COVER STORY

THIS LONG SENTENCE BEGINS WITH A PERIOD

“Ancient Greeks, the originators of modern medicine, labelled the female body as inferior, and the act of menstruation has been viewed as proof that women have troublesome physiology and are by nature dirty and toxic.” Image credit: ASHWINI CHAUDHARY on Unsplash.

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

The blurb on the cover describes Blood by Dr Jen Gunter as “the brilliant and long-needed corrective that we have waited for, since the first time we stuffed a box of pads into a three-ply paper bag and slunk out of a pharmacy. Never again.”

And yet, years of conditioning – generations of conditioning that is ingrained in us – is hard to shed. I can’t help but gasp as I begin the book. She’s writing about this, saying these things out loud?

Much like myself and my friends, Veena Dhar*, was raised in a progressive home. Her father is a physician and her mother taught economics at university. Just like at our homes, while they didn’t really talk about it, menstruation wasn’t a bad word. There were no taboos around what she could do or touch when she had her period.

Then she married into a home where there were.

“It was just one stop short of being banished to the outhouse – I should count myself lucky we didn’t have one!” she recalls with a rueful laugh.

Perveen Mistry wasn’t so lucky. The protagonist in The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey is inspired in part by the woman who made history as India’s first female attorney. Massey describes how a young, newly-married Perveen is secluded in a bare room for the length of her period by her mother-in-law.

It’s fiction, but the graphic details in the book set in the early 1900s are not so different from what Dhar says she was subjected to.

Her mother-in-law explained the custom of secluding women as a kind one, one that ensured they were given rest.

“I actually bought that tale until I realized that ‘rest’ needn’t come with being banned from entering the kitchen or touching anything. My dishes were kept separate and so was my bedding. I began taking pills to postpone my periods if they were going to clash with a puja because I couldn’t bear to be shut away with visitors there.”

On moving to Canada, and more so after the birth of her daughter, she put an end to the practice.

Have things changed since the early years of Dhar’s marriage?

Not so much, as movies like Pad Man show.

Millions of women around the world don’t have access to sanitary products and are still made to isolate themselves for days every month.

Dr Jen Gunter writes that the “Ancient Greeks, the originators of modern medicine, labelled the female body as inferior, and the act of menstruation has been viewed as proof that women have troublesome physiology and are by nature dirty and toxic. Many religions and cultures have long carried that same torch based on the erroneous belief of impurity and the idea that menstrual blood is filthy and contains actual toxins that poison the body (and especially men, if they were to touch it).”

Ancient Greeks, ancient religions and cultures... all that is behind us, surely?

Letters published in 1974 in The Lancet, a leading medical journal, hypothesized that there may be sound medical belief behind the notion that menstrual blood was toxic and that menstruating women could wilt flowers, she writes. In 1974.

A 21-year-old woman died of suffocation in a windowless “menstruation hut” after she lit a fire to keep warm. In 2019.

Many women suffering from severe premenstrual syndrome (PMS) were described as mad menstrual women in historical medical texts and “given all manner of awful therapies”. Image credit: KUNAL GOSWAMI on Unsplash.

Dr Gunter is here to try and change that. She wants to dispel the shame, mythology, and misinformation around menstruation with scientific facts, medical expertise, and a fierce feminist perspective.

While biologically, a period “is an evolutionary marvel, it is also a source of aggravation, pain and suffering for many, because retrofitting a body for a potential pregnancy and then bleeding for several days four hundred or so times over a lifetime can have medical consequences. At times, it can be a faulty system, but individual discomfort or injury isn’t evolution’s concern, and in fact, evolution’s motto might be best summed up as ‘good enough’.”

She employs a chatty style, writing about the things that many don’t take seriously enough, rather like a well-informed friend venting at the sheer stupidity of it all.

“For many years, studying the reproductive tract mattered mostly for improving pregnancy outcomes, rather than improving the lives of those who lived with those reproductive tracts.”

She shares her own experiences at different stages of her life frankly, and without being coy about body parts or bodily functions. Being caught unawares as a teenager at the onset of  a period while at school, for one. Her memory of offering a jacket to anyone you saw with bloodstains on their pants echoes mine in a different country at a different time – if you saw a girl walking around with her sweater tied around her waist, you knew.

Yes, she’s a gynaecologist, but women are used to even gynaecologists using terms like “that time of the month”.

While marvelling at the creativity behind expressions she’s come across – including Aunt Flo and the cure – and informing us that there are over 5000 euphemisms used around the world for menstruation – she’s quite clear about the fact that she doesn’t care for the term “hygiene products”.

Because menstruating is not unhygienic. Period.

Menstrual products, however, are big business.

Comparing the costs in the UK and US – between $12.50 and $13.25 a month, respectively – she makes a case for lowering the taxes on these products. And shares some interesting facts.

Among them:

• Kenya was the first to abolish a tax on menstrual products in 2004 and they are now tax-exempt in many countries including Canada and India.

• The first commercially produced disposable pads appeared in the late 1800s in the US and the first tampons were produced in 1931.

There are so many myths surrounding menstruation and Dr Gunter dispels several. The one about cycles syncing up for women who live in close proximity. Not true, no scientific basis to that belief. Women tend to remember the times the cycles happened to coincide and forget the times when they were on different schedules in what is a case of recall bias, she writes.

The onset of periods, heavy bleeding, hormones, mood swings, menopause and its many symptoms, Dr Gunter describes them all in clear, concise language.

Many women suffering from severe premenstrual syndrome (PMS) were described as mad menstrual women in historical medical texts and “given all manner of awful therapies”.

The good news? Two modern studies suggest that calcium carbonate might be effective in managing PMS. “In one study, they used Tums, an over-the-counter antacid – no expensive designer supplements needed.”

Who knew? Perhaps the right question also is, why didn’t we know?

When it comes to the correlation between menstruation and stress, most of us have heard that the stress of an exam can make you skip a period. As Dr Gunter writes, replace exam with a breakup or international travel or any potentially stressful situation and the result might be the same. This then, often, plays into the it’s-all-in-your-head response. However, the impact of stress on periods is real and complex, she writes.

Discussing the biology of pain, Dr Gunter sheds light on the painful reality of what she describes as an epidemic of under-treatment.

“Women’s pain is undertreated in general, as compared to men’s, but painful periods have historically been seen as a ‘woman’s thing’ and hence unimportant. Our patriarchal system has dismissed menstrual pain as both exaggerated and a sign of weakness.”

On alternative and naturopathic remedies, she gives the example of turmeric. Some people believe in the ancient therapy for pain but there are few conclusive studies.

Some options might work better than others, and she urges women to make informed choices. And  please don’t get your information from social media feeds! Dr Gunter takes on internet phenomena such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop, for one.

Ditto for diets.

Her take on “the myth of ancient wisdom” gives one pause for thought.

“One myth that many people who spread disinformation tie into is the idea of secret female knowledge: that ancient women had great herbal lore that could cure everything... It’s important to recognize that almost nothing written in ancient texts comes from women, so we know very little about what they thought. All we know is what men of the day claimed these women thought. We should also consider that any ancient therapies that actually worked as medicine have stuck around in one form or another: ginger is still used for nausea.”

Dr Gunter shares facts that should be obvious, but weirdly enough, come as a great revelation. Or at least as a case of, “Yeah, of course, now that you think about it!” Such as this: Menstruation is the only scarless healing in the human body.

Yikes! you might think, 400-plus pages of dense text on “The science, medicine, and mythology of menstruation”?

Dr. Jen Gunter is the bestselling author of The Vagina Bible and The Menopause Manifesto.  

Honestly, there could be more.

“There are so many things to learn and questions to answer, but eventually a book must end,” Dr Gunter writes. “My goal was to provide you with a solid background to help you better understand what is happening with your body and why.”

This is a book all women and their people should read.

* Name changed to protect identity.

Blood by Dr Jen Gunter is published by Random House Canada, $32.