One of Ingrid berthon-Moine's portraits of women wearing their menstrual blood as lipstick. Photograph: Ingrid Berthon-Moine
One morning in 2005, Chella Quint was lying in bed wondering if her period was due. That day she was entering a contest to create a magazine in 24 hours. She needed an idea, and the two thoughts collided. Why not create a 10-year chart for her menstrual cycle? She need never lie in bed wondering again. She could include interviews, a diagram of female reproductive organs, an ode to alternative sanitary products . . .
So began Quint's life as a menstrual activist. Since that hastily written debut, she has created four issues of her 'zine, Adventures in Menstruating, complete with leakage horror stories and tampon craft projects. She has taken her "menstrual comedy" show from her home in Sheffield to feminist festivals in Berlin, Cork and Malmö. And she has started a project to photograph her "biggest bugbear": the sanitary disposal units (SDUs) in British toilets.
"My partner Sarah calls them 'the elephant in the smallest room'," she says of the SDUs. "Nobody talks about them. They're huge, grey and hulking, and if your bottom is bigger than your head then you've come into bodily contact with them. I'm just trying to chronicle the number of clues a woman might see each day that say 'You are a bio-hazard'." Quint's mission is to take the shame out of periods, to "help alter the visibility of menstruation, so that it's at least normal to talk about it. Because, right now, it's not".
Quint isn't the only one breaking taboos. It seems that menstrual activism (otherwise known as radical menstruation, menstrual anarchy, or menarchy) is having a moment. The term is used to describe a whole range of actions, not all considered political by the person involved: simple efforts to speak openly about periods, radical affronts to negative attitudes and campaigns for more environmentally friendly sanitary products. (It is estimated that a woman will dispose of 11,400 tampons in her lifetime – an ecological disaster.)
Earlier this year, 18-year-old Rachel Kauder Nalebuff published My Little Red Book, a collection of first period stories by women including Erica Jong, which became a US bestseller. In June, the British-based artist Ingrid Berthon- Moine exhibited a video at the Venice Biennale of her twanging her tampon string to the song Slave to the Rhythm. She is currently completing a series of photographs featuring women wearing their menstrual blood as lipstick.
Jezebel, the popular women's website, has posted a story, describing in lingering detail, the much-feared-but-never-spoken-of experience of forgetting to remove a tampon (after 10 days it smelled of "rotting fish meets sewage meets Black Death"). Filmmaker and academic Giovanna Chesler has toured her documentary, Period: The End of Menstruation, a response to the growing number of hormone treatments that promise to end the monthly bleed altogether. And, when I wrote an article for G2 this summer about a Tampax advertising campaign that used viral marketing techniques, the online comments were dominated by glowing reviews of an alternative sanitary product, the Moon Cup. Apparently Moon Cup enthusiasts were staging a viral campaign of their own.
Next spring, Chris Bobel, associate professor of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, publishes New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation. Most menstrual activists, says Bobel, "begin by thinking, wait a minute! Do we have to regard our period as something dirty? Do we have to greet a girl's first period with silence? And then they get interested in challenging that."
So, for instance, Kauder Nalebuff's book stemmed from her own first experience of menstruation - waterskiing in a yellow swimsuit with her grandfather. She thought this was a truly "terrible story", but when it was shared with her family, it was brought into stark perspective. Her great aunt Nina revealed that her first period arrived as she was about to be strip searched while fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland, and "the most powerful part," says Kauder Nalebuff, "was that she had never told anyone about this before. I started asking other women in my family about their first periods, and I found it was an electric topic." She sees her project "as a segue for women to talk openly about their family history, their bodies. Really important issues."
Menstrual activism certainly isn't new. In 1970, in The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer memorably wrote that "if you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you've a long way to go, baby". Bobel has charted the movement's history, writing about the first "bleed-in" in 1973, when 13 women gathered in the US and "shared stories of their first periods". Around the same time the artist Judy Chicago created Red Flag, a lithograph of a bloody tampon being pulled from between a woman's legs. (Berthon-Moine's work reflects Chicago's, and is, she says, similarly a way of breaking taboos and "showing what you usually don't see – tampons, blood, all that".)
In the 80s, the focus shifted, with activists "working with industry and government to produce safer products", says Bobel. This was the era of the toxic shock syndrome epidemic; in 1980, 813 period-related toxic shock cases were reported in the US, and 38 women died. The panic and fear inspired some incredibly effective activism. In Britain, for instance, Bernadette Vallely and the Women's Environmental Network campaigned against the potential health risks of chlorine-bleached sanitary products; apparently, after just six weeks all major British producers had pledged to stop the bleaching process.
These days, says Bobel, activists often bypass engagement with corporations and concentrate on DIY approaches, setting up businesses that sell reusable sanitary products for instance. This reflects the punk and alternative roots of the current movement. Where the hippy/spiritual wing of 70s feminism might once have composed celebratory songs to the lunar cycle, recent activists are more likely to dress up as a bloody tampon and perform a cheer: "Smear it on your face and rub it on your body, it's time to start a menstrual party!"
It would be easy to lampoon those who are breaking the menstrual taboo, to accuse them not just of navel-gazing, but of setting their sights quite literally lower. Of all the feminist issues in the world, why this one? And might it not prove an invitation for men to talk about their bodily functions too? (Something surely to be avoided.)
But, as Kauder Nalebuff's book illustrates, this is a subject long mired in shame and confusion – there are girls who know nothing about periods until their first one arrives, and assume it is a sign of impending death. Many grown women still feel embarrassed about buying tampons. When touring her film, Chesler says that she met groups of women who had never heard the term "ovulation"; audiences would nonetheless have two-hour conversations about their experiences. And then there are the environmental issues, which are still far from being resolved.
Quint says that she will write her 'zine until she is finally ready for Adventures in Menopausing instead, "but, of course, it would be great if I didn't have to, if there was no shame whatsoever". For now, this seems a long way off. The bloody fight continues.
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