Put a Period on That

I got my period a few days ago. At work. In the middle of a rush. And I forgot to slip a tampon in my purse. And nobody else had one to spare. So I stood at the bench, counting pills into bottles and answering the phone and squeezed my thighs together and hoped for the best. Thank god I always wear navy blue/black scrub pants.

Right now, I can literally hear a million male faces squinching up in horror and retracting like a cats anus. Look, deal with it assholes. I've had to deal with it since I was 10 years old and, quite frankly, if any man within reach dares make the "never trust anything that bleeds for a week and still lives" joke, I will snap their nuts off like bottlecaps and ram them up his own asshole. It's about goddamned time you guys knew how much we women suffer once a month: it's not just blood flowing out of our ladyholes smooth as Karo syrup and food coloring. It's chunky. It's blobby. It stinks. Every time we sneeze we feel a huge, thick squirt into our panties, as if our vaginas had suddenly become giant hot glue guns. Inserting tampons is like trying to shove a size ten matchstick into a size four drinking straw, and pulling them out again is akin to pulling your own small intestine out of your navel. I live in fear that someday I'll tug that swollen cotton finger out of my cooch and all of my insides will come shooting out right behind it like thick, blood-foamy champagne released from a bottle when the cork is pulled too suddenly.

Listen, if you can watch neo-grindhouse torture porn, Italian gutmucnhing/Japanese Pinky Violence horror movies, you can hear about a girls period in vivid detail. Man the fuck up, pussies. At least I spared you the details of the organ crushing cramps and the torrential diarrhea.


Anyway, onto the list of films which accurately depict the menstrual cycle in all of its squishy, flowy, stinky nastiness.

#1 - Carrie

Duh. Like I wasn't going to pick this one? This is THE menstrual horror film. The period on the period at the end of the sentence. It is every teenage girls worst nightmare: getting your period at school and everyone knows because you bleed right through your designer jeans and left a blood puddle on the seat in Calculus. And knowing your luck, you left your hoodie at home and have nothing to tie around your waist with which to hide the miniature murder scene that is spreading on your ass. This film reinforced the belief that getting your period was shameful, and to allow anyone to find out about it was unforgivable. Honestly though, the book did a far better job of delving into the connection between Carrie's first period and her latent telekinetic powers. In the movie, it happens, it's over and is never mentioned again. The book starts with a period, climaxes with the mother (pun intended) of all periods, and ends with a period (Sue Snell, who is either having a miscarriage or has simply miscalculated her menstrual cycle. Either way, she ends up the same as Carrie: covered with blood in public, screaming in horror and scarred for life.)


#2 - Ginger Snaps 

Brigitte: Are you *sure* it's just cramps?
Ginger: Just so you know... the words "just" and "cramps," they don't go together.

No, they fucking don't.

Ginger's reaction to her first unwanted and unasked for menstrual period was much the same as mine: disgust and mourning. Because unlike Ginger, I was not ready to be a woman and had no desire to grow up just yet. I kept it a secret from my schoolmates for as long as I possibly could, because I knew once the word was out, I'd be expected to start wearing a bra and shaving my legs and buying perfume and tacking up those fold-out posters of the cast of The Outsiders that came in Tiger Beat magazine up over my bed and daydreaming about being Mrs. Ponyboy. Yuck. Actually now that I think about it, my actual reaction to my first period was less like Ginger's and more like Sarah Conner's: "I didn't ask for this honor and I DON'T WANT IT! ANY OF IT!"

#3 - The Company Of Wolves

Nobody really considers this a menstrual horror film until I point out this line of dialogue in the early scenes:

Mother: Where is she? Did she miss tea again?

Sister Alice: She said she had tummy-ache so she's sulking in her room.

They're talking about Mother's youngest daughter and Alice's little sister Rosaleen, who has indeed shut herself in her attic room and locked the door, restlessly sleeping off what is probably her first bout of cramps. Like me, Rosaleen isn't ready to leave childhood behind just yet either. But the wolves give her no choice. She's one of the pack now whether she likes it or not, and they drag her - kicking and screaming amid her broken dolls and worn out teddy bears - into hairy, savage, blood soaked adulthood.

#4 - Janghwa, Hongryeon

Better known as A Tale of Two Sisters, the original title of this Korean tale translates into Rose Flower, Red Lotus. How better to personify a young, menstruating virgin than with a red flower? Unspoiled and pure, but still somehow sexually aware. Young Su-Mi's blossoming is poisoned by the death of her mother and the cruelty of her stepmother, and the sudden appearance of a menstruating ghost and her sisters sheet-staining period showing up in the middle of the night seem to be the catalyst for all of the violence which soon follows. A single ribbon of crimson running thin and delicate down an ivory inner thigh quickly becomes a metaphor for the butchery of innocence and the deliberate murder of sanity, like a rose on the edge of its first blooming throwing its petals open to reveal a core of corruption and rot.

#5 - Valerie & Her Week of Wonders

So here we have a daisy instead of a rose, virgin white purity stained by the first drops of blood falling from Valerie's lacy skirts as she walks through the garden one night. Upon awakening on her first full day as a woman, Valerie finds that her impending womanhood has attracted the means: a cadaverous vampire who might also be her father, a lecherous priest, an amorous boy who may also be her brother and an endless parade of buxom, wiggly girls who love nothing better than squirming on tree branches and kissing each other. Valerie is as confused as we are, but soon finds her place in the weird world of adults, where people's emotions seem as backwards as Alice's Looking Glass world, and seemingly upstanding denizens commit unspeakable horrors in the name of love/lust.

We don't bleed once a month and live.
We bleed, and cramp, and shit, and writhe, and suffer blinding headaches and violent mood swings, and somehow we still manage to go out into the world the whole entire time, walking around with cotton stuffed up our lady holes, in pain, working, going to school, running the usual errands, and most of you never know when it's That Time Of The Month because we are experts at hiding it, and dealing with it, and sucking it up and going about our business, for a whole week.

If you ask me, that's pretty bad ass.
I'd like to see a guy do it for a single day.