Blood: the image at the center of the Venn-diagram between periods and Halloween. What could be more terrifying, on a primordial level, than the sense that life is running out of you in bright red streams? It’s carnage, chaos. As one guy I interviewed for this piece said, periods are “kinda gory.” When asked if I could quote him on the record, fear flashed in another boy’s eyes — he facetiously remarked the subject was “worse than Israel/Palestine” in terms of how much trouble he could get himself into over the course of a short conversation. I’ll admit this was the response I expected my inquiry to elicit. (As a disclaimer: this essay is highly journalistically unserious; all interviews were conducted anonymously over the course of a three-hour, nausea-inducing bus ride on a University-sponsored trip in a miscellaneous European country. The benefit of this arrangement was: my subjects could not run away from me.)
Many men shy away from talking about periods— the topic is more taboo than sex. Raising the subject causes some to flinch and cover their ears as if on the receiving end of a jump scare. This avoidance raises a few obvious questions: What makes periods frightening (to some)? Are they actually frightening? And ought they be?
To state the obvious: menstruation is a natural phenomenon. I won’t elaborate too much on this point; surely my readers have taken a health class at some point. But there’s a long tradition of viewing periods as strange and disturbing. In some cultures, women are physically separated from others during their time of the month; period huts are prevalent in Ethiopia (called niddah) and Nepal (chhaupadi). When I mentioned I was writing this article, a friend (Nell Marcus ‘27) recommended Julia Kristeva’s essay “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.” Kristeva positions the female body as “other” and “abject”— that is, “the jettisoned object … radically excluded [which] draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.” She reflects on how menstrual blood is often cast as unclean — horror-inducing, even:
While they always relate to corporeal orifices as to so many landmarks parceling-constituting the body’s territory, polluting objects fall, schematically, into two types: excremental and menstrual. Neither tears nor sperm, for instance, although they belong to borders of the body, have any polluting value. Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death. Menstrual blood, on the contrary, stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference.
Kristeva points to the “polluting value” both menstrual blood and excrement have in the eyes of society (a polluting value sperm noticeably lacks). She suggests menstrual blood is particularly disturbing to men because of its gendered nature: it is a physical, threatening representation of sexual difference. I won’t pretend to understand Kristeva perfectly, but conversations I’ve had borne out what seems to be her main point: periods made the guys I spoke to “deeply perturbed” and “uncomfortable,” as two respectively remarked. They referenced and carefully rejected (these guys are voting for Kamala, after all) the narrative that “periods are gross.”
Not to be all “not all men,” about it, but I did receive a range of reactions. All the guys I spoke to acknowledged that the process was normal, and something that boys ought to be able to talk about. One guy with a long-term girlfriend expressed a desire to understand menstruation, and said he felt comfortable discussing it: “you want to know the things that affect someone physically, emotionally, and mentally when you’re dating them.” Some have mothers or sisters who are generally open with them about their health.
Others had a more light-hearted approach to broaching the subject. One boy insisted that “period” was not the most precise grammatical analogy to the menstrual cycle: “You should call it your ‘ellipsis,’ since ellipses look like blood dripping.” (I concurred.) Some turned downright philosophical: “when you think about it, every ounce of blood is a baby dying.” (The latter statement is false.)
The source of boys’ reported discomfort seemed to be unfamiliarity. “I don’t think about it very much,” one said on the subject, “I don’t have many close female friends.” Another guy cited the “biological limits of empathy” to his understanding of menstruation: “ I can’t imagine what it’s like to be hobbling around all day with a fucking tampon in.” A third remarked that he “cannot fathom” having a period.
This murky territory has inspired quite a few horror films. Carrie (1976) has a famously bloody period scene. The titular protagonist gets her period for the first time in a school locker room. Having never been informed about periods, she’s visibly terrified; her classmates bully her, throwing pads and tampons at her as she crumples to the floor. Her mother later gives her a lecture on Eve and sin and how periods are women’s curse. In Jennifer’s Body (2009), Jennifer’s transition into a demon is analogized to menstruation several times: she’s asked if she’s PMSing when she acts aggressive and sullen, then later if she needs a tampon when she’s stabbed in her abdomen and blood is gushing out of her. In a Nassau Weekly meeting, when I was pitching this essay, someone mentioned that Ginger Snaps (2000) also featured a menstruation motif. The film revolves around a girl (Ginger) who gets bitten by a werewolf during her first period (the blood attracts the monster); she later turns into a werewolf herself. In all three films, periods are associated with impurity and wrong-ness—they mark the end of innocent girlhood and the beginning of mysterious, monstrous changes. Girls on their periods are presented, paradoxically, as both victims and villains. And these are just a few examples — a quick google search of “periods in horror movies” yielded copious results (creepycatalouge.com even recommends a curated list of 10 movies matching the latter description, if you’re still looking for Halloween film suggestions).
What’s so frightening about periods anyway? The clothing stains, of course (out damned spot, out I say!). But is there any real basis for fear? Even accepting menstruation as a natural process—and, on a personal level, as an unremarkable, ubiquitous presence in my life— I do believe there is perhaps something genuinely, objectively terrifying about periods. I was speaking to a group of female friends the other week about the ways one’s mental state can be altered by their period. Some are prone to unusually negative thoughts in the few days precipitating their period — thoughts that would usually not take shape, cropping up as alien presences. “Depression” happens to be listed as a symptom of PMS, a broad condition which three-fourths of menstruating people experience at some point, according to Mayo Clinic. If one’s PMS symptoms are “severe,” one may have premenstrual dysphoric disorder. (What qualifies as “severe” is unclear, but PMDD is apparently uncommon.) Mayo Clinic notes: “Exactly what causes premenstrual syndrome is unknown.” Allegedly, hormones are vaguely at play.
A lot of menstruating people I spoke to reported other spooky symptoms. Pain that makes it hard to get out of bed; throwing up; fainting. (One guy I interviewed mentioned that his sister “always” faints on her period — “She’ll just pass out on the way to dinner. It’s really scary”). The latter concern is especially disturbing. I can confirm fainting is a strange phenomenon. Your hearing goes out first, your vision fades, you wake up on the floor with bruises forming under your skin. There are many places where it would be highly inconvenient, even dangerous, to spontaneously pass out (speaking from personal experience: a ski slope, a crowded Shake Shack, a medieval town). A few girls I know have spoken to their doctors about their concerns. They received noncommittal responses: taking Advil and hydrating may help.
I don’t recall being warned about many of the aforementioned symptoms of PMS; neither do most of my friends. The concept of PMS was introduced to me as a joke, an insult—but not as a condition with a string of symptoms, no real treatment and no known concrete causes. Disorienting: ignorance about your own body. Talking about it and writing about it — comparing experiences, making a few Google searches — does make the subject less perturbing, but in some ways I feel like I have more questions than I began with.
As much as I want to say that horror movies about periods demonize a natural event in a vaguely problematic way, there does seem to be something there. Rather than blood, though, that “something” is perhaps the lack of attention and education on women’s health. PMS is often not covered in health class; there is essentially no research and funding directed towards investigating a condition which almost half of the population experiences. Amid this black hole, it’s easy to see where movie-inspiring myths spring out of, and why there’s such a unique, mind-bending stigma on the topic. The unknowable female body— boo.