By Lester Andrist

I remember walking to class one morning as a 10-year-old boy, and for no particular reason, my gaze drifted from the open door of my classroom to my right, just in time to catch a classmate exiting the girl’s restroom. It was a split second glance into the forbidden zone, and something fluttered in my stomach as though I was stealing a glance at a confidential file or listening in on a private conversation.  Why, I wondered, was the mirror in the girl’s restroom twice as large as the mirror in the boy’s restroom? A more pressing question was to the nature and purpose of that large white box bolted to the side of the bathroom wall.

Whatever goodies that glorious white box dispensed, I decided that the facilities, and indeed the experience of using the girl’s restroom were irrefutably better than could be had in the boy’s restroom. Some time later, I pieced together enough information to conclude that the box held a supply of tampons or menstrual pads, which had something to do with women and their periods. As to how often girls used these soft cotton marvels of technological innovation was a complete mystery, and I knew even less about how they used them.

That fleeting glance of the white box that day stirred my curiosity, but somehow I intuitively understood that to broach the topic of women’s menstruation was to risk embarrassment, so I never brought it up. I eventually learned the basic mechanics of an average menstrual cycle, but it wasn’t until after high school that I developed some very close relationships with women, and through our conversations, I was finally able to name this bizarre mystique surrounding the topic of menstruation.

I’ve always been a curious guy, so it’s fitting that I became a sociologist. As a sociologist, I’ve recently been thinking about just how pervasive this fear of menstruation is in American society. I’m wondering why it exists at all. One could look at Hollywood movies as a rough gauge the ubiquity of the fear. The kinds of stories we transform into blockbuster movies, and even the jokes we tell in those movies, say a lot about our society. Take, for instance, the popular 2007 film Superbad, starring Jonah Hill as Seth. In one memorable scene, Seth finds himself dancing close to a woman at a party and accidentally winds up with her menstrual blood on his pant leg. READ MORE… »