Trader Joe’s and the Menstrual Taboo

 

By Andrea Scarpino

 

Los Angeles

 

I love shopping at Trader Joe’s late in the evening right before it closes. The crowds thin out, restocking of shelves begins, and the employees start pumping some raucous dance music. They also start gossiping, about their shifts and managers, about which area is the most boring assignment, about budding employee romances and new products.

Last night, though, I eavesdropped on another customer. Standing in the aisle with toothpaste and other personal products, I heard a masculine sounding voice in back of me say, Do you need any tampons? And then laugh. I turned around. Both the speaker and the friend to whom he was speaking looked like adult men. One was bald, for god’s sake. The friend made eye contact with me. It’s always funny to joke about tampons, I said to him with my saucy-teenager-perfected sarcasm. The speaker kept laughing, but started to blush. His friend looked uncomfortable. You know, he said, I was just looking at hand soap.

I smiled. You can tell that you’ve reached maturity when you’re still joking about tampons, I said. That’s my tried and true method for sassing people—smile big while you’re doing it. Both men looked at the ground. As I walked away, I thought about the fact that menstruation can be funny—just like Steve has said before about blindness. Remembering first period stories with friends now that we’re adults can be pretty amusing. I use reusable cloth menstrual pads, and on more than one occasion, have found a missing pad folded neatly on top of my apartment’s shared washing machine, left behind from a load I had washed the night before. Imagining one of my macho, muscled, BMW driving neighbor-men folding my missing pad on the washer for me to reclaim totally cracks me up.

But the statement I overheard last night wasn’t an attempt at “honest” humor, so to speak. It was a man mocking his friend by engaging in our cultural menstrual taboo. You know, the thing that makes women use words like “time of the month” to describe their period. My good friend Chris Bobel researches menstruation and has many more insightful things to say about the menstrual taboo than I could ever muster (she contributes to the blog re: Cycling which I highly recommend) but suffice it to say that making women uncomfortable in their bodies is a continually acceptable cultural phenomenon. Sure, we have much more “plus-size” model visibility than we’ve had in the past (and by “plus-size,” I mean still-thinner-than-the-average-American-woman) but on the whole, there is much money and power to be gained from teaching women to hate their bodies.

And the menstrual taboo is part of that. Menstruation is a biological process that almost half the human population experiences at some point or another and yet, it’s so infrequently discussed that a joke about buying tampons is still considered kosher by grown men. Seriously?

Leaving Trader Joe’s last night, I reconfirmed my commitment to speaking up when presented with the menstrual taboo and to refusing the many ways women in our culture are taught that our bodies don’t matter, need fixing/quieting/conforming/etc, or should be the sites of shame. There is power, after all, in speaking up, in refusing to participate in culturally constructed taboos. As one of my favorite poets, Adrienne Rich, says, “Lying is done with words and also with silence.”

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

Comments

[wjpeace]

I can relate to what is written though not to menstruation. In terms of disability we always see the disabled body through a medical lens of pathology instead of acceptance for what it is. Thus we with a disability are reduced to spinal cord injury of a certain level with bladder dysfunction. Lost is the humanity, grace, and different sort of ability we have. Darwin called this adaptation and diversity. Too bad others do not have the same insight.

[elizabeth]

Great essay. I wonder, though, why when I explained menstruation to my two sons who were about seven and nine at the time they looked shocked and repulsed. I was speaking very matter of factly, but their horror was evident. Is it the blood thing, not the woman thing?

[Claire]

I'm probably going to sound like a dinosaur, but I still believe in discretion when it comes to menstruation. Menstrual blood is a waste product of the body just like urine and feces. It's private...I don't like poo-poo and pee-pee jokes either. I no more need to discuss my private "issues" in that regard than I need to talk about how I go to the bathroom. Is it "oldist" to be embarrassed by incontinent products? It's always going to be embarrassing to purchase products that are of a very personal nature...hemorrhoid cream, prostate drugs, etc. I don't think it's a sign of anything more than just plain human nature...and a little bit of quiet about the whole thing is appropriate.

[Laura]

I disagree. Menstruation is a normal, natural function that has been considered shameful for too long. Society's attitudes toward both menstruation and menopause, which is the time of life that I am in, are part of the process of making women feel inferior. Thank you, Andrea for this beautiful column! I apologize for taking so long to send my heartfelt thanks.