the blood itself (17). Menstrual blood toxicity was disproven in the late 1950s (18).

In 1974, a comparative study of 44 societies found a majority of cultures surveyed viewed menstruation, in part, as what it is: a signal for a reproductive phase. The study also found that the appearance of taboo in a given society may be closely tied to how much or little males participate in that society’s procreative activities, like child rearing and childbirth — that is, higher participation was associated with fewer taboos (though this relationship does not speak to causation)(5).
*****
One theory holds that menstrual taboos are at the center of the origins of patriarchy.
Professor Chris Knight, a social anthropologist at London University, has researched the deep historical roots of menstrual taboo. In 1991 he published Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, and later co-founded EVOLANG, an international conference series on the evolution of language. Knight’s theories are controversial but thought-provoking, and speak to the complexity of discerning the historical roots of menstrual stigma.
Knight believes that the original menstrual taboos were born of female-led and female-advantaging behaviors in early humans — i.e., that females themselves had good reason to establish menstruation as a time when their bodies could not be touched, creating their own taboo. Only later did this taboo transform into something that compromised female autonomy, rather than enhanced it.
For Knight’s theory to hold, early humans would have had to menstruate in sync with the moon, something for which we have no evidence in modern societies. But, as Knight points out, this doesn’t mean our cycle length has no evolutionary significance. The human species evolved under conditions that favored a menstrual cycle of 29.5 days, the same length of the lunar cycle. Our close relatives, chimps and bonobos, have menstrual cycles of ~36- and ~40-day cycles respectively. Other primates have a 19-day and 28-day cycles. Scientists don’t agree on why the human cycle became so close in length to the lunar cycle, or why the original euphemism for cyclical bleeding is moon-related across many cultures. But Knight says we can’t dismiss it as a coincidence before exploring whether there was some adaptive basis for it — how and why it might have benefited females in our evolutionary past.

The theory is best explained in two parts: the possible origins of female-benefiting practices around menstruation, and how they might have changed so dramatically.

Knight’s theory of menstrual taboo begins with the way our human ancestors hunted.
As our Homo habilis ancestors evolved in Africa around two million years ago, they coexisted with big cats — lions, saber-toothed tigers and other large predators with night vision far superior to our own. Hunting in times of little moonlight would have been more dangerous than hunting when the moon was full, illuminating the surroundings.

Early hunting practices provided little meat for females and their young. When chimpanzees hunt, males gang up around their hunted subject and fight over it as they eat it on the spot. This provides no meat for those back at the camp, who find protein to eat in other ways.
Contrastingly, hunter-gatherer societies in Africa today have rules where hunters return to camp with an entire kill, before it’s taken by the women and shared equally.

In Knight’s model, early females played an important role in shaping this new hunting behavior by acting in ways that promoted safety and ensuring that food from the hunt was shared. Females began to gather in isolation from males for a period of time around the new moon (darkness), something that still happens in hunter-gather societies today. During this period, sex would be withheld, and male attention would be focused on the upcoming full-moon hunt. Males would believe females to be menstruating together at this time. After the hunt, if males returned with food, their behaviors of hunt preparation, participation, and food-sharing would be rewarded. The period of sexual isolation would end, and a time of feasting and sexual activity would begin. It’s this cyclical synergy of moonlight, firelight, nutrition, and behavior, rather than gravity, that Knight suggests is creditable for possible menstrual syncing in our ancestors.

By gathering and signaling “no” females may have established blood as being powerful, creating a strong cultural symbol, and the first menstrual “taboo” — different from the way we think of taboos today. Menstruation would become associated with power, with the success of the hunt and with the blood of game animals. This “taboo” on blood may then have also applied to the blood of the hunted kills, leading males to not eat their own kill until the blood was brought back to camp and removed through cooking. The Ju/’hoansi people in the south of the African continent, for example, tell stories of men who are killed by elephants after not observing menstrual taboos, and how hunting when one’s partner is menstruating can lead to being attacked or losing one’s game.

How a practice that benefited females changed
If the original menstrual taboo was one bolstering female power, why did it change? Knight says it shifted as big game become more scarce. As the population grew and big animals became harder and harder to hunt, a monthly hunt wasn’t enough. Populations began having to rely on small game, tubers, and other gathered foods much more continuously, making the traditional work-play rhythm, and all the behaviors and rituals associated with it, less possible.

The desynchronization of the hunt from the moon would have cost the menstrual cycle its own synchronicity. By this point, Knight explains, the timing of nearly everything would have been governed by these practices. As they became irrelevant, any associated rules of sexual isolation or solidarity would have gotten in the way. As the practices collapsed, female cycles started to stagger again, and communal female solidarity was lost.
At that point, something very strange happened, Knight says. “In many places, in order to prevent the whole system from collapsing, the men start ritualizing their own version of menstruation, by cutting their penises (or, in some places ears, noses, or arms) and bleeding together, shedding enormous amounts of blood.”

Menstrual huts — common spaces where females gathered to menstruate together — were then reassigned for the new, better synced, male bleeding ritual. “They became male huts from which women were excluded, renamed as Men’s Houses or Temples.”
It’s this, Knight believes, that’s at the crux of all the world’s patriarchal religions. “Wherever you find these temples and churches, in Judaism, Christianity, they are men’s huts writ-large, male controlled and dominated.” Even after agriculture began, these male bleeding rituals continued.
This all may have set the stage for the treatment and view of menstruation in extremely patriarchal cultures of the Romans, Greeks, and later religions, which have led us into our modern west.

(For some context for time, this story began about two million years ago in the time of homo habilis, the ~600 thousand year stretch of history between “ape-like humans” and homo erectus. Fire use began around 1.5 million years ago, and cooking began less than one million years ago. Big-game scarcity, and the outcomes of it, is in the much more recent period since the last Ice Age).
“At the base of all the world’s religions, we find one fundamental idea. Some things are sacred. And if the body isn’t sacred, nothing is,” says Knight. “Blood was a mark of the sacredness of the body. So the paradox is, that the very thing that benefited women throughout evolution is now made to be, and experienced as, the most disempowering.”

We may never know how, exactly, menstrual taboos were established.
Of course, there are deep controversies around these histories, leaving many elements up to interpretation. Both menstrual synchronicity and asynchronicity may have their adaptive evolutionary advantage — some research suggests synchrony decreases female–to-female competition for mates and favors genetic diversity, for example (19). But the quality of evidence of estrous synchronicity in human and non-human populations is questioned and hotly debated, and has been written about by Clue’s Oxford collaborator Alexandra Alvergne, as well as Knight, among others.
For an in-depth explanation of Knight’s theory, you can read more here, or in his book. Knight’s theory has been referenced by peers as the “most important ever written on the evolution of human social organization”. His is arguably the only theoretical framework for this deepset history of menstrual taboo to date, which may be reflective of the taboos themselves in academia.

It’s clear that the way we talk about menstruation is slow to change because of how deeply menstrual taboos are ingrained in our cultures, beliefs, and histories. The societies which give us our understanding of our bodies were formed around these taboos. Changing taboos requires the systems to change.

Gibbonstrength posted:

who was going around wiping menstrual blood on stuff to find this out anyway

hello placenta

Women’s Bodies as Threats
Why have women’s bodies become a battleground? The simple answer is because they present (or represent) a threat to culture and society. An ancient threat, believed by many to be the root of patriarchal oppression of women, concerns paternity and men’s uncertainty about whether they have a
genetic connection to the children they are raising. This threat has resulted in colonization: attempts to control women’s bodies and to curtail women’s freedom. However, it does not concern us here because it does not lead to stigmatizing women’s bodies, although it certainly has led to stigmatization of women as adulterers and children as bastards, often with disastrous consequences. Today, in some parts of the world, women are still killed because they have been accused of adultery.

The Threat of the Menstruating Woman
A more relevant threat is the positioning of women’s bodies as monstrous and polluted, ‘‘a unique blend of fascination and horror’’ (Braidotti, as cited in Ussher, 2006). As Jane Ussher (2006, p. 1) put it: a woman’s body ‘‘is a body deemed dangerous and defiled, the myth of the monstrous feminine made flesh ... Central to this positioning ... is ambivalence associated with the power and danger perceived to be inherent in woman’s fecund flesh, her seeping, leaking, bleeding womb standing as site of pollution and source of dread.’’ Superstitious beliefs about menstruation were (and are) common, and many led to taboos that circumscribed menstruating women’s behavior. Among the beliefs described by Frazer (1951) are the following: Drops of menstrual blood upon the ground or in a river kill plants and animals; wells run dry if a menstruating woman draws water from them; men become ill if they are touched by or use any objects that have been touched by a menstruating woman; beer turns sour if a menstruating woman enters a brewery; and beer, wine, vinegar, milk, and jam go bad if touched by a menstruating woman. These beliefs have been reported in various places in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, and they are related to contemporary beliefs that women should not bathe, swim, wash their hair, do heavy housework, play sports, tend houseplants, eat or drink certain things, or engage in sexual intercourse during the menses (e.g., Davis, Nowygrod, Shabsigh, & Westhoff, 2002; Marva´n, Ramı´rezEsparza, Corte´s-Iniestra, & Chrisler, 2006; Snow & Johnson, 1978; Tampax Report, 1981; Williams, 1983). As recently as the 1930s, scientists were attempting to demonstrate that menstruating women exuded menotoxins (i.e., poisonous elements) in their menstrual blood, perspiration, saliva, urine, and tears (see Delaney, Lupton, & Toth, 1987). Although most Westerners today do not believe in menotoxins, the sex taboo during menstruation is still widely observed, and most people believe that it is at least good manners, if not absolutely necessary, to hide evidence of menstruation, not only from public view but in private as well (Johnston-Robledo & Chrisler, in press).
Advertisements for menstrual hygiene products, although now ubiquitous and not nearly as oblique as those of my youth (e.g., ‘‘Modess ... because.’’), still do not show evidence of the products in use or as having been used, as Judy Chicago did in her 1972 art installation Menstruation
Bathroom. Some ads actually use blue liquid, rather than red or brown, to illustrate the products’ functionality (Merskin, 1999). The ads contribute to the communication taboo by promoting secrecy and by their use of allegorical images(e.g., flowers, hearts), and they contribute to stigmatizing the menses by their emphasis on being clean and fresh and avoiding embarrassment (Coutts & Berg, 1993; Delaney et al., 1987; Houppert, 1999; Merskin, 1999). Advertisements emphasize women’s worry about shameful leaks and their fear that they will be ‘‘outed’’ as menstruating—because discovery means stigma (Coutts & Berg, 1993). Ads for panty liners tell women to use the product everyday so that they can be ‘‘confident’’ that they are always ‘‘fresh’’ and untainted (Berg & Coutts, 1994). The term ‘‘feminine hygiene’’ itself suggests that there is something dirty about women (Kane, 1997), and Kotex now markets a ne ‘‘crinkle-free’’ wrapper, so that other women in a public restroom will not know that someone is unwrapping one of
their products (Kissling, 2006). A print advertisement for ‘‘U’’ by Kotex plays on stigma: ‘‘I tied a tampon to my keyring so my brother wouldn’t take my car. It worked’’ (Newman, 2010). A series of television commercials that Tampax is currently running play on the menstrual euphemism ‘‘Mother
Nature’s gift.’’ They show Mother Nature, a middle-aged woman in a green suit, approaching women in public places and trying to hand them a small, red gift box. The humor comes in as the women dodge and weave, trying to avoid Mother Nature, because menstruation is the ‘‘gift’’ no one wants to
receive In a recent study, my colleagues and I investigated product placement in three major drugstore chains (Chrisler, Gorman, Abacherli, et al., 2010). We found that menstrual hygiene supplies were always placed in the rear of the store, where people who were not looking for them would be less likely to encounter them. The signs in the aisles were euphemistic (e.g., ‘‘Personal Care’’), and in one store, the aisle sign read ‘‘clean, revitalize, cleansing, fresh.’’ The uninitiated might expect to find soap and detergent in an aisle marked that way, but the shelves contained tampons and pads, breastfeeding supplies, and douching supplies. The sign (and the ads) suggests that, without those products, women are dirty and stigmatized, but with them, women can be clean and fresh and keep their stigmatized
conditions concealed.
2 Psychology of Women Quarterly 000(00)
Downloaded from pwq.sagepub.com at PORTLAND STATE UNIV on July 1, 2014
Besides the threat of discovery, the menstrual cycle is connected to another, more modern threat: the erratic, out-of-control premenstrual woman (Chrisler, 1996, 2002; Chrisler & Caplan, 2002). In 1981, two women in England on trial for murder received lesser convictions because Dr. Katharina Dalton testified that they had premenstrual syndrome (PMS). Prior to that, PMS was a little known phenomenon. Most women coped with premenstrual signs and symptoms and considered them, if they considered them at all, to be part of the ups and downs of life. The trials resulted in an explosion of media interest in PMS, which led to the current belief that most women are ill for at least several days prior to their menses. Images of violent premenstrual murderesses merged with ancient images of women as dangerous beings who lured men to their doom, but now women’s hostility and
duplicity were seen to arise from their own bodies. PMS was referred to in the popular press as a ‘‘menstrual monster’’ that turns women into Jekyll and Hyde (Chrisler & Caplan, 2002; Chrisler & Levy, 1990). Self-help books and qualitative studies suggest that women have embraced this metaphor as a way to explain unfeminine behavior or to reject words or actions they wish they had not said or done (Chrisler, 2008). A woman interviewed by Swann and Ussher (1995, p. 364) spoke of ‘‘this thing that takes over me.’’ Authors of confessional/self-help books have written about ‘‘premonstral syndrome’’ (Ferrare, 1999, p. 43) and warned about an ‘‘untamed monster’’ that can ‘‘raise its ugly head and devour family and friends with uncontrolled words, moods, or action’’ (Frangipane, 1992, p. 8). One author wrote, ‘‘When I’m in PMS mode, no one is safe’’ (Ferrare, 1999, p. 49), and another that ‘‘Once a month, I’m a woman possessed’’ (Post, as cited in Chrisler & Levy, 1990, p. 97). Premenstrual symptoms are not technically part of the menses; they are defined as resolving when menstruation begins. However, it seems that the threat of the menstruating woman and the threat of the premenstrual woman have merged into one stereotype of a moody, and possibly dangerous, woman. Recent studies of attitudes toward women
indicate that premenstrual and menstrual women are now described in similar ways (e.g., angry, tense, irritable, and changeable; Chrisler, Gorman, Marva´n, & Johnston-Robledo, 2010; Forbes, Adams-Curtis, White, & Holmgren, 2003; Marva´n, Islas, Vela, Chrisler, & Warren, 2008). If you think that I am exaggerating the menstrual cycle as threatening, just search ‘‘Hillary Clinton and PMS’’ online and see how many hits you get. Or consider what pundit G. Gordon Liddy said on his radio show about then Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor: ‘‘Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then!’’ (‘‘Liddy
Worried About Sotomayor,’’ 2009). Of course, neither Clinton nor Sotomayor are likely to continue to menstruate, but thethreat of a woman in a position of power sometimes seems to cause emotional reactions that defy logic.

fuck hrc but its a interesting paper

Edited by Cuntessa_Markievicz (Jan. 5, 2018 13:23:16)

Petrol posted:

take it to the clapping thread

cars posted:

take it to the clapping thread

i was going to take it to the crapping thread, but it was already full of you're posts.