Period Drama

Chris Bobel, in the “Radical Menstruation” chapter of her book New Blood, explores a punk-inspired feminist movement urging women to reclaim their bodies from corporations (among other things) that shame and harm them in direct and indirect ways. She talks about grassroots efforts to push back a capitalist agenda that inhibits women from being comfortable with and in control of their bodies.

Her mention of the exploitation of young girls through cheeky (yet extremely sanitized and trustworthy-sounding) advertising encouraging them to buy products she points out as harmful, is all too relevant and relatable. She notes that manufacturers often gear their advertising and packaging to a teenage audience, a large chunk of their market (108). Immediately, the classic happy-looking-conventionally-attractive-girl-doing-something-bold-in-all-white ad came to mind, along with an important revelation: A woman showing absolutely no outward sign of the process her body is undergoing. While this suggests happiness and perhaps comfort (thanks to the awesome product she’s using!!) on the woman’s part, the important thing here is that nobody knows she’s on her period, because it is supposed to be kept secret. The white skirt is meant to provoke fear in the viewer, maybe even awe and respect for the girl, a “She’s so bold! Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be if blood showed through!??!” response, because the manufacture relies on cultural stigma to sell products; it’s in their best interest to promote period shame. This concept is insidious because it is thinly veiled in the half-heartedly portrayed “we know periods are rough but we’ve got your back so you’ll be happy, especially because we won’t let your secret (literally) show” message, while also ignoring the reality of physical discomfort that can accompany a period, that a tampon or pad most certainly will not ease, and emphasizing that there should be absolutely no noticeable cues that a woman is menstruating.

1980 Advertisement 

Now’s the annoying (but in no way shocking) part: while searching the internet for the ad that I’d seen in a magazine several years ago that immediately popped into my mind when I read Bobel’s piece, I found an almost identical image, but it had circulated as an ad in the 1980s, disappointing proof that at least in the case of the feminine care industry, messages pertaining to how women should feel about their periods and methods of dealing with them haven’t changed at all. The advertisement from the 1980s is blantant with its assertion that periods are not something to be on display, captioned “With Stayfree Mini-Pads the only thing shows is your confidence,” implying that the knowledge of a well-hidden period empowers women because they don’t have to worry about bloody evidence betraying the shameful secret of their reproductive organs. The more recent ad- nearly identical in terms of visual content- for Tampax tampons, makes a jab at u by kotex’s branding techniques, something only women who had seen kotex ads and products would understand, saying “at a moment like this, I don’t care if my tampons came in a little black box,” meant to imply consumers of Tampax care more about functionality (and the reliability of the brand, though Bobel, and many of the people she interviewed would likely scoff at the concept of cooperations that use potentially dangerous materials in their products could in anyway be reliable) than they do cutesy packaging (maybe suggesting periods are decidedly not cute..)

Looks familiar... this ad from 2011 is written about on The Society For Menstrual Cycle Research's Website

The catchphrase on this ad leads me to my moment of pondering. It reads “outsmart mother nature,” a subtle argument that the natural process of menstruation is at best a nuisance, at worst some type of negative experience being forced on women by biology. This calls to mind Bobel’s juxtaposition of two understandings of periods: what she describes as the “feminist-spiritual” understanding of menstruation and the more radical view sometimes adopted by third-wave feminists that refutes the former’s tendency to attach periods to something mystical and distinctly feminine, instead viewing it only as “a bodily process” and nothing more, but being concerned with what it means in the context of larger institutions (100-103). 

This brings me to Dominque Christina’s “The Period Poem,” performed as slam poetry (video link here, transcript link here), with a message that embodies both concepts. She emphasizes her belief that women are “made of moonlight, magic, and macabre,” proclaiming that monthly encounters with blood bring insights about life (and perhaps death, too). She doesn’t see menstruation solely as a spiritual experience though, bringing in some of the concepts third-wave feminists would be more likely to find important in period discussions like a society in which some have “disdain for what a woman’s body can do,” along with touching on women’s basic human rights in her conclusion. I think the period can be understood through both lenses simultaneously, or just one way, but ultimately whatever way any menstruating person is comfortable with.  I find it hard to embrace just the radical view that Bobel documents one activist saying: “it is blood. Period. We bleed,” as it seems to minimize the body’s capabilities and also the experiences associated with the period, whether they’re bad, neutral, or good (100). Regardless of politics, I still find the body’s cyclical natural rhythm fascinating, along with this cycle’s possibility of supporting new life. I think it’s amazing on both biological and spiritual levels, and certainly not something to be disdained as Christina mentioned, or to be stigmatized and hidden. It is what it is to the individual experiencing it, and I think Bobel’s main point is just that; the period and its meaning belongs to the person, not the system.

Walking the Walk as a Woman

Walking the Walk as a Woman

(Or, Existing and Doing as a Gendered Human Form)

(Or, The Manslamming Debate: Is it Really an Issue of Voice?)

Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” for a discussion based on the human body, is philosophical, cerebral, maybe even a little existential… thinking about how you think about your body (and how you think about using your body and whether or not you apply those thoughts in your actions) can get a little overwhelming.

Young ponders women’s relationships with their bodies, in an attempt to understand more about why the manner in which we move and use our physical forms have come to be understood as so distinctly gendered. Young some verbs that make it onto the list of having particular characteristics described as feminine when a woman does them, including but not limited to run, throw, and hit (143).

While I found some of the questions Young posed intriguing, at many times I found her approach to answering them a bit too heady for me to be able to confidently understand or apply. My biggest source of confusion was perhaps the lack of attention to the structures that act on women in their life (I’m thinking sexist institutions.. etc). I couldn’t get a feel for if Young assumed that we as readers are already aware of how structurally engrained sexisms impacts women physically, or if maybe these structures are a result of some of the bigger philosophies about bodies she poses.. but wouldn’t aforementioned structures influence how we conceptualize our bodies whether or not we realize it??? These spiraling questions occurred a frequently during my reading process, so I found myself continually picking out a concept I believed I understood, and thinking more pragmatically about it, in ways that I could more easily comprehend and relate to. I took Young’s big philosophical ideas, and funneled down until I came to manageable concepts that I could myself mull over more thoroughly and expand on.

Young emphasizes that women position, move, use, and think about their bodies differently than men, but doesn’t say much about physical interactions between men and women that may indicate some type of gender dynamic playing out in the physical world. There is little mention of the role deeply embedded sexism and notions of patriarchy play in everyday life. For example, Young points out how women lack confidence in their physical capabilities, creating self-fulfilling prophecies of limited physical possibilities, while at the same time being afraid of getting hurt (144). These ideas of self-imposed restraints brought to mind Bartky’s discussion of women self-policing and “disciplining” their bodies to maintain adherence to expectations of femininity for fear of some type of punishment. Applying these theories helped me better grasp the practical consequences of what Young discusses, because her focus is on the body, yet I have a hard time talking about body in terms of gender without discussing the structural ideologies that influence our understandings and interactions with the world around us…

…This leads me to the “Manslamming” debate. The concept of physical existence and action got me thinking about space, and carrying our bodies through space, and interacting with other people carrying their bodies through space, and triggered a memory of a tweet I’d seen ages ago about men and women interacting while carrying themselves through said space. A Google search brought me the exact social media tidbit I remembered, and much more…I found numerous articles explaining a type of social experiment a woman conducted after noticing men not moving for others, seemingly using space for their bodies without regard to the people around them. According to New YorkMagazine’s The Cut, Beth Breslaw decided to adopt this “men’s” style of entitled walking for about a month, not moving when others approached on the sidewalks of New York City, and found she ran into men far more often than she ran into women, thus the term “manslamming” was born.

Things got interesting when I looked at other articles though. More than one refuted Breslaw’s assertions, saying both her results couldn’t be true, and that she was trying to hard to make public space interactions an issue of gender. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting to find anything challenging Breslaw and her motives and genuine concern for feminist causes when I looked into this story, and will admit again a feeling of surprise, and perhaps some disturbance when I read things like “I’m not saying sexism doesn’t exist. Of course it does — and that’s why it’s so important not to discredit the idea by making issues about gender when they’re not.” My main issue with this assertion from an article in the National Review, is that attacking women when they talk about personal experiences of sexism is dangerous as it has the potential to silence women for fear that their complaint is not valid, or worth the trouble of questioning it and challenging it by legitimizing it through communication of some sort. I’m equally thrown off by the authority this article gives itself in taking away Breslaw’s authority over her own experience; if they can claim Breslaw was biased and therefor most certainly wrong, aren’t we all bringing our own biases to everything we do? If so, how could this piece so immediately and decisively decide Breslaw is not only Wrong with a capital W, but bad for feminism? 

Another article I found on TheGuardian’s Women’s Blog does nearly the identical thing, saying Breslaw is guilty of “manstraining; the act of having to squint your eyes really hard to find an affront to your daily experience as a woman, despite so many bigger ones to battle.”  I found this particular article to be problematic too, for it dismisses and trivializes women’s lived physical experiences, claiming the woman who conducted the experiment (to be fair, the point that this is tough to scientifically call an experiment is valid, but the attack gets more aggressive..) was simply wanting attention, and would get it by finding trouble whether or not it existed. In some round about way, I think these arguments can be related to the topic they’re about.. manslamming is an issue of taking up space in the physical public, and isn’t publishing articles that make arguments an issue of voice taking up physical and virtually space in the public discourse? I think the right to space needs to be honored for women, for it seems in more than one aspect of life they are feeling told to move off the metaphorical sidewalk, shrink, and silence themselves…

Truth with a capital T

An apparent societal obsession with determining the “Truth” with a capital T – the type of universal fact that supposedly clears up complications, can be adhered to by all, and through logic soothes our aversion to the unknown – surrounds the way we talk about and treat bodies. Things either are or they aren’t. They’re male or they’re not male. They’re feminine or they’re not. It makes things easy, right? Right???

The absurdity of attempting to pigeonhole the beautifully complex human body into molds of normalcy emerges when we combine concepts of individual Truth with what limited knowledge we have about how our bodies work.  

In GenderQueer, Riki Wilchins argues for an individual truth that cannot be easily explained or categorized, noting “for nowhere are we more ourselves than in those small, private moments when we transcend the common reality, when we experience ourselves in ways that cannot be said or understood or repeated. It is to those moments that we are called, and it is to those moments that we must listen” (46). Wilchins makes the case for every individual to be their own authority in determining their Truth. Does this then challenge the importance (and even existence) of a larger Truth that can be applied to all?

It also begs the question though, of where we search for answers and why we seek to gain knowledge from particular sources. When it comes to bodies (especially sexual bodies), authorities have historically ranged from the church, medical professionals, and the law. In short, institutions. Institutions with social and cultural influence, either with agendas of their own, or under the influence or pressure of various other institutions or established belief systems.

Truth is understood as a prerequisite for reality, and thus legitimacy. In the case of the human body, reality and legitimacy and reality are closely associated with personhood, and with personhood, agency and rights. 

Institutions however, do not always acknowledge an individual’s very personal and very legitimate truth if it challenges dominant discourse and power structures, as illustrated through Caster Semenya’s treatment by international athletic governing bodies and the media.  Caster Semenya’s Truth is being a woman and being an internationally dominant athlete. Yet the aforementioned institutions don’t take her as the authority of her truth, because it does not fit their ideas of truth. They question how someone with high testosterone levels can identify and compete as a woman, because that person’s Truth regarding womanhood and athleticism does not match their Truth.

Jere Longman’s New York Times article describes the flip-flopping of medical communities and sports authorities and the unfair situations they have put Semenya and other athletes in. Longman brings up several important points, including the seemingly random ways certain athletes’ gender comes under scrutiny based on performance. As if women reaching a certain level violates a great Truth of sports; doing something women should not be able to do. Yet there’s more at play here, Longman notes, than Semenya’s gender, when he compares her feats with those of the English (and white) Paula Radcliffe, the world-record holder in the women’s marathon. Longman notes how Paula’s gender never came under fire, nor was she accused of doping despite how by the numbers, her time in her event is arguably more shocking than Semenya’s bests in the 800 meters. Longman’s article is valuable in that it does not treat Caster Semenya as a freak of nature who is hurting the sport and must be “figured out,” instead, situating her in the larger context of gender and race politics, while crediting her accomplishments on the track.

The Truth had always been that men had greater athletic ability than women, due much in part to testosterone. The Truth claimed some physical features and activities masculine, some feminine. The ruling that kept women with high testosterone from competing was made under this assumption, yet Truth has a way of evolving to put in nicely, or perhaps more accurately disintegrating when asked the right questions; at any rate, said ban was listed when the medical community (an authority) realized they didn’t know much about the subject. How, then, do such groups keep their position as guardians of Truth? Maintaining authority and legitimacy seems tough when there is constant shifting, backtracking, and misinterpretation involved.

Wilchins makes a good point about Truth of identity and the complications that occur when we are not the sole authority of our individual Truth, using the phrase “we learn to recognize and see ourselves in the mirrors of others’ eyes” (47). We’ve reached a point too, highlighted by Semenya’s situation, that others expect us to fit the ideas they’ve constructed for us based on their perceptions, creating confusion and unfairness for everyone. It doesn’t seem right that a legitimately universal Truth would squash someone’s voice, somehow saying that they’re experiences are not real, and even more damaging, not human.

A focus on big, societal, cultural, institutional Truths, seems like a forced (and perhaps it is pushed upon us by those in power to maintain particular ideologies..) and not nearly complex enough way of understanding human life, especially in relation to our bodies. Perhaps we should focus on the small truths (with a lowercase T, to emphasize it’s ability to change and inability to strictly govern) of our individual lives, and learn to live with a little uncertainty.