Guess what everybody!? It’s that glorious time of the lunar cycle where I shed my menses out into the ethereal material of the multiverse, painting the cosmos with cherry colored uterine debris. Aren’t you so excited to hear this!? That right now, at this very moment, I am leaking as if there were womb wine makers stomping their bare feet into my ovaries!
If you’re anything like me (and for you’re sake I will say prayers under Tibetan flags that you’re not), you might find yourself contemplating the nature of bloody vaginal secretions while sipping you’re morning tea. Why is it that ladies experience this delightful monthly ceremony where we have to curtsy to the gods of cotton, bowing to the soft snowy material in reverence for our dependence? It can’t just be because God’s punishing half of humanity for Eve’s original sin of tasting the forbidden fruit, especially because we can’t really blame her for the snake’s seduction. After all, apples are low calorie and you know how society likes to keep its women thin!
Is there some greater message to be received by these persistent periods beyond the body’s continual reminder of potential procreation?
You bet your sweet ass there is.
Your period is mother’s nature secret gift to us ladies. Don’t be jealous men – you have your phallic elements too, your towers that pierce the sky, missiles that blast through the air, and carrots that penetrate the earth. But Gaia has bestowed upon women this lovely bodily experience of bleeding through your pajamas, past your sheets, and deep into your mattress as a means to whisper into your ear canal a crucial lesson that must be remembered time and time again. A tap on the shoulder to activate awareness beyond the kerfuffle of dealing the accouterment of all the various devices we must use to catch, capture, and collect the shedding of our walls. Yes my friends, we must honor and praise the period because it does one thing to all of us that is actually vastly important to our psychological selves.
It makes us bitchy.
Why is this important you may wonder? Well, having to sleuth the arrival of my fallopian’s farewell to my unfertilized child has made me a detective of sorts, sorting out the emotional puzzle of the hormonal flooding inspired by the deluge of ruby fluid. Being a normally kind, tolerant, peaceful person, the gift of the bitchy rage that accompanies my yoni’s yawing is actually the KEY ingredient to unlocking a crucial side in my personality.
My period doesn’t feel the pressure to be conformist and come every 28 days like the rest of the periods. NO! My period is a rebel that challenges the confines of society and arrives whenever it pleases. This is not a status quo kind of period, but a revolutionary menstruation that wants to defy all laws of logic, physics, and convenience. As such, I never really know when this allusive period will arrive. It’s always lurking in the shadows of possibility, stealthily stalking my every move. I don’t have warning cramps to alert my body’s eco-system that it will momentarily be bombarded with bombs of red tissue. There is no alarm that goes off cautioning me of soon to be stained panties. But what does happen to me is that I start to feel a primordial fury about the horrors of humanity.
Now, if you know me, you know that I’m always talking about the patriarchy this, the patriarchy that, and blah blah blah the patriarchy. Yet I don’t always FEEL the abhorrent reality of how the world functions. I can simultaneously know that there is massive unnecessary suffering, yet still have a conversation about benign topics like putting butter in one’s coffee to still get high off caffeine, but not as high. Of course in the back of my mind there is always this persistent nagging that we are at 2 minutes on the doomsday clock, punching in for our ultimate peril – but I can still function like a relatively “normal” person and not scream “we’re all gonna die!” in the face of my green grocer.
Yet when I get my period, it’s as if all the social convention and historical expectation to be a “good girl” melts into the magma of my fiery blood. I no longer want to play nice or say nothing when a man looks me in my face and questions if gender even matters for women anymore. That side of me that is accommodating, overly cautious, and afraid to make others uncomfortable suddenly flies out the window like a pad with wings. My period awakens the kraken inside that yearns to speak my truth and say things like, “Hey dude, why don’t you shut the fuck up before I plug up your mouth hole with my tampon.” But, don’t worry; I would never actually do that because I don’t wear tampons… but come to think of it, I could just free bleed onto his face, which would have the same effect.
I’m just spit-balling here!
Men may wonder why women get so “emotional” during their periods, and not to be gendered or anything, but it is a biological difference that is significant to the female experience. Not that men don’t get their “Manses” because they do, but the influence of my period on my behavior is significant enough to reshape my days, and define my time.
The reason why I get an attitude is because my period is an unveiling of reality. The hormonal spikes are my body’s way of taking off the blinders of thousands of years of the conditioning women. The rose tinted glasses become flooded with a crimson tide, and I’m reminded how women’s bodies have been used and abused. I recall that women are raped, killed, and tortured because of wars waged by men. I remember how the violence inflicted on the environment is caused by a patriarchal system of economics devised by the fathers of the state, and controlled by the titans of industry.
I’m not shitting on all men. Of course not! So many men have honorary periods where they too feel the horror of the elevator in The Shining reenacted in their underpants… metaphorically of course. For those men I lovingly extend my panty liner, and fill their hearts with the contents of my diva cup. Those glorious males, or gender fluid people who like me, feel the oppression and confines of society and desperately seek another way. When I talk of the patriarchy it’s not about men vs woman but rather an acknowledgement that a system that’s benefited few men has a vast influence on all of humanity’s organizing principals from religion, to capitalism, to war, to the insatiable thirst for power. This masculine way of ruling is not about all men, but the definition of masculinity that glorifies violence towards women, and the planet.
So that’s why we are bitchy. We see the truth for one week of every month. We feel the pain of our “president” saying he’s not a feminist, meaning he doesn’t believe in equal rights for women. The period is that special time that chips away at the pressures the patriarchy has put on us women to just shut up and take it. That’s why as women get older, and have had more and more periods to scrape away the mind control, we start to rebel more and shave our armpits less. As a young woman I tolerated things I never would today because my menses has rewired my brain over the years to say, “Hey Toni, you actually don’t have do things you don’t want to.” Our periods are a secret sacrament that engages our souls and remind us that we should be fighting against the crimes against us. Then, after 5-7 days the veil comes back up and we smile, make you a sammich, and suck your dick again.
