While acting in a play that was in part concerned with menstruation, I was surprised to observe people's reactions to the subject. I had never really thought about menstruation or its effect on others, and I was shocked to hear how other people thought and reacted. I have been for many years somewhat matter-of-fact about it, or so I thought.

The other women in the play reacted with anything from horror to disgust. Some said menstruation was not a suitable subject for the theater; some said menstruation was not a suitable subject for discussion at all. I was dumbfounded to find that Czechs evidently do not talk about the subject. Men who watched us rehearse also said that they could not stand the play because of the subject. I find these reactions fascinating, because, after all, menstruation is a normal part of every woman's life, for at least thirty-five years, and when people react to a normal part of life with disgust, shock, horror, and an unwillingness to discuss it, it seems wrong to me.

(Not that I bring the subject up in every chance conversation, either; I lived with my roommate for three months before we ever mentioned menstruation. I just think that people should not be afraid of discussing normal occurrences. We happened to finally recognize the fact when one month I started menstruating earlier than expected, and had no napkins, and we were about to leave for rehearsals when I realized that I had to run to the store. I was afraid our director would be angry if I were late without explanation, so I told my roommate what had happened and asked him to tell our director. Later we did discuss menstruation, but we had lived together all that time with absolutely no acknowledgement from either of us that such things happen!)

The other women in the play said that they would never tell anyone except their partners that they were menstruating, and then only if necessary. They said that, for example, no matter how bad they felt, they would not tell their teacher or their boss that they had menstrual cramps, but rather they would lie and say they had a stomachache. I cannot understand their reluctance to discuss it, because in my part of America it is normal if a woman is menstruating to be able to admit to cramps. If they are really bad every month, cramps can even become something of a status symbol. But why are people afraid of it?

I started to imagine: what if I lived in a society where menstruation was admitted to be a normal part of life and there were no shame or secrecy attached to menstruation? I began researching primitive cultures but I found that for the most part, females are taboo during their menstrual periods. True, it's no matter for secrecy there, but women are regarded as somehow dangerous to be around. Why?

I tried another step with my imaginings: women are allowed to bleed and to stain their clothing and no-one thinks anything about it. I cannot imagine this at all. I have been too strongly conditioned by my social upbringing to keep my menstruation a secret. I tried to relate menstruation to other things I know and the first thing I thought of was excretion. But excretion is for the most part under our voluntary control, and menstruation is not. Really, perhaps the closest analogy I can make is breathing or sweating. Neither of those is a matter for secrecy, so why should menstruation be different? I cannot imagine; the fact remains, though, that we treat menstruation much differently from any other bodily function. (Well, okay, I CAN think of a reason: only women menstruate. Even better: only women who can bear children menstruate. Are we seeing womb envy?)

I wonder what the world would be like if men menstruated. Would they turn menstruation into a matter of pride? Who can bleed the most in an hour? Who can go the longest without pain relievers? Could women learn to think like this--to embody some of the competitive pride of males into their most hidden lives? It seems almost unthinkable, and yet why should this be so?

If we cannot talk about something that we experience as a normal part of our lives, that subject goes underground much as sex did during the Victorian era in England. Nobody really wants to return to those days, when even pianos had to wear long skirts to cover their limbs ("legs" was considered too sexual a term to be used in polite company). But we treat menstruation the same way the Victorians treated sex--could we at last be ready, finally to stop treating menstruation as a shameful and guilty secret and admit that every woman menstruates every month? Why should menstruation, something involuntary, be less acceptable than masturbation, which now people admit that women do?

On a personal note, I found menstruation more difficult to write about than I expected. I kept replacing (unconsciously) the word "menstruation" by "it," and it took real effort and a word processor to use the word consistently, instead of hiding behind the pronoun. So perhaps I need to remember the difficulty I had using the word menstruation, and remind myself that I'm not as open about my menstruation as I think I am.

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