This is probably the dumbest thing you ever heard of. With this new menstrual lunacy, feminism just sank a little bit deeper reaching an all time new “low.” Tired of feeling ashamed and ostracized by society for going through their monthly menstrual cycle, a Spanish female performance group has made a public statement by wearing white pants covered in menstrual blood stains. [1] The street performance titled “Sangre Menstrual”, literally translated as “menstrual blood”—is (believe it or not) a protest against the EVIL “patriarchal systems” that oppress women during her menstruation. [1] Sangre Menstrual wrote the manifesto to point out that, by attempting to hide our periods, a perfectly natural bodily function, we are participating in the patriarchal system and effectively punishing ourselves for being women. [3] Being viewed as unclean since biblical times, the group aims to “reclaim the female body and free normal bodily functions from shame and judgement”. [1] A statement from the “Manifesto for the Visibility of the Period” reads, “I stain [my pants], and it doesn’t make me sick. I stain [my pants] and I don’t find it disgusting”. The performance has created “larger debates surrounding reproduction and the female body.” [1] Like the feminist artist Barbara Kruger and her legendary print “Your Body Is A Battlefield,” the blood-stained performance aims to present the body as a political act of defiance. The manifesto states, “the visibility of the period [is meant] to increase the visibility of the body, as political space.” Do patriarchal, sexist institutions persist in part because of the repulsion with which we treat menstruation? [2] The stunt is the latest in a string of period protests – you might recall such performances as the Shark Week period rap; Petra Collins’ Period Power t-shirt for American Apparel; and who could forget last year’s vaginal knitting artwork by Casey Jenkins? (For 28 days, Jenkins knitted from menstrual blood-stained wool inserted into her vagina.) [5]
Gloria Steinam
In her crappy short essay “If Men Could Menstruate,” Gloria Steinam explores the so-called “sexism” behind this period-negativity. She asks, for example, why the ability to give life didn’t lead Freud to theorize about “womb envy” instead of penis envy. She also vividly constructs the world which would arise “if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not… Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much. Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood. Gifts, religious ceremonies, family dinners, and stag parties would mark the day… Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (“men-struation”) as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat (“You have to give blood to take blood”), occupy high political office (“Can women be properly fierce without a monthly cycle governed by the planet Mars?”), be priests, ministers, God Himself (“He gave this blood for our sins”), or rabbis (“Without a monthly purge of impurities, women are unclean”)… TV shows would treat the subject openly…Of course, intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical arguments. Without the biological gift for measuring the cycles of the moon and planets, how could a woman master any discipline that demanded a sense of time, space, mathematics– or the ability to measure anything at all? In philosophy and religion, how could women compensate for being disconnected from the rhythm of the universe? Or for their lack of symbolic death and resurrection every month?… In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician.” Read the full essay here! [3]
Do you think this event serves its purpose, or is it just a rather repulsive demonstration?
