![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.bepreparedperiod.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/Silhouette-woman1.jpg?ssl=1\" "\\"Silhouette")
<\/a>Whatever goodies that glorious white box dispensed, I decided that the facilities, and indeed the experience of using the girl\u2019s restroom were irrefutably better than could be had in the boy\u2019s 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 <\/em>they used them.<\/p>\nThat fleeting glance of the white box that day stirred my curiosity, but somehow I intuitively understood that to broach the topic of women\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always been a curious guy, so it\u2019s fitting that I became a sociologist. As a sociologist, I\u2019ve recently been thinking about just how pervasive this fear of menstruation is in American society. I\u2019m 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<\/em>, 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. A group of boys at the party spot the blood, deduce the source, and one by one, they buckle in laughter. Seth is humiliated by what is supposed to be an awkward adolescent moment, but he\u2019s also gagging uncontrollably from his own disgust.<\/p>\n This film\u2019s commercial success suggests it resonated with a broad swath of the American public. I would argue that the humor in this party scene worked in particular because it drew on widely shared ideas about menstruation as something capable of both contaminating and humiliating a person. We Americans laughed at this scene because from a cultural standpoint, we\u2019re in on the joke. We understand the awkwardness.<\/p>\n Long before me, feminists have noted that the all-too-common fear of menstrual contamination and the shame of failing to manage the menstrual flow are deeply held ideas rooted in patriarchy. That some men involuntarily gag at the mere thought of menstrual blood is evidence that the natural human experience of menstruation has been successfully re-imagined in American society as a kind of pathology. But I think it is important to remember, that women bear the brunt of this ideology. After all, women\u2019s bodies are pathologized, not men\u2019s.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to note that this pervasive fear of menstruation also fuels a multi-billion dollar industry, which produces and markets hundreds of products designed to manage and even suppress menstruation (e.g., Lybrel and Seasonique). In an interview about her recent book, New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation<\/em>, sociologist Chris Bobel nicely articulates the connection between menstrual anxiety and corporate profit:<\/p>\n The prohibition against talking about menstruation\u2014shh\u2026that\u2019s dirty; that\u2019s gross; pretend it\u2019s not going on; just clean it up\u2014breeds a climate where corporations, like femcare companies and pharmaceutical companies, like the makers of Lybrel and Seasonique, can develop and market products of questionable safety. They can conveniently exploit women\u2019s body shame and self-hatred. And we see this, by the way, when it comes to birthing, breastfeeding, birth control and health care in general. The medical industrial complex depends on our ignorance and discomfort with our bodies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Bobel\u2019s analysis helps make sense of why I felt so certain at the ripe old age of 10 that I couldn\u2019t ask anyone about the tampon dispenser on the wall. By then, I had already internalized the patriarchal notion that women\u2019s menstruation is a potential source of shame, or at least that my interest in it would be shameful. Nearly three decades later, when discussing the topic with my students in the introduction to sociology class I teach, I invariably get asked why\u2014given all we know about the natural, reproductive purpose of the menstrual cycle\u2014do we persist in attaching shame and embarrassment to this experience? In order to understand why, I think we need to critically examine the way patriarchy is entangled with capitalism. As Bobel also notes, it is profitable to peddle the patriarchal idea that women\u2019s bodies are potentially dangerous well springs of shame. Femcare companies and the advertising firms they hire devote enormous resources toward replenishing this well of menstrual anxiety, thereby ensuring women continue to purchase a host of products all designed with the intent of managing their menstrual flow or even stopping it all together.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, quelling the persistence of these very problematic ideas about women and menstruation is a tall order. If my argument is that it is untenable for advertising firms to effectively tell women they must<\/em> use femcare products to avoid shame, then it is equally untenable for me\u2014especially as a man\u2014to tell women they shouldn\u2019t<\/em> use certain femcare products. Instead, my hope is that both women and men can become better educated consumers of the media and the messages it deploys.<\/p>\n Lester Andrist<\/a> <\/em><\/strong> is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. In addition to writing his dissertation, he teaches an introductory sociology course and will soon be stealing as much time as he can for hiking and mountain biking. He’s a regular blogger and editor at The Sociological Cinema<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, which is a site he co-created to help sociology instructors engage their students with visual media.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s restroom. It was a split second glance into the forbidden zone, and something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[185,23,186,25,187,39,188,189,76,190,100,26,50,28,191,62,65,192],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-periodtalk","tag-femcare","tag-feminine-hygiene","tag-lester-andrist","tag-menstrual","tag-menstrual-blood","tag-menstrual-cycle","tag-menstrual-flow","tag-menstrual-pads","tag-menstrual-period","tag-menstrual-shame","tag-menstruating","tag-menstruation","tag-period","tag-periods","tag-suppress-menstruation","tag-tampon","tag-tampons","tag-the-sociology-cinema"],"yoast_head":"\n