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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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cal thunderstorms flickering over the desert. The more advanced the pregnancy, the more insistent these so-called Braxton Hicks contractions become. Mother of goddess, how extraordinary it is! Your belly is swelling, and you think, I will explode, I am a supernova. And then contractions seize you up and you think, No, I will collapse, I am a giant black hole.
The uterus grows. The uterus retreats. It is not unlike the heart, a large, powerful muscle that swells, shrinks, twitches, and bebops. Oscillations and deep rhythms are the source of life, the principle of life; even cells work through pulsatile mechanisms. When radio astronomers first discovered pulsating signals coming from a distant neutron star, they thought they were detecting a message from an alien civilization. What but other living beings could emit such rhythmic signals? Only when the scientists determined that the signals were too regular, too mechanical, for life did they trace their source to the spinning core of the ultradense neutron star. If we respond to music viscerally, it is because our viscera are the original percussionists, and the heart and the uterus are among the most perceptible of our natural pacemakers.
Beyond rhythmicity, the heart and the uterus share another quality, their association with blood. Not all women breed, but nearly all women bleed, or have bled. Jane Carden said that she regretted her inability to menstruate far more than she did her inability to become pregnant. In that way alone did she feel she was missing something extraordinary about the female odyssey. And she was. There is no clearer rite of passage, no surer demarcation between childhood and adulthood, than menarche, the first period. When people talk of the indelibility of a strong memory, they speak of recalling exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot or the
Challenger
space shuttle exploded. But what a woman really remembers is her first period; now there's a memory seared into the brain with the blowtorch of high emotion. With some exceptions, a girl loves getting her first period. She feels as though she has accomplished a great thing, willed her presence into being. Emily Martin interviewed a number of women from different social classes about their thoughts on menstruation, and all gave joyful accounts of menarche. One recalled bursting into song in the bathroom. Another rushed to tell her girlfriends in the school cafeteria that her period had just started, and they responded with a small

 

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celebration, buying her ice cream. Those who are too shy to celebrate publicly rejoice internally. In her diary, Anne Frank referred to those early periods of hers and early ones is all she lived to have as her "sweet secret." If a gift has cramps, she may even love them at first. They are proof of her body's power, the muscular flexes propelling her toward a destiny that looks, for the moment, as bright and as important as blood.
After the heady triumph of menarche, most of us soon begin thinking of menstruation as a hassle, a mess, an embarrassment. We try to be cavalier, and we try to scold ourselves into pragmatism, yet still we feel uncomfortable paying for a box of tampons or napkins when the salesclerk is male. There are innumerable myths and taboos surrounding menstruation, some, not surprisingly, attributable to our familiar medicine men, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen (most easily remembered by the acronym HAG). Hippocrates argued that fermentation in the blood precipitated menstruation, because women lacked the male ability to dissipate the impurities in the blood gently and sweetly through sweat; to him, menstrual blood had a "noisome smell." Galen believed that menstrual blood was the residue of blood in food that women, having small and inferior bodies, were unable to digest. Aristotle assumed that menses represented excess blood not incorporated into a fetus.
The notion that menstrual blood is toxic has pervaded human thinking, west to east, up to down. Given the noxious fumes they exude, menstruating women have been said to make meat go bad, wine turn sour, bread dough fall, mirrors darken, and knives become blunt. Menstruating women have been confined to huts, to home, to anywhere but here. Some anthropologists have suggested that hunting societies have been particularly stringent in keeping women quarantined during their monthly flow, in part because of fears that menstrual odor attracts animals. Even today, women are warned not to go camping in grizzly country if they are menstruating, lest a very large ursine nostril pick up the scent. Whether the warning has merit remains unclear. When biologists in North Carolina recently tried to determine the best way to lure a bear, they found menstrual blood to be of almost no use. Some men, bearlike or otherwise, claim that they can smell when a woman is on her period, but no study has ever borne out that charming if rather smug

 

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conviction, and this writer has certainly not found it to be true even when cohabiting with said sensitive fellows. Certainly men who continue to hold ritualistic prejudice against menstruation don't rely on their olfactory powers to distinguish the clean from the soiled. It is not unusual for an Orthodox Jewish man, for example, to refuse the ministrations of a female physician, on the chance that the doctor may be menstruating and pollute him more profoundly than the disease from which he suffers.
In fairness, views of menstruation have not been uniformly negative, and the same potent ingredients that menstrual blood supposedly carries have on occasion been considered therapeutic. Moroccans have used menstrual blood in dressings for sores and wounds, while in the West blood has been suggested as a treatment for gout, goiter, worms, and, on the theory of using fire to fight fire, menstrual disorders. The ancient practice of bloodletting, which dominated medicine for hundreds of years, may well have been a mimic of menses, although the fact that women shed blood naturally did not spare them from extraphysiologic drainings whenever they fell ill.
We may be amused or angry at the variations on the theme of the bloody succubus, but how much better are we? We modern women too think of menstrual blood as dirty, much filthier than blood from a cut on the arm; which would you rather put in your mouth? Camille Paglia, that most noisome and antifeminist of self-proclaimed feminists, expressed in her book
Sexual Personae
an attitude toward menstruation that is no more inspired than the HAG's. "Menstrual blood is the stain, the birthmark of original sin, the filth that transcendental religion must wash from man," she writes. "Is this identification merely phobic, merely misogynistic? Or is it possible there is something uncanny about menstrual blood, justifying its attachment to taboo? I . . . argue that it is not menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imagination unstanchable as that red flood may be but rather the albumin in the blood, the uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea. We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself." Placental jellyfish? Forget the menstrual hut this woman needs to be confined to an aquarium.
We also have dwelled overmuch on the negatives of menstruation

 

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and premenstruation: the headaches, the weepiness, the sore breasts, the pimples. We have turned premenstrual syndrome into a distinct genus in the taxonomy of psychiatry, right up there with panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive behavior. We suspect that women may be slightly less competent right around the time of their periods' onset. And yet the opposite may be true. As Paula Nicholson has pointed out, empirical research suggests that "the premenstrual phase of the cycle is frequently accompanied by heightened activity, intellectual clarity, feelings of well-being, happiness and sexual desire." This is an empire I can vouch for. One of my most beautiful memories of college is of a day when my period was due but hadn't yet arrived. I was sitting in my living room, studying, and I felt an unaccountable surge of joy. I looked up from my book and was dazzled by the air. It was so clear, so purely transparent, that the objects in the room were sharply etched and proud against it, and yet it was as though I could see the air for the first time. It had become visible to me, molecule for molecule. My mind was focused and free of anxiety. I felt for a moment as though I had taken the perfect drug, the one that has yet to be invented; call it Liberitium or Creativil.
My enthusiasm quickly vanished, and I couldn't recapture these sensations in subsequent periods. It was the 1970s, and feminists were trying to create a woman's-eye mythology and, among other things, to give menstruation a good name, but I couldn't help greeting their efforts with a sneer. They were, as I'm sure my daughter will say to me someday, so
twentieth-century
. An instructor in my women's studies class, for example, suggested that we students all trade in our tampons for napkins over the next few months, the better to feel the process of menstruation, to go with the flow, as it were. Phooey, I thought. Women have been wearing tampons for at least three thousand years; the ancient Egyptians wrote about what sound like early tampons, and so did our father of the tentacled uterus, Hippocrates. I didn't take my teacher's advice, then or since. I'd been delighted when my mother let me switch from pads to tampons when she was assured by some doctor, I think, that tampons are safe for a young gift and her hymen and I was not about to return to the awkwardness of a cotton football between the legs.
Nonetheless, I believe there should be a woman-centered myth of menstruation, a construct of our shared feminine low-giene some-

 

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thing on a par with the male pissing ritual, perhaps. Men obviously find their upstanding approach to urination manly, amusing, and potentially seditious, or the public urinal scene would not be such a fixture of film and television. Emily Martin has described menstruation's potential to foment rebellion and solidarity, offering as it does an excuse for wage-earning women to retreat to the one place where their male managers cannot follow. "In early twentieth-century documents," she writes, "there are scattered references to groups of two or three girls frequently found in the washroom 'fussing over the universe' . . . a girl sobbing in the washroom over her stolen wages and girls reading union leaflets posted in the washroom during a difficult struggle to organize a clothing factory." Let us again retire to the chamber for some universal fussing and fomenting. Let us overthrow the lore, the idiocy, and the Paglian prissiness that surround menstruation and found a myth on reality. How and why do we bleed? Why have we evolved the cycle of endometrial death and renewal? Surprisingly enough, that question was not asked until recently, and the quest for an answer is still very much alive. In exploring origins, we may find new blood.
Menstruation is the way that we first experience the uterus, and if we are Western women who have small families, we experience the uterus thusly 450 to 480 times in a lifetime. During the average period, we cast off a volume of material amounting to about six tablespoonfuls, or three fluid ounces, half of it blood, the other half the shed endometrial layers, along with vaginal and cervical secretions. Most of us think of menstruation as a passive business, decay aided by gravity. The uterine lining builds up and awaits the sacred blastocyst that would be a baby; if none appears, the lining disintegrates and falls away like so much mildewed wallpaper. The active process, we imagine, is the anticipatory phase of the menstrual cycle, a time of anabolism, the plumping up of the endometrium with tissue and nutrients that occurs in concert with the ripening of the egg. If nothing happens to keep anabolism alive, if conception and implantation do not happen and the lining is no longer needed to feed the baby, then activity ceases, the plug is pulled, and there goes the ruddy bathwater.
That is not in fact what happens. Recall the lesson that contemporary biology teaches us: dying is as active as living. Eggs die by undergoing apoptosis; that is, they commit suicide. So too is menstruation a dy-

 

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namic and directed affair. Margie Profet, an evolutionary biologist now at the University of Washington, has described menstruation as an adaptation: it is a product of design, the designer in this case being that greatest and most unpretentious of deities, evolution by natural selection. ''The mechanisms that collectively constitute menstruation appear to manifest adaptive design in [their] precision, economy, efficiency and complexity," she has written. "If menstruation were merely a functionless byproduct of cyclic hormonal flux, there would be no mechanisms specifically designed to cause it."
The first relevant mechanism is a specialized type of artery. Feeding into the two superficial layers of the endometrium, the ones that are disposed of each month, are three spiral arteries, so named because they look like corkscrews. During pregnancy, the spiral arteries serve as important conduits of blood for the placenta. Yet their purpose extends beyond fetal feeding. Several days before a woman's period begins, the tips of the spirals grow longer and more tightly coiled, like a Slinky that's being pulled and twisted at the same time. Circulation to the endometrium grows sluggish the calm that presages calamity. Twenty-four hours before the onset of bleeding, the spirals constrict sharply. The faucets are twisted off, the blood flow ceases. It is a heart attack of the uterus. Deprived of blood and therefore of oxygen, the endometrial tissue dies. Then, as abruptly as the arteries squeezed shut, they temporarily open again, allowing blood to rush in. The blood pools in pockets beneath the dead endometrium, causing the lining to swell and burst, and the period begins. Their mortal work complete, the spiral arteries constrict once again. (Fibroids disturb the ritual of menstruation because their parasitic blood supply does not conform to the squeeze-relax-squeeze pattern of the spiral arteries.)
A second outstanding feature of menstruation is the quality of the blood. Most blood is poised to clot. Unless you are a hemophiliac, when you cut yourself, the blood flows briefly and then coagulates, for which you can thank your platelets and sticky blood proteins such as fibrin. Menstrual blood does not clot. It may seem goopy at times, and the dead tissue accompanying it may pass out in clots our slimy medusas! but the blood proper contains very few platelets and does not form the interlocking coagulatory mesh that characterizes blood released from a wound. The only reason that menstrual blood does not

 

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