We can talk about our periods now, and it's relieved a little shame from the shameful condition called womanhood. Menstruation was Eve's burden and eternal punishment, but we are totally secular now and we don't even believe in that stuff anymore. It was once a symptom of women's spiritual deficiency and earthliness. Now that spiritual deficiency is common to all of modernity, Science has dissected our Mother Earth to discover the objective truth about women: it is only scientific to say that we are the physically inferior sex once a month, wracked with cramps that should excuse us from working, and it is also scientific to say that we are the physically and mentally inferior sex every other day of the month, too, because of what we very officially and scientifically call Premenstrual Syndrome.
I had debilitating period cramps when I was younger and I can in no way honestly say that I don't believe women who suffer the same or even worse. But I am absolutely suspicious of the medical insistence that these symptoms are so essential to the menstrual cycle that they have resisted all scientific efforts to invent treatments, because science is objective and there'd be no reason to neglect women's reproductive health over men's. My period has only become more tolerable as I've grown older. Bleeding used to last for seven days and now barely four, and the intensity of my cramps don't compare at all to those I had before. My only long-term grievance was that pads were the sensory equivalent of diapers to me, but, once I got over the shame that my mother taught me after I asked for tampons when I was 12, I started using a menstrual cup and I forget I'm even on my period at all.
None of my clothes have been stained by blood in years. My period always begins as conveniently as it can, when I'm peeing, and when I'm peeing in my own home and never on campus or in public, as if my body waits for me. It waited last week for me to come home from my boyfriend's. He gave me a cold, actually. I sneezed on the bathroom floor at some point, and what shot out from my nose was what made me think of Lacan's lamella or "hommelette," an indestructible amoeba of pure, excessive Life. The next connection generated by my nervous system was Julia Kristeva's "contagion," but I mixed up Kristeva with the contagion from "becoming-animal" in A Thousand Plateaus and she never actually said anything about that I don't think. Here is something she did say: "'I' do not assimilate it, 'I' expel it. But since the food is not an 'other' for 'me,' who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which 'I' claim to establish myself." Sneezing can be as beautiful as the screaming Francis Bacon painting that ejects the "I" through the mouth-anus continuum. My period has that same beauty, too.
I'm bragging, and I'm very lucky, but I mean to say that periods do not have to be what to ascetic monks is flogging. It can be as unconscious of a bodily cycle as digestion, or the heart pumping blood, or the lungs filling with air. But it does not serve science to study women's reproductive system and make painless periods possible. Science classifies, and its proudest classification is the female with a hole distinguished from the man with the penis, adapted from religious myth. Imposing religious shame on any mention of menstruation protected the phallic order. The order that made erection the sign of vertical orientation towards the Heavens, and the empty womb or vagina as the dark Platonic cave of illusion. The vagina and its inert egg must passively accept the mobile sperm of religious, masculine Activity. The symbolic order could not (should not) articulate the fluid that forces itself out from what is not as much a "hole" but a becoming-vein that pumps as resolutely as the penis. It's like the inverse of what Sensory Convent says about anal sex:
"The anus, a muscle that normally excretes, is shown to also pull in (very much like the sun). This sucking-anus dismantles the concept of a "natural" order — a comprehensible, almost linear, top-down, oral-mouth:intestine-anus order. Why should an anus that produces shit also pull things in?" (Face Down, Ass Up: Towards Anal Utopia)
What was so progressive about science is that it neutralized the Lamella of the menstrual blood clot and made it assimilable to speech. Periods are no proof of excess or pure Intensity, they remain what make women naturally inferior and lacking compared to the model Man. What's so evil is that, by allowing women a taste of the symbolic order in which they may now speak and participate in meaning, they are only again investing value in the currency of the phallus. We shout out loud now that periods are a curse and imply that the most desirable genital is the penis. I already wrote about the double bind of patriarchal meaning/representation/value in this essay:
"no desire of ours can represent anything but the phallus. Women desire men because they lack the phallus (penis envy), women desire women because they lack the phallus (lesbians want to be men), women desire sexual freedom because they lack the phallus (not only to be fucked but to fuck) … When right-wing women appeal to the values of men, it is not because they are ignorant of some more truthful self-value that exists deep down inside of them, but because no meaning is possible outside of the patriarchy and they know it."
What I ultimately propose is feminist meaninglessness. The meaninglessness of the "I" abjected with the menstrual blood clot. The condition of women now is like the sacrificing mother; the mother sacrifices everything for her family, but she will sacrifice everything except sacrifice itself, because it is what provides her with meaning. We divest ourselves from any possible self-respect in exchange for pathetic patriarchal values whenever we don't call our depression "depression" but "PMS," or when we don't call our bursting uteruses a failure of the medical system but just the reality of the menstrual cycle. sometimes it is indistinguishable to me what men call the hysterical "time of the month" and what some of you claim your period makes you say or do. And beyond that, what I think is at stake is repairing the relations between feminism and transgender people. The movement is paralyzed until we let go of the meaning invested in "woman" just as much as in "man."