MENSTRUAL CRAMPS ARE REAL: A SLAP IN THE FACE
As soon as Judy saw the faint brown stains on her panties she brought the undergarment to her mother. All her friends had their periods and she had been dying to get hers too. "Well, this is the beginning of your womanhood, Judy. You're finally growing up," said her mother as she looked at the soiled white cotton. Then, for no apparent reason, Judy's mother gently slapped her on the side of her face. Judy wondered if she had done something wrong, but no, then her mother hugged her and brought her up to the master bedroom where a box of Kotex was being saved for this moment.
It took years, but by the time she told the story to her doctor, Judy had learned that the slap was a time-honored custom. Her mother had simply been carrying out a tradition, but neither she nor her mother had known what the slap was supposed to mean. It was Judy's grandmother, the matriarch of the family, who finally explained that the slap was intended to bring good health. For generations, menstruation must have been regarded as a sickness.
Today, with all our increased knowledge about women's bodies, most people know that menstruation is a natural process and not a disease, but it still continues to be shrouded in mystery. Contemporary mothers are slapping their daughters and performing all sorts of ritualistic acts that have been passed down through the centuries.
One can understand how menstruation might have originally been considered a weird or magical event. Imagine primitive man watching primitive woman bleed for five days without dying. He must have been totally awed and frightened. And there probably wasn't any connection made to the fact that the reason a lot of the tribeswomen weren't bleeding was because they were constantly pregnant or breastfeeding. But then one has to wonder why all those primitives didn't notice that the animals bled too, at least when they were in heat.
Anyway, civilization progressed, but not the facts about menstruation. It seems logical that the word menstruation would come from the Latin word mens, meaning "month," until you realize that month is a derivation of moon and that in Greek moon is mene. The ancients were still identifying the monthly cycle as something cosmically controlled, like the phases of the moon. Thus, the interpretations of menstruation are mind-boggling.
A number of religions which remain with us today viewedand sometimes still viewthis very healthy and natural occurrence as repugnant. When Moslem women are menstruating, they are not allowed to enter mosques. Women of Greek Orthodox faith, early in this century, were forbidden communion during their menstrual periods. At one time in the Catholic church's history, intercourse during menstruation was a sin. Even though menstruation gives a woman a wondrous internal cleansing, in the orthodox Jewish faith a woman's "clean" days are after her period, when she is immersed in a purifying bath. Women's bodies have been featured in an enormous number of myths and misconceptions.
And Freud, with his ridiculous "penis envy" theory, furthered misunderstanding. Paula Weideger in her book Menstruation & Menopause explains that according to Freud, menstruation, like loss of virginity, childbirth, and menopause, is a time that a woman becomes Furious because she doesn't have a man's penis. "Freud, then, believed that banishing a woman from sight, forbidding her to touch utensils shared with a man, or prohibiting sexual relations between man and menstruating woman are rational actions that men must take to protect themselves. The menstrual taboo spares man from witnessing the rage of woman's castration anxiety, and from being reminded of his own castration anxiety, which would be elicited by the sight of genital bleeding."
Menstruating women have been blamed or credited for everything from blight to harvests of plenty, from causing death to curing illness. Through it all, women have remained silent. The hush falls on the pages of My Mother/My Self when Nancy Friday describes the day she started menstruating and the way her mother skidded around the subject. "She caught me off guard with a new voice: 'Well, how does it feel to be a woman?' ... I leaned far out the car window, my pigtails flying behind. My answer was appropriately lost in the wind. They were the last words my mother was to utter on the subject. ... I am still working on her question about how it feels to be a woman. But I never have understood the secrecy about menstruation."
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Women's Health