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.