Sex During Menstruation: Race, Sexual Identity, and Women’s Accounts of Pleasure and Disgust

This study analyzes qualitative interviews with 40 women across a range of age, race, and sexual orientation to examine experiences with sex during menstruation. Results show that 25 women describe negative reactions, two describe neutral reactions, and 13 describe positive reactions. Negative responses involve four themes: discomfort and labor to clean ‘messes,’ overt partner discomfort, negative self-perception, and managing partner’s disgust. Positive responses cohere around physical and emotional pleasure from sex while menstruating and rebellion against anti-menstrual attitudes. Race and sexual identity differences appear: White women and bisexual or lesbian-identified women describe more positive feelings than women of color or heterosexual women. Bisexual women with male partners describe more positive reactions than heterosexual women with male partners, implying that heterosexual identity relates to negative attitudes more than heterosexual behavior. Those with positive attitudes also enjoy masturbation more than others. Additionally, interviews address sexual and racial identities’ informing body practices, partner choice affecting body affirmation, and resistance against ideas about women’s bodies as ‘disgusting.’

Introducing Menstrunormativity: Toward a Complex Understanding of ‘Menstrual Monsterings’

In this text, Persdotter advances critical menstrual studies by introducing and developing the concept of menstrunormativity as a way to understand the ways normativities around menstruation affect and discipline menstrual subjects. To do so, she works with the idea of a system of multiple and contradictory normativities that order and stratify menstruation. Persdotter makes four interlinked arguments regarding menstrunormativity: (1) normativities work in clustered, complex ways; (2) the cluster of normativities that surround menstruation produce an impossible ideal subjectivity (the imagined menstrunormate), which follows that we are all actually menstrual monsters; (3) normativities are continuously coproduced by everyone and everything, which means we are all, always, culpable in creating monsters; and (4) there is significant potential in embracing ourselves as both Dr. Frankenstein and as monsters, since such a viewpoint produces more opportunities for livable lives for menstruators and the menstrual countermovement alike.

Addressing Menstruation in the Workplace: The Menstrual Leave Debate

Levitt and Barnack-Tavlaris discuss the idea of menstrual leave, a policy option that provides employees with time off during menstruation. They counter the paucity of research surrounding the impacts of such policies on menstruators and the locations offering leave. Levitt and Barnack-Tavlaris argue that without addressing underlying sexist beliefs and attitudes as well as gender discrimination, menstrual leave could have negative effects on menstruators. The authors augment this research with findings from their previous study, which examines attitudes toward and perceptions of menstrual leave. Against this background, the chapter concludes with a discussion of alternative approaches to menstrual leave.

Monitoring Menses: Design-Based Investigations of Menstrual Tracking Applications

Fox and Epstein interrogate and reimagine menstrual tracking technology, focusing on mobile applications designed to document and quantify menstrual cycle data. While such technology promises to provide users with new insights and predictions, the authors highlight how these apps are inscribed with particular visions of menstruation and encourage users to extract intimate information about their bodies. Apps regularly assume, for instance, that all possible users are women, heterosexual, and monogamous, have a “normal” cycle, and use tracking techniques exclusively to gauge fertility. Fox and Epstein present two case studies: (1) examining core issues of usability and inclusion in the design of existing applications; and (2) using participatory approaches to highlight the lived experiences of menstruators and introduce alternatives to dominant menstrual app protocols. In offering this two-part analysis, they point to important openings for exploring how these technologies might support the needs of a multiplicity of menstruating bodies.

Of Mice and (Wo)Men: Tampons, Menstruation, and Testing

Vostral provides much-needed insight into the link between women’s bodily experiences with tampons and twentieth-century developments in material science, corporate research, and gynecological observations about menstrual cycles. She examines how design modifications to tampons, changes in material composition, and the cultivation of women test subjects exposed scientific assumptions, ideas about safety, and attitudes concerning gendered and menstruating bodies. Focusing on the practical work of tampon testing, Vostral examines the impact of broad cultural conditions: prevailing ideas about women’s bodies, gender differences, and the role of science and medicine in optimizing well-being. Finally, she shows how patterns of social power and privilege configured this research, with evidence taking different forms over time.

The Womb Wanders Not: Enhancing Endometriosis Education in a Culture of Menstrual Misinformation

Embedded in the centuries-old assertion that the womb was a nomadic entity wandering about the body causing hysteria and distress, persistent menstrual misinformation and misconceptions remain prevalent wherein pain disorders like endometriosis are concerned. Affecting an estimated 176 million individuals worldwide, endometriosis is a major cause of non-menstrual pain, dyspareunia, painful menses and reduced quality of life among individuals of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds. Wide-ranging symptoms may be dismissed as routine by both patients and practitioners alike due to lack of disease literacy, and lengthy diagnostic delays can exacerbate the negative impact of endometriosis on the physical, psychological, emotional and social well-being of those affected. This chapter identifies some of these challenges and explores how obstacles to best practice can be reduced in part through adoption of early educational campaigns which incorporate endometriosis as a major component of menstrual health education.

The Modern Way to Menstruate in Latin America: Consolidation and Fractures in the Twenty-First Century

The introduction of commercialized disposable pads and tampons during the twentieth century changed the experience of the menstrual body in many (but not all) countries of the world. From a Latin-American perspective, this new way to menstruate was also understood to be a sign of modernization. In this chapter, Tarzibachi describes and analyzes how the dissemination and proliferation of disposable pads and tampons have unfolded first in the United States and later in Latin America, with a particular focus on Argentina. She pays particular attention to how the Femcare industry shaped the meanings of the menstrual body through discourses circulated in advertisements and educational materials. Tarzibachi explores how the contemporary meanings of menstruation are contested globally, as the traditional Femcare industry shifts its rhetoric in response to challenges from new menstrual management technologies, new forms of menstrual activism, and the increasing visibility of menstruation in mainstream culture.

Living in Uncertain Times: Experiences of Menopause and Reproductive Aging

This chapter explores the everyday experiences of women living in and passing through the stages of perimenopause and menopause, a transition that brings both physical change and identity change. Dillaway approaches this subject by examining the myriad uncertainties that women face during this transition, attributing many of them to confusion around the definitions of perimenopause and menopause; ambiguous signs and symptoms; conflicted feelings about ageing; and reflections on both previous and current motherhood and family experiences. Women think about and navigate these uncertainties in varied ways, Dillaway says, and she concludes that part of the everyday experience of this reproductive- and life-course transition is learning to live in and with uncertainty.

Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) and the Myth of the Irrational Female

King’s chapter begins by describing the historical context of ‘premenstrual’ symptoms, which were first formally described in 1931. She then questions the prioritization of mood-based symptoms in the diagnostic criteria for Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS). King argues that population studies suggest that mood-based symptoms are not the most common nor most disruptive of menstrual changes. She then proposes that the trend of ‘psychologizing’ premenstrual symptoms is influenced by the sexist historical assumption of ‘the myth of the irrational female’—the idea that women, due to their reproductive biology, are pathologically emotional and thus have a reduced capacity for reason. The author concludes by calling for a more integrated and rigorous approach to PMS definitions and research to support people who experience cyclical symptoms, without unintentionally pathologizing the menstrual cycle or stigmatizing an entire gender.

If Men Could Menstruate

In this satirical piece, Gloria Steinem scrutinizes the sexist social constructions dominant Western attitudes towards menstruation by imagining a world in which men, not women, are menstruators. Through Steinem’s critical lens, we can see clearly how we we “do” menstruation today—41 years after she originally penned the short essay for Ms. magazine.