If you’re grossed out by periods, you might want to skip this post. Or, since menstruation is a perfectly normal biological function, maybe you should read this post and contemplate why it is you’re grossed out by periods.

My schoolmates and I hurried up the gangway of the Lady Baltimore with the loud, obnoxious swagger that is universal to groups of hormonally-charged 13-year-olds. We were almost done with our last year of middle school, many of us were fresh from our bar and bat mitzvahs, and summer was beckoning us. As Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff said in that year’s summer anthem (already on heavy rotation on our local radio station): “Every moment frontin and maxin/ Chillin in the car they spent all day waxin/ Leanin to the side but you can’t speed through/Two miles an hour so everybody sees you/There’s an air of love and of happiness/And this is the Fresh Prince’s new definition of summer madness”

Profound, I know. It was 1991.

As I stepped onto the deck of the ship, a faint ache in my abdomen tugged at me. I had noticed the pain earlier in the day as I skipped up the stairs of the State House, along with a slightly wet feeling in my underwear. I figured I was just feeling a little sea-sick after the long boat-ride, and the warm spring sun was making me not-so-fresh. I shrugged off the discomfort and sought out my small group of friends.

About twenty minutes later, I was leaning on the rails of the observation deck, looking out at the Chesapeake Bay, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see my friend Rose with a look of mild distaste and concern on her face. She leaned in and whispered:

“You need to go to the bathroom. You’re…leaking.”

I looked at her quizzically. Leaking? What did she mean? I couldn’t have wet myself…I was in 8th grade, for God’s sake!

“Your period. You got your period. It’s…all over your butt.”

I craned my neck to see what she was talking about. There it was: a large red stain decorated the seat of the new white jeans shorts my grandmother had given me.

My period. I had my period. Like, for real.

I glanced past Rose to discover Jessica Freidman and her group of Jewish American Royalty smirking at me and cackling. Oh, God. This was bad. This was tragic.

Rose followed closely behind to help shield everyone from a view of my bleeding backside as I rushed to the tiny galley bathroom. I closed the door quickly behind me, pulled down my stained white shorts, stripped off my soaked-through underpants and threw them into the garbage after attempting to rinse them off in the bathroom sink to no avail.

I sank down onto the toilet and felt the flow of blood dripping into the water. I was dazed.

My first period wasn’t supposed to happen this way. It was supposed to be like Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret: I was supposed to wake up in the morning, discover blood on the toilet paper, shyly declare my discovery to my mother, who was to take me by the shoulders, look me in the eye and announce “You’re a woman now.” I was supposed to glow with a quiet sense of momentous pride.

I wasn’t feeling proud. I was feeling disgust and shame and betrayal. My body had betrayed me.

There was a knock on the door: Rose had gotten one of the chaperone moms. She poked her head into the bathroom to see me sitting helplessly on the toilet without any pants on. My eyes filled with tears at the sight of her.

“Oh, honey. It’ll be okay. I’ve got a tampon for you.”

A tampon? Oh, God.

I flashed back to 5th grade, when my best friend Dayle and I got a hold of her older sister’s box of Super Plus Tampax and dared each other to try one out, just to see what it was like. The huge, dry cotton cylinder had gotten stuck in my non-menstruating pre-pubescent vaginal canal, and I spent the rest of the night locked in Dayle’s bathroom, panicked and tugging at the unyielding blue string.  Eventually, the tampon came out, but I had vowed to never use such an evil contraption once I started my period.

The mom must have seen the fear in my eyes, because she said “Don’t worry, sweety. You’ll still be a virgin.”

Oh, no. I hadn’t even thought about the de-virginizing factor. But they had already told us in health class that tampons don’t pop your cherry, so I wasn’t overly concerned.

I realized that the tampon was my only option at this point. My soiled panties were at the bottom of a trashcan, and my flow was strong enough to soak through a wad of toilet paper in minutes.

So I took the Playtex from the hand she had stuck into the bathroom and as I unwrapped it, she insisted on bellowing instructions through the cracked door despite my assurances that I knew what I was doing. As I began to insert the tampon, she said “Now when it’s time for you to take it out, just pull on the string and…go with the flow.”

After the tampon had been inserted, I put my stained shorts back on. I washed my hands and opened the bathroom door.

My entire 8th grade class was waiting for me. Every single one of them. A member of the Jewish American Royalty clique began the slow clap. The gradual applause full of contempt and mockery caught on until almost every member of Pikesville Middle School’s graduating class was clapping and hooting and laughing.

“GO WITH THE FLOW!” some of them chanted. “GO WITH THE FLOW!”

Someone gave me a sweatshirt to tie around my waist. Someone escorted me to a table in the deserted galley, far from the rest of the kids. Someone, I think it was my friend Jeannie, sat with me and acted like a security guard every time a kid passed my table to sneer and toss an insult my way.

“Leave her alone,” Jeannie would say. But my humiliation was much too succulent for hormonally-charged 13-year-olds to pass up. They circled me like sharks, darting in every once in a while to take a bite out of my self-esteem. Thank God I only had a month of school left with those monsters.

But every month, for years after that incident, I would feel a mixture of disgust and shame at the sight of my blood on the toilet paper. And then I would feel betrayed by my body.

My Body Wasn’t the Problem

Now, after my body has contributed two boys to this world, I feel betrayed by the culture of shame and taboos that surround menstruation.

I feel bemused that despite having been witness to the birth of both of my children, despite having seen my body at its most vulnerable and its most intimate, my husband still feels embarrassed or somehow emasculated about picking up feminine products from the grocery store.

I feel sickened that someone who considers himself qualified to lead the free world felt it acceptable to imply that a female journalist who asked tough debate questions had “blood coming out of her…wherever”. Because only a hormonally deranged bitch would dare challenge The Donald.

I have something to confess: I was overly ambitious in thinking I could cover the history of menstrual hygiene in just one post. I’ve had a blast doing the research on this topic and have  some juicy tidbits I want to share with you (hmmm juicy tidbits just doesn’t sound quite right within the context of menstrual history, does it?). 

So this will be a four-part weekly series. The first part will discuss how women from prehistory through Ancient Egypt handled menstrual hygiene. Here we go!

The vagina: portal of life, tunnel of love, channel of feminine power. The fleshy, cave-like canal from the womb has been a source of fear, awe, disgust, lust, and fascination for centuries. And for centuries, humanity has sought to tame it, to cover it, to disguise it, to clean it up, and to plug it.

If you consider the time and money invested toward menstrual hygiene, you’d think it’s one of the great problems we must confront as humanity. More man-(and woman-) hours have been devoted to inventing the perfect feminine hygiene product than to developing sustainable energy sources. More marketing dollars are invested in selling tampons (which is a $2.85 billion market) than in increasing awareness about women’s health issues.

So: just what have we come up with as a species to battle the pervasive (and staining) nature of menstrual blood and other feminine fluids? Here’s how our foremothers have handled their monthlies over the flow of time. (PS, if period puns give you the cramps, you’ll want to close this page now).

Pre-history: The Woman Cave

The human female menstrual cycle is nearly unique in the animal world. Most female mammals have a period of estrus (aka “heat” or “horniness”) shortly after ovulation which makes them sexually responsive, but the luteal phase (aka “messy, drippy time”) after estrus generally involves little to no bleeding. In fact, most mammals re-absorb their uterine lining during a process called “covert menstruation.” Among primates, humans and chimpanzees shed the most amount of endometrial tissue (aka uternine lining, aka menstrual blood) for the longest period of time.

Our primate cousins have a thick thatch of fur surrounding their lady-bits to catch menstrual blood (as do we, but our furry thatches tend to get bush-whacked according to the changing beauty standards of our societies) but it’s fairly uncommon to witness a chimp in full flow. That’s because most female apes who have reached reproductive maturity spend the majority of their adult lives either pregnant or lactating (natural menstrual suppressants), so they don’t get their periods nearly as many times as we do.

Among the Dogon people of Mali (often cited by anthropologists as one of the closest modern examples of a stone-age society), women of child-bearing age have as few as 100 periods in their lifetimes as opposed to the modern Western woman’s average 300-500 times. When she isn’t carrying a baby in her womb or a nursling on her hip, a menstruating Dogon woman can be found free-bleeding in a menstrual hut, cut off from the common areas of her village and only permitted to participate in agricultural work.

But not all prehistoric or pre-technological societies resorted to letting their women drip into the dirt. Feminist cultural theorist Judy Grahn has suggested that the first pieces of clothing invented by prehistoric peoples were menstrual belts with a soft fiber pad to capture menstrual blood. The purpose of the menstrual belts wasn’t to maintain cleanliness, but to collect the blood for use in religious rites. Gives a whole new meaning to “liquid gold,” doesn’t it?

Here’s part 2 of my series on the history of menstrual hygiene. If you want to start from the beginning, you can visit my first post, The History of Menstrual Hygiene From Free-Bleeding to Flow-Tracking Apps.

When we last saw our heroines, they were in Ancient Egypt plugging their cha-chas with tampons made of papyrus. No wonder the Egyptians walked like that.

Now we’ll hitch a chariot to the Greek and Roman Empires to see how our pagan sisters handled their flows.

What Was Happening Under Their Togas? The Women of Antiquity

Ancient Greek and Roman women commonly used discarded cloths to soak up their monthly menses. In Greek, the word for any rag is rakhoi; there’s no word specific to rags used for menstruation. In Latin, pannus menstruus describes a woman’s homemade menstrual cloth.

Let’s talk for a moment about ancient bad-ass Hypatia of Alexandria. As a great scholar of philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics, Hypatia was the Neil deGrasse Tyson of the 5th century (or is Neil deGrasse Tyson the Hypatia of the 21st century?). Young male students fought to attend her lectures not only because her of her beautiful mind, but also because she was easy on the eyes. In fact, one student developed a passionate infatuation with her and, to her annoyance, attempted to court her.

Here’s how it went down, according to legend (with a little interpretive help from yours truly):

Student: Damn, teacher lady! You are soooo fine! Let’s play satyrs and nymphs!

Hypatia: Thanks, but I’ll pass.

Student: Oh, come on. I saw you gaze seductively into my eyes during your lecture on the constellations. Our coupling is written in the stars.

Hypatia: Dude. It’s a public speaking technique. I made eye contact with each student in the amphitheatre. I’m just not that into you.

Student: But I need to see what’s under that toga!

Hypatia: Ok, fine. You want to see what’s under here? Here you go.

Student: What are these? And why are they red? Ermergerds. Are these–?

Hypatia: Yep. Them’s muh period rags. Still want to get up on this?

Student: Um. Ew. Nope. I’ll pass.

Hypatia: That’s what I thought. I’ll go back to being celibate now.

Aaand “scene.”

Let’s just hope that our 21st century Hypatia—er, Neil deGrasse Tyson—doesn’t meet the same end as his 5th century counterpart:

In 415 CE, as tensions between the Roman, Christian, and Jewish residents of Alexandria peaked, an elderly Hypatia found herself seized by an angry mob of Christian fanatics. They accused her of using witchcraft and counseling Orestes, Roman governor of Alexandria, to cut ties with Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria and impose strict limits on Christian and Jewish participation in public ceremonies (none of these accusations were substantiated). The mob dragged her to a church, stripped her naked, and according to 5th century historian Socrates Scholasticus, used pot-shards to flay her alive.