Period blood is likely the most common bloodshed, with an estimated 800 million people menstruating at any given time on our planet.
I’m in sixth grade and I hate that I’m stuck running a pointless errand with my mom. At a stoplight she uses her hands to supplement the verbal explanation she’s giving me on Fallopian tubes and falling eggs and shedded lining. She’s explaining menstruation to me, in the car, downtown. It feels like a setup. There’s a middle aged man in the lane next to us and the look he shoots over makes me positive that he knows what we’re talking about. I want to disappear. I already know about the impending period – last year in school they took the girls aside and we watched a video about cramps and mood swings and tampons and how embarrassing and womanly our bodies were becoming. The boys had their own presentation – from the jokes circulating the playground it appears to have been about nocturnal emissions and “urges”. It takes a while for the girls’ talk to circulate – it’s about two years before a boy on the bus pops my cherry with a ‘joke’ that I’ll hear repeated for the rest of my developmental years “You know what they say: don’t trust anything that bleeds for a week and doesn’t die.” We all laugh. I get the joke: it’s a play on words, women and our cycles are a loophole to this rule. I feel the undertone too, even if I don’t fully understand it – women are not trustworthy.
When I get my first period it feels like a life sentence. I’m not around people who are talking about women’s business openly. The messages that I get from kids at school, from teen magazines and from society in general is that periods are gross. That’s it. Ewww. I get the message: blood is gross and also women’s life-creating bodily functions are gross.
Period blood. Most cis women get to deal with that shit every month for the majority of our lives. It’s not just regular prick your finger blood -we experience actual viscera. Clots and globules. Coagulation. Old bubbling brown blood and fresh trickling scarlet. Because cis men don’t get periods, don’t hear about periods, don’t see periods – they have very limited real life experience with blood as compared to their menstruating counterparts. I’ve seen blood out in the public world only a handful of times: when David crashed his bike into the house and his nose ran like a faucet, the tip of my finger flying across the hotline at work and a subsequent crimson squirt, blood spatter on bar walls and bathroom stalls after a misunderstanding. Violent blood. Injury blood. Bad blood. Outliers.
In tenth grade I donate blood for the first time. The blood tech has to stab my arm a bunch – she calls my veins squirmy. My mom’s are too. Blood is inherited – it is passed down. When the needle finally enters me properly, I watch my own dark liquid fill a clear bag. I can see my feint pulse in real time outside of my body. It’s estimated that 4.5 million Americans will need a blood transfusion this year. Blood saves lives.
People regularly ask me why I’m so obsessed with blood. The perception is that it’s weird and kind of fucked up. Maybe I am both. But, to me, blood is not inherently violent. Blood is feminine, is literal life – and blood phobia feels sexist. Every single human on this planet came of some blood and we’re all fucking full of it.
