Ms Cerelle

I had a conversation with a friend recently that left me totally gobsmacked. I'm still swirling about in a kind of ponderthon of unanswerable questions from it. If I ask you these questions, and present you with my half answers, then I suspect I will manage to get a blog-post out of it. 

This conversation was about a friend of her’s who started her periods late, got a boyfriend shortly afterwards, and went straight on the pill. She was telling me about this while we were sat in a velvet-strewn, underground café, listening to Etta James; while a nearby couple were listening to us, although both pretending to be reading. I realise that this seems normal enough, and not something which should trigger a deluge of unanswerable questions, but bare with me. This friend of her’s was put onto the Cerelle pill (the new and current medical preference) which contains no oestrogen and only progesterone, and stops periods all together. Which means that this friend, my friends friend, has only ever had one period in her entire life. 

Let that sink in for a second.

Only one. The very first. That bewildering, intoxicating, underoverwhelming catapult into perceived womanhood. She had that one, and then she stopped.

It is a logical step then (judging by the number of my female friends on the pill) to presume that a huge proportion of this generation of adolescent women are living life free from menstruation. And that many of those who follow, will also. This is what has sent me swirling and wondering. Although I am not of the Hippocrates school of thought: that if a young woman does not menstruate then her blood will collect and fill her lungs and heart and she will be the unfortunate victim of the dreaded but prevalent female hysteria and turn mad and fling herself violently about the room… I do think that this development will have implications, of a social and psychological impact. Herein follows the unanswerable questions, and their undulating half-answers.  

Question 1: how will this affect the way in which women interact with the passing of time?

Quite literally just a picture of a butternut squash.

Having never been a man, I cannot know for sure, but I imagine that NOT having a squidgy, butternut squash shaped lunanome, spitting out the months for decades of your life, probably means you have a different experience of the passing of time. Unlike most women, or J.M Barrie’s crocodile who swallowed the ticking clock, men have never experienced an internal, physical reminder of the passing weeks. This must be an influential factor in a person’s perception of time’s markers, or at least the importance they place on them. In this sense, either our perception of the passing of time, or our social construction around the passing of time, is gendered. Or both, of course. Zadie Smith’s observation in NW that women ‘bring time with them’, has always seemed completely right to me, although I couldn't pin-point exactly why. 

More specifically what I wonder is… will a woman who has not experienced years of menstruation (as those who came before her did) have an altered perception of the passing of time, or is it the social scaffolding that we have built around her which has the greater influence? It's a question of the butternut squash vs society, and although one has certainly influenced the other, and the other has used the one as an excuse for oppression within the other, we undoubtable have ourselves a chicken and the egg conundrum. 

Question 2: do a man’s physical and emotional world’s feel more separate than mine?

I am very used to associating changes in my body with changing emotions, it's a melting, rolling, circulating ordeal. More than just directly feeling an emotion physically, a huge shift in my body coincides with a huge shift in my perception of the world, and emotional interaction with it. Hormonal maturity has taught me how drastically external reality can vary depending on your own internal one. Essentially… if one moment the sound of someone breathing makes you want to punch them in the face, but the next you are weeping sweet ovarian tears at a photo of a baby in a sloth costume, reality as a form of objective experience becomes a fragile concept. Or a smash-able one, depending on your cycle. And so how might a woman’s learning experience of subjectivity change, in the absence of years of menstruation? 

Another way in which a period has the ability to bridge the physical and emotional worlds, is that the pain, discomfort, and bleeding, provides a physical release from emotional tension. One which men can only find by actively seeking it out. There is no doubt that the emotional release periods bring to women, is a factor in the way that men and women’s mental health experiences differ. In which case, should we be expecting, and preparing for, a change in the mental health requirements of this next generation of women?

Question 3: how will this development interact with a culture that is ever obsessed with hairless, symmetrical, porn-perfect genitals? 

I think we can all agree that sex should mostly be about how it feels, not about how it looks. Despite men having a brain which is more visually stimulated sexually, we can agree on the fact that it is an all-round sensory experience for whichever gender. In which case, an over-emphasis in the way genitals look, causes a problematic shift. It causes a shift in focus from the sensual to the visual, and the genuine to the self-conscious. Of course this has been a struggle for humankind since Adam and Eve first realised they were starkers. But even they weren't fretting about Eve’s uneven, floppy labia, or wondering when the tiny, many bobbled heads of shaving rash would pop up and say g’day.

It is nothing radical to suggest that this shift away from the sensual, by which I mean towards visual and away from feeling and function, is an influential factor in the low-self esteem, eating-disorder epidemic that sweeps the West. I worry that opting out of periods (although in many senses a medical victory) takes women further still from their body as a functioning and sensual self, and soon we’ll all have a hairless, fluid-less, symmetrical, thigh-gap where a grown woman’s vagina used to be. 

In Annie Leclerc’s rather fabulous ‘70s book about female sensuality, she describes the feeling of menstruating as ‘that dark milk, that warm syrupy blood-flow, the pain with the scalding taste of happiness’ and I can't help feeling that that would be quite a sad thing to lose.

But perhaps I’m just being too emotional. 

Alice's Mushrooms

If I'm going to cry, it tends to be in the evening or at night. Which makes sense because usually it’s about events of the day, a symptom of exhaustion, or from a more general reflection on life at a late and more reflective hour. What makes less sense, is to cry in the morning, before anything has happened. If a person finds themselves crying in the morning, before they’ve even started the day, then I suspect there is something more complicated, more all-encompassing that is troubling them. It's from something they have carried over from one day to the next; it is too heavy for their subconscious to keep to itself, and so it passes it on to the conscious mind which, probably unprepared, does not have a handle on the situation. 

This is what I found happened to me, on a park bench at 9.30am, in the centre of Madrid, on a Tuesday. And I cried my eyes out. I don't know if you have ever found yourself crying on a park bench early in the morning, but if you have you will know what happens. Firstly, all of the dogs who are being walked, bound up to you. They sense you are upset and, as chief cheerer-uppers of the globe, see this as their duty and their moment to shine! And you pat their quivering little zig-zagging backs appreciatively, and for a moment it's really, really, lovely… until the owners arrive. The owners arrive and, not being a chief cheerer-upper of the globe, they aren’t quite sure what to do. Mostly they approach hesitantly, side-stepping and side-smiling, in an awkward, apologetic sand-dance towards you, pick their bemused little canine up and then trot off sideways again. You give them your best watery humble smile, and watch their eyes dart about your appearance, looking for clues, wondering why.

Which, incidentally, is also what I was wondering. If one of them had actually asked me why, I would have had nothing to say. I didn't have a bloody clue what I was doing and what had happened or why I was crying.

Everything had been going so well. In the previous couple of days, I had successfully secured employment with six new English students, ready for when I finished Spanish lessons and started the next phase of life in Madrid. (You know, the phase where I would earn my own money; live in the centre, spend my free time writing in cutesy cafés, and partying in a stylishly uncouth manner; aesthetically somewhere half-way between prohibition glam and heroine chíc.)

I had been making my way to Spanish school, enjoying the haphazard experience of listening to my iPod on shuffle, trying to avoid making eye contact with that waiter who seems to think I fancy him, when, out of nowhere, it happened. An overwhelming feeling of impending doom billowed out from the clouds and surged down towards me, and at the same time the earth I was walking on dislodged itself and disloyally raced up to meet it. Feeling like a wavering computer glitch, or how Alice probably did when she ate those mushroom: except I was throbbing between the big Alice and the little Alice and then back to the big Alice again, I veered off towards the park. 

And thus I found myself where we started – weeping on a park bench, friendly dogs, sand-dancing owners ...etc. This was very perplexing. I couldn't decipher what it was that this emotional response was interacting with. Everything was going to well, wasn't it? Apparently not.

That impending-doom, billowing, Alice’s mushrooms thing, could probably also be called a panic-attack. It's textbook; feelings of entrapment and death, volatile and uncontrollable in nature, an intense emotional spasm seemingly disconnected from its trigger. But what isn't in the textbook, is the positive result I gained from it. It forced me to properly observe the details of my situation and, like a dense lump of icing being squeezed through the pin-hole of a piping bag, I came out the other end lighter and under control, my life feeling like nice pink squiggles, instead of an indistinguishable, heavy lump. I realised (with some hindsight)  that what I need at the moment, post-graduation, is to feel tangible progress. I need to see evidence that I am beginning to build the future I want for myself; and that future is not in Madrid.

The next day I booked a flight back to London. 

Of course for many people there is no positive result of a panic-attack. Clinical, perpetual panic-attacks are debilitating, and suggesting that they should simply find the deeper meaning, would be ridiculous, offensive. However I suspect there are many people who, like me, do not suffer from a panic disorder, but do experience the occasional one in times of stress or confusion. In which case, it’s a fantastic thing that your sub-conscious forced you through the piping bag, when your conscious mind was stubbornly lugging your indistinguishable lump-life around. Thank god I had a melt-down in a park, or else I'd be struggling on with the plan that looked so good on paper, trying to suppress my discontent. 

And so next time I feel Alice hovering ominously with those magic mushrooms of hers, rest assured, I’ll be grabbing that trip by its furry rabbit ears.