Period. Emma Barnett

their brows as to whether they could run such a ‘distasteful’ image – despite it being all over the internet and the very same news outlets thinking nothing of filling their daily feeds with graphic images of bloody wars. You will hear more from Kiran a little later on.

      Does that not strike you as terribly odd, now you stop to consider it? The fact that the sight of a woman’s menstrual blood, coming out of the hole it’s meant to, provokes more consternation than the image of lifeless children’s bodies being pulled out of the Mediterranean Sea in their failed fight to find a permanent home? One image can be published without question, while the other is censored, out of fear of poor taste and offence.

      In China, tampons are still thought of as sexual items rather than basic sanitary goods. Caught short on holiday, when I asked a young female shop assistant in Beijing where the tampons were (whilst making unedifying finger gestures as I stood next to rows of sanitary pads), she looked at me like I was a strange slut.

      There is still a fear, especially amongst younger Chinese girls, that tampons break the hymen. Recent figures show that only 2 per cent of the country’s women opt for tampons, compared to Europe’s 70 per cent. According to my friend and fellow journalist, Yuan Ren, Chinese medicine is also to blame for the cultural fear of tampons. It propagates the idea that putting a foreign object into the body is not good for you and can be harmful to girls who are still growing. Add this to the lack of education in the country as to how to insert a tampon and you have the perfect combination of factors to ensure that millions of women never experience the joy of a less cumbersome absorption method.

      Instead, they have to waddle about with a cotton surfboard jammed between their legs. Lovely.

      So why don’t we just say it how it really is? Periods are the blood of life and in many ways go to the very heart of being a woman. Simone de Beauvoir, when writing her seminal feminist text, The Second Sex, in 1949 wanted us to have jobs and work through them. She believed distraction from our pain was a good thing and the only way to cope. Germaine Greer, in her similarly iconic 1970 bestseller The Female Eunuch, famously wanted us to taste them as a test of our emancipation (full disclosure – I haven’t). She wrote: ‘If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby.’

      Periods, whether you are into tasting yours or ignoring it as best you can, are part of the essence of being female.

      And yet we vilify them, disproportionately.

      We know that men, particularly recent American presidents, have difficulty with them. But women also hush up other women on the topic, mainly out of fear that they will be seen as weak. Just because periods come out of our nether regions and, by their nature, are messy things, women worry this renders them worthy of censorship. But why? Is there just a horror and shame linked to blood in the pants? Granted, many men wouldn’t want to talk about their bleeding haemorrhoids. But they aren’t a normal monthly part of life and a vital sign of health. Quite the opposite. Or is it something that runs deeper and proves that women have bought into the age-old myth that anything uniquely female is filthy, reductive and not quite right. That we are broken and yucky in some way.

      We can’t continue as a human race without periods – and yet we still can’t acknowledge their existence. In the twenty-first century. I am not calling for women to walk down the street in short skirts with their tampon strings dangling out, armed with megaphones screaming: ‘Look at us! We’re bleeding!’ (Although if you want to do that – go for your life, sister.) But what I do want is for this juvenile shaming attitude towards women and a vital part of our anatomy and health to stop being such an embarrassing mysterious and dirty secret.

      Most women I know wouldn’t walk to the toilet in their office – a place they go every single day – without a dainty ‘special zip-up bag’ (ladies, you know what I’m talking about here) or even their whole handbag, just to take a tiny tampon into the loo for a change. Can you imagine if men bled for a week every month? Some form of menstrual leave would have been written into HR policies around the world, period-pain-bragging would be an Olympic sport and bleeding males would dramatically stagger to the office bog with their tampon proudly gripped in their fist. There would be no need to hide sanitary products in tiny zip-up bags. But men don’t have periods. And history has meant that they were the ones who designed society and the world of work without women – or our monthly downpours – in mind.

      It’s time to perfect your period patter and swagger with pride, but it’s also important to know what you are up against: generations and generations of debilitating myths and anti-women, fear mongering nonsense.

      Just as I began this chapter, that’s why it’s important to remember that ‘Girls are superheroes. Who else could bleed for a week and not die?’. I’ve got this. You’ve got this. We’ve got this.

      Turn this page, turn a new leaf. Our work begins now.

       CHAPTER TWO

      

       ‘The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.’

       Alice Walker, author and poet

      Before I tell you how periods unexpectedly took centre stage in the run up to my wedding, I thought it first prudent to share a list of some of the codswallop that women on their period have been blamed for and prohibited from doing while menstruating.

      Menstruating women must not:

       Make mayonnaise as it will curdle

       Come into contact with mirrors as they will cause them to dim

       Walk through fields of courgettes, pumpkins or fruit trees – all will rot and wither

       Contaminate butter as it won’t churn

       Touch wine as it will turn to vinegar

       Venture near dogs as they go crazy in the vicinity of period blood

       Go camping or wild swimming – bears and sharks are drawn to the bleeding lady

       Walk in front of anyone as their teeth will instantly break

      Believe it or not, some of these nonsensical outright lies are still doing the rounds today. The teeth-breaking one? Still frighteningly alive and well in modern-day Malawi. The mayo gem? Still very much in rude health in Madagascar.

      While we’d like to believe many of these myths – religious or otherwise – have died a death (along with believing women aren’t capable of doing loud smelly farts or pumping out logical thought), stories have a way of burrowing invisible roots deep into society. Even if there’s no basis for the prejudice or superstition, a grain of belief