Quotes & Sayings About Menstruation

Our feelings about menstruation are the image of what it is to be a woman in this culture. While menstruation and the fear of revealing evidence of loss of body control bear possibilities of humiliation for women of which men are not aware, it is humiliating too to be that sex whose voice and presence carry less significance. It is humiliating to speak the same words as a man and have his heard, and not yours. It is humiliating to feel invisible when God gave you a body as solid as his. It is humiliating that women are accorded little dignity unless they are married. We twist these humiliations around, of course, and say it is glorious to have a man fight our battles for us, put us on a pedestal, take care of us. It is, if you enjoy being dependent on someone else. — Nancy Friday

As a rule, menstruation is generally not something seen in porn, which is a peculiar omission in an industry that fetishizes everything from shoes to stuffed animals to excretory functions. Though credit-card processing companies seem to have no problem with double- and triple-penetration sites, bukkake, and electricity play, most of them regard menstruation and other forms of blood play as out of bounds, citing obscenity violations as well as safer sex concerns
though anal cream pies and the like are at least as risky. — Audacia Ray

...she did remember on time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood. — Stephen King

It takes a lot of time, focus and energy to realize the enormity of being the ocean with your very own tide every month. However, by honoring the demands of bleeding, our blood gives something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not - at first - be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we're quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon the solutions to dilemmas that've been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba 'across de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual so profoundly and routinely reinforces our cuntpower. — Inga Muscio

Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison. — Pliny The Elder

Fresh tadpoles coming out in the spring should be washed clean in cold well-water, and swallowed whole three or four days after menstruation. If a woman swallows fourteen live tadpoles on the first day and ten more on the following day, she will not conceive for five years. If contraception in still required after that, she can repeat the formula twice and be for ever sterile... This formula is good in that it is effective, safe and not expensive. The defect is that it can be used only in the spring. — Pearl S. Buck

Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month that I can be myself. — Roseanne Barr

I knew, for instance, that rooms where people slept exuded peculiarly human smells just as the goat pen smelt goaty and the cattle kraal bovine. It was common knowledge among the younger girls at school that the older girls menstruated into sundry old rags which they washed and reused and washed again. I knew, too, that the fact of menstruation was a shamefully unclean secret that should not be allowed to contaminate immaculate male ears by indiscreet reference to this type of first in their presence. — Tsitsi Dangarembga

Never trust something that bleeds for seven days and doesn't die — Linda Kage

Periods are a period when nature forces prostitutes to go on leave. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If you make some comment even obliquely alluding to menstruation or menopause and its effect on my judgment," Murphy interrupted, "I will break your arm in eleven places. — Jim Butcher

Most keep their condition secret from all but a few close friends. Interestingly, many of them say the thing they regret most is not their inability to have children but the lack of menstruation, the event they see as a monthly voucher of femaleness. — Natalie Angier

I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood. — Margaret Atwood

It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life.
[Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview] — Hilary Mantel

He had never wanted to know anything about the part of her intimate life that he had not shared with her. Why should he take an interest now, still less take offense at it? Anyhow, he asked himself, what is an intimate secret? Is that where we hide what's most mysterious, most singular, most original about a human being? Are her intimate secrets what make Chantal the unique being he loves? No. What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing that everybody has: the body and its needs, its maladies, its manias-constipation for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal. — Milan Kundera

And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped. — John Hersey

Multiple wives are required for a godly man to get into heaven, and the prophet regularly performs spiritual marriages, deciding who should be wed to whom, placing girls to be exalted in a plural marriage based on a revelation from God. Most families wait to marry their daughters until the girl begins menstruation, as childbearing is expected within the first year of matrimony. Raising up a righteous seed unto the Lord is a woman's highest calling and it is only though a husband's guidance that a woman can attain entry into the celestial kingdom. — Michele Dominguez Greene

Precisely what menstruation is, is not yet very well known. — G. Stanley Hall

On the one hand, then, in the reproductive functions proper-menstruation, defloration, pregnancy and parturition-woman is biologically doomed to suffer. Nature seems to have no hesitation in administering to her strong doses of pain, and she can do nothing but submit passively to the regimen prescribed. On the other hand, as regards sexual attraction, which is necessary for the act of impregnation, and as regards the erotic pleasures experienced during the act itself, the woman may be on an equal footing with the man. — Princess Marie Bonaparte

It'll be all right, Clay. Really." "So you say, but you have a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur." "That's true," Tom said, "but they're balanced out by poor self-image and ego menstruation at roughly six week intervals ... — Stephen King

In 1986, Gloria Steinem wrote that if men got periods, they 'would brag about how long and how much': that boys would talk about their menstruation as the beginning of their manhood, that there would be 'gifts, religious ceremonies' and sanitary supplies would be 'federally funded and free'. I could live without the menstrual bragging - though mine is particularly impressive - and ceremonial parties, but seriously: Why aren't tampons free? — Jessica Valenti

At her first bleeding a woman meets her power.
During her bleeding years she practices it.
At menopause she becomes it.
Traditional Native American saying — Lucy H. Pearce

Women are females and men are males. According to gynaecologists, women menstruate every month or so, while men, being male, do not menstruate or suffer during the monthly period. A women, being female, is naturally subject to monthly bleeding. When a women does not menstruate, she is pregnant. If she is pregnant, she becomes, due to pregnancy, less active for about a year. — Muammar Gaddafi

We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. The same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. — Dan Savage

When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun. — Jeanette Winterson

Women give birth, men take life. Therefore, men are jealous of this power. War is menstruation envy. — Greg Proops

It's okay to talk about birth, okay - then menstruation. I first started my advocacy for women's health in the field of reproductive freedom, and the next stage would be bringing menopause out of the closet. — Cybill Shepherd

It is better for a girl to marry in such a time when she would begin menstruation at her husband's house rather than her father's home. Any father marrying his daughter so young will have a permanent place in heaven. — Ruhollah Khomeini

girls were subjected to both clito-ridectomy - the excision of the clitoris - and infibulation - the cutting away of the labia and the sealing of the wound to leave only a tiny opening for urination and menstruation. If the malnourished little girls didn't bleed to death from the procedure itself, they often died from resulting infections or debilitating anemia. In others, scar tissue trapped urine or menstrual fluid, causing pelvic infections. Women with scar-constricted birth canals suffered dangerous and agonizing childbirth. Sometimes — Geraldine Brooks

Why is it that a dog's menstruation made her lighthearted and gay, while her own menstruation made her squeamish? The answer seems simple to me: dogs were never expelled from Paradise. Karenin knew nothing about the duality of body and soul and had no concept of disgust. That is why Tereza felt so free and easy with him. (And that is why it is so dangerous to turn an animal into a machina animata, a cow into an automaton for the production of milk. By so doing, man cuts the thread binding him to Paradise and has nothing left to hold or comfort him on his flight through the emptiness of time.) — Milan Kundera

The hormonal interplay inside a woman's head creates her reality. Her hormones tell her day to day what's important. They mold her desires and values. — Abhijit Naskar

On thyroid therapy, more than 90 percent of those with painful menstruation were relieved, most of them completely. The results were fully as good in converting irregular periods to normal, regular ones. And in six of seven women with excessive flow, normal flow was established. — Broda Otto Barnes

In terms of language, there were no separate words for female genitalia for thousands of years. That was mostly because women were considered pretty much the same as men, only of course flimsier, more poorly designed, and incapable of writing in the snow. — Elissa Stein And Susan Kim

While woman sheds the Blood of Life each moon at menstruation, man can only shed the blood of death through warfare and killing. — Katha Pollitt

My mind's monumental, my pen is penetration
That produce words that bleed on the pad like menstruation — Elzhi

If nature really acknowledged the so-called women's month, the entire month would have been period-pains-free. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap. — Florence King

Consider a very natural process, menstruation, and how the association has been created in which this process is dirty, degrading. — Frederick Lenz

Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric "becoming a woman," all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep. — Nell Zink

I understood that menstruation - the indication that you're a real woman - stopped if you grew weak from illness — Aya Kito

One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl's legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, "May you bloom." The girl doesn't flinch. The widow tells her, "This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature." The girl asks, "Why is it the word ne?" The widow responds, "When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman's body to men." The widow places her hands into the water and says, "Good. You are alive. You and I are alive. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Push my buttons, and I'll push you off a bridge. — Karen Quan

A husband or wife did not have the right either to demand sex from his or her spouse or to refuse it, and there was a catalogue of forbidden sexual practices, notably homosexuality, bestiality, certain sexual positions, masturbation, the use of aphrodisiacs, and oral sex, which could incur a penance of three years' duration. Nor were people to make love on Sundays, holy days, or feast days, or during Lent, pregnancy, or menstruation. People believed that if these rules were disobeyed, deformed children or lepers might result. — Alison Weir

The Rose has always been the premiere symbol of female sexuality. In primitive goddess cults, the five petals represented the five stations of female life - birth, menstruation, motherhood, menopause, and death. And in modern times, the flowering rose's ties to womanhood are considered more visual. — Dan Brown

Birth is of course violent. Menstruation is violent. Trust me, if men's penises opened up once a month and shot blood, we'd be hearing about the violence of it. — Lidia Yuknavitch

The greatest mischief of medicine has occurred because life was not honored. Women have been robbed of the glory of their own bodies with, in recent times, removal and mutilation of reproductive organs and breasts, and the treatment of natural passages of life -- birthing, menstruation, menopause -- as disease. — Jeanne Achterberg

If men could menstruate ... clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much.... Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. Of course, some men would still pay for the prestige of such commercial brands as Paul Newman Tampons, Muhammed Ali's Rope-a-Dope Pads, John Wayne Maxi Pads, and Joe Namath Jock Shields - "For Those Light Bachelor Days." Gloria Steinem — Sawyer King

In order to reclaim our full selves, to integrate each of these aspects through which we pass over the course of our lives, we must first learn to embrace them though our cycles. — Lucy H. Pearce

The problem with the word "vagina" is that vaginas seem to be just straight-out bad luck. Only a masochist would want one, because only awful things happen to them. Vaginas get torn. Vaginas get "examined.".. No. Let's clear this up right now - I don't actually have a vagina. I never have. I, personally, have a cunt. Cunt is a proper, old, historic, strong word, and it doubles up as the most potent swear word in the English language. Yeah. That's how powerful it is, guys. If I tell you what I've got down there, old ladies and clerics might faint. I like how shocked people are when you say "cunt." Compared to this, the most powerful swear word men have got out of their privates is "dick," which is frankly vanilla. In a culture where nearly everything female is still seen as squeam-inducing and/or weak - menstruation, menopause, just the sheer, simple act of calling someone "a girl" - I love that "cunt" stands on its own, as the supreme, unvanquishable word. — Caitlin Moran

So I was forced to go to school wearing a menstrual pad belt that had been in our first aid drawer since approximately 1961. If you've never seen one of these things, because you haven't been to the antiquities museum, it is a literal belt that goes around your waist, with two straps that dangle down in your front and back cracks, ice cold metal clips holding a small throw pillow in place over your shame canyon. — Lindy West

I'm the guy with the good attitude towards menstruation. — Dave Foley

Starving whilst schooled is like a man's finding out that his wife is on her periods ... a few seconds after he took Viagra. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby. — Germaine Greer

Attitudes towards menstrual blood in contemporary Western culture still circle around the subject with a mixture of denial and horror, advertisements for sanitary products typically use blue liquid in an attempt to sanitize the reality of blood, weary old jokes circulate about not trusting anything that bleeds for seven days and does not die. Menstrual blood is constructed either as something that requires a hygienic makeover or as something unnatural and obscene, a further indication of the horrors of sexual difference and the threatening 'secrets' of the female body. — Ruth McPhee

I mean if there was any justice in the world you wouldn't even have to go to school during your period. You'd just stay home for five days and eat chocolate and cry. — Andrea Portes

A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity. — Florence King

Chamomile- Potent Medicine Pretty Flowers! This flower has many uses including digestive aid, ulcer healing/prevention, boosts immune system, tranquilizer, soothes menstrual cramps and to promote the onset of menstruation. Use an infusion for its many healing benefits. Take 2 to 3 teaspoons of flowers per cup of boiling water. Steep 10 to 20 minutes and drink up to 3 cups a day. Ask your doctor before using medicinal amounts of chamomile. — Stephanie Stuart

Menstruation not only carries with it the connotation of a productive system that has failed to produce; it also carries the idea of production gone awry, making products of no use, not to specification, unsalable, wasted, scrap. — Emily Martin

Susan was already rehearsing excuses in case she was caught: I just got my period and I was looking for a tissue to stuff in my underpants. Men didn't question menstruation stories. Ever. You could probably get into the White House if you said you needed a tampon ASAP. — Chelsea Cain

Y honouring the demands of our bleeding, our blood gives us something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not-at first- be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we're quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon solutions to dilemmas that've been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba 'cross de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual that so profoundly and reinforces our cuntpower. — Inga Muscio

To be monitoring anything we fucking say. If you wanted to discuss menstruation at great length and detail, this is probably our best chance. He's always been squeamish about women, and no one likes a Peeping Tom, even if he is prime minister. — James S.A. Corey

In indigenous cultures including those of Native Americans, menstruation is viewed a time of positive power, rather than evidence of sin and negative power, or as a feminine inconvenience. — Joan Borysenko

The day of the full moon, when the moon is neither increasing nor decreasing, the Babylonians called Sa-bat, meaning "heart-rest." It was believed that on this day, the woman in the moon, Ishtar, as the moon goddess was known in Babylon, was menstruating, for in Babylon, as in virtually every ancient and primitive society, there had been since the earliest times a taboo against a woman working, preparing food, or traveling when she was passing her monthly blood. On Sa-bat, from which comes our Sabbath, men as well as women were commanded to rest, for when the moon menstruated, the taboo was on everyone. Originally (and naturally) observed once a month, the Sabbath was later to be incorporated by the Christians into their Creation myth and made conveniently weekly. So nowadays hard-minded men with hard muscles and hard hats are relieved from their jobs on Sundays because of an archetypal psychological response to menstruation. — Tom Robbins

In 1790, the average age of first menstruation for European girls was just about eighteen, almost fifty percent older than today. — Howard Means

The sexual map we acquire in youth includes body image, masturbatory guilt, sexual preferences and more. From what turns us on to what turns us off. From attitudes about menstruation to the right of women to wear certain clothing. But using this guilt- and shame-ridden map as a guide to sexuality is like using a map of an ancient city sewer system to locate the fiber optic network. What if the only map we had of a city was made 2,000 years ago? How useful would it be today? My city was an open prairie 2,000 years ago with no roads and maybe a few animal paths. A map of that reality would be of little use today. — Darrel Ray

Given my swimmingly fetching cultural milieu, getting used to this bleeding business took quite a while. In the meantime, I fervently asked people why the hell this happened to us girls. Various sources consistently informed me that it was (big sigh) "just part of being a woman" (big sigh), or the good ol' standby curse we inherited from Eve. — Inga Muscio

From a May 2010 Interview, Chuck Palahniuk
Weird and creepy but true, I've been reading lots of Judy Blume. Being a 48-year-old male reading about adolescent sex in Forever gets me lots of stares in airports ... At this point I am an authority on menstruation. — Chuck Palahniuk

You should never make a decision the day before your period. — Miranda J. Barrett

Avoid Menstruating If, you are using hormonal contraception, such as a low-dose birth control pill, you can avoid the whole change in pH caused by menstrual blood by avoiding menstruation. That's right! Take your pill straight through the placebo days and skip having your period. And yes, this is safe. As discussed in chapter 9, skipping menstruation is a common treatment for endometriosis. — Lauren Streicher

Buddy eyed me closely. His eyes were filigreed with red. I watched as he went through one of those instantaneous mood swings that only drunks and menstruating women can manage. — G.M. Ford

Women's regular bleeding engenders phantoms. — Paracelsus

She got to you, too, huh?" I said, sliding onto the bench seat across from him.
"Actually, I called her." Luca grinned. "I'm vomiting from a possible case of food poisoning. You?"
"Sudden onset menstruation."
He nodded respectfully. "Classic."
"Yeah, but I should have gone for something more long-term. Yours will get you out of the whole afternoon. Ferris Bueller would be proud. — Rachel Vincent

The great mother whom we call Innana gave a gift to woman that is not known among men, and this is the secret of blood. The flow at the dark of the moon, the healing blood of the moon's birth - to men, this is flux and distemper, bother and pain. They imagine we suffer and consider themselves lucky. We do not disabuse them.
In the red tent, the truth is known. In the red tent, where days pass like a gentle stream, as the gift of Innana courses through us, cleansing the body of last month's death, preparing the body to receive the new month's life, women give thanks - for repose and restoration, for the knowledge that life comes from between our legs, and that life costs blood. — Anita Diamant

When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which brings forth with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons forth the emission of the man's seed. And when the seed has fallen into its place, that vehement heat descending from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it, and soon the woman's sexual organs contract and all parts that are ready to open up during the time of menstruation now close, in the same way as a strong man can hold something enclosed in his fist. — Hildegard Of Bingen

Early Menstruation renders the Uteri Hard & dry; so that they ought not to prompt the early appearance by obscene books, and frequent touchings. — Jill Lepore