Feminist information/ mythology/ explanations about menstruation
July 21, 2017 4:11 PM   Subscribe

I need help conceptualizing what happens to my mind when I'm PMSing from a holistic/ feminist /empowering perspective and am looking for traditional rituals, self care options, and/or mythological explanations that "value the divine feminine energy" instead of the misogynist assumption that "women are hormonal". I'm looking for spiritual/ psychological healing options rather than help with the physical cramps and headaches and etc.

It doesn't happen every month, but ever since I started menstruating, every couple of periods is accompanied by deep feelings of wanting to find my life's purpose, and feeling like I'm having all these insights into myself and what I want out of life.

It also goes along with feeling all this anger, and for once in my life not giving a fuck what other people think. And feeling like, now I know what it feels like to be a man, because I do whatever the fuck I want.

Also, at times I feel like some sort of demon woman who personifies all the ways that women are crazy, and my mind seems to become completely irrational and instead, suspicious, judgmental, and prone to lashing out.

Sometimes I also get this feeling of, everything in my life is wrong and I have to fix it all.

And it seems like I cycle between these states all throughout the day, and makes me feel like a crazy person.

It's so fucking confusing, and due to knowing that I'm bound to feel this way every month or two, I don't feel confident that I can take on big challenges in life because when PMS hits, all logic goes out the window and it feels like my brain is a snowglobe that just got shaken.

I'm already on Effexor, and I find it has helped me quite a lot in the past year. But these weird stages still come back. I used to be on Tricyclin birth control, but I stopped it when I read that hormonal birth control has been linked to depression. I'm not interested in incorporating any new pharmaceuticals into my life, and no it's not PMDD.

Anyways, I'd love to hear about how you treat yourself special when you're PMSing, how you harness the insights and the anger that finally come out and find renewal afterwards, what monthly rituals you undertake.

Also would be interested in books that touch on this topic from a not-too-New-Agey perspective (ie: anthropological texts that talk about how menstruation is treated in indigenous communities that value holy feminine energy)
posted by winterportage to Religion & Philosophy (11 answers total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love this question! I'm not sure I have too much to suggest except to say right on, and that I have felt a lot of these things, too. One thing that came to mind as I was reading your post was the phrase "blood mysteries." I can't remember who coined it, but it was a term I came across when reading books about preparing for childbirth. The idea being that there are a few different times in women's lives that are marked by change, disruption, and potential insight, periods being one of them. Look it up, you might find something good. And thank you for this post.
posted by toomuchkatherine at 6:24 PM on July 21, 2017


From a women's group I was involved with many years ago, I picked up the habit of always wearing red while I was on my period, as a form of claiming my power, even if what I was wearing was underwear nobody else could see.

I taught this to my daughters; they don't stick with it entirely, but they've both said it helped them cope with teenage life and school - they had a secret they weren't telling anyone, rather than a shameful thing going on that they were supposed to hide.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 7:32 PM on July 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


I have come to look upon the time of my period to be a monthly cleansing of all that has happened, and that it is time to let go of what doesn't serve me. I think that's possibly where some of the difficult emotions come from, as I work through some things and don't always relinquish everything each time. It really is a time of cleansing, renewal, and feeling refreshed once it is all over. Literally it is: as in the body is ridding its preparations for the possibility of new life to start, and beginning anew. I find that by incorporating little cleansing rituals, even if only small meditations or yoga, I feel so much better if I allow myself to breathe through it... with the knowledge that there will be clean slate ready to create again in the month ahead.
posted by itsflyable at 8:16 PM on July 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


Have you ever read The Spiral Dance by Starhawk? If not, I think it might be exactly what you're looking for.
posted by heatherlogan at 8:22 AM on July 22, 2017


Best answer: If you have kids or are planning to, this may not work for you, but as a childless-by-choice nonbinary uterus owner, I love rereading Suzanne Sadedin's How The Woman Got Her Period.

Long story short, the relationship between mother and fetus is actually quite antagonistic in some ways, because the fetus is so demanding of nutrients and resources -- which is ultimately because of how our big intelligent brains are so expensive to grow and run. So, lots of things about the uterine lining are the way they are because of this evolutionary history. Somehow, this makes it more energetically favorable for humans to have overt menstruation instead of covert menstruation (reabsorbing the blood internally, or "estrus", which most other mammals do). I don't know quite enough physiology to understand the last bit, but I can reasonably guess at the evolutionary tradeoffs involved.

The blood of menstruation is the blood of humanity's battle for intelligence, and the blood of uterus owners' battle for bodily autonomy against their own offspring.
posted by Alioth at 8:26 AM on July 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


I love the idea of making all those deep feelings empowering. Just be wary about conflating femininity and menstruation - not even all cis women menstruate.
posted by gaybobbie at 9:18 AM on July 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Menstruation, and abortion can both be regarded as a sacrament. A lot of the sexism that women labour under is not laid upon them by men, but by their own children. Women take this upon themselves voluntarily because they have to choose between themselves and their children. Socially single fathers suffer many of the disadvantages that single mothers do. Menstruation is the declaration: I have not created a child. It is a mixture of rage, empowerment, relief, grief, release, celebration, vulnerability. Every pregnancy brings a chance of killing you. Menstruation means not this time. Every ovulation that does not result in pregnancy means you have missed a chance to have a child, that you have saved your resources and strength for yourself, for any children you may already have, or may have in future and for anyone else you may choose to direct them towards, such as perhaps the cause of making this a better world by not having children.

Red is the most primal colour, blood is the most primal substance. Blood is holy. To donate blood is also a sacrament. Only women bleed without taking an injury. Only human's menstruate. Other animals will spot during ovulation (as humans also may do.) Menstruation is catharsis. Menstruation is the purging of a rejected conception. Your body menstruates because it cannot tell if you have conceived or not, but it can tell that if you have the embryo is a suboptimal one, and it is refusing to carry it. (A common birth defect produces an embryo that lacks a certain bio-marker. Your body menstruates if it does not sense this bio-marker. The biological purpose of menstruation is to prevent you wasting valuable resources and risking a full term labour on a fetus that will die on delivery.) Menstruation is there to protect you from this.

When you are bleeding you are vulnerable. Predatory animals can smell you and track you. You are more likely to be weak and faint. Therefore you are quite likely to instinctively want to hunker down somewhere safe and familiar where you have a stash of resources like water and food and bedding and sleep until the bleeding stops. That's normal. So it's also normal to spend a chunk of your pre and early period thinking Get away from me! at everyone because you really just want to be in a low stimulus environment, back in your den.



Many of our emotions are cause not by our social situation, but by our biological situation. eg. we are grumpy not because the people around us are especially unkind, but because we are hungry. Menstruation and its predictable cycles gives us an opportunity to learn how our physiological rhythms create our emotional rhythms; that one day we will feel rage, and another day contentment, and that these are valid and real feelings, but that we do not need to attribute them to external things. They can come from within us. This is a critical thing to learn. It's so easy to mess up our relationships with other people by thinking they have power over our emotions, that it is them making us upset or happy, when they don't have that power, when our upset and our happy, is much more under our control, or a part of our cycles than something that other people control.

When you learn your rhythms you learn to work with them: On the third day before my period, I may waken to sullen feelings, to introspection. This is when I should think about injustice. I may gain insight. This is when I brood. On the day before my period I may feel rage. This is when my reflexes will be fast, faster than my self control. I will choose to move slowly and not go among other people lest I turn my anger at them. This will be a day when I can catch an arrow in flight, when if I am thwarted I will break my way through glass with a single punch. Five days after my period begins I will feel a foolish fondness for my accustomed lover and my pelvic area will engorge easily. It is a good time to seek this person out. Their scent will be attractive to me and I will want to touch them and listen to them. The anger will have melted away. I will not want to quarrel with anyone. It will not be a good time to compete. I will feel patient and drowsy.

This was a example of an cycle emotional map, but you can make your own. It's a very useful tool for self understanding, especially if you have any tendency towards personality disorder. It's an enormous relief to know that you will feel a certain way at a certain time but that the feeling will inevitably run its course and not be as strong later, or may even completely switch to the opposite. The first thing to do is document it. Observe and document. After two or three months you will start to get a feeling for the fact for how many days the rage lasts, or how many days the near panic self pity lasts.

The next thing to do, once you have some patterns charted is to figure out constructive things to do with those days. For example, when you are having a rage day it is NOT a good day to discuss your childhood with your mother, or meet with the landlord about what repairs need to get done as you may be more aggressive than is effective. It is likely to be a good day for cleaning out the back shed and hauling all the junk to the curb. It might be a good day for writing a break up song. When you are having a weepy self pity day might be an excellent day to go see that silly comedy movie, or to get together with your sister, but would probably be a bad day to go out drinking and a bad day to watch sad movies.

The thing about having cyclical emotions is that it is good. It is much better than having unpredictable emotions. There is nothing wrong with having emotions - metafilter regularly gets questions from people who suffer from dysthemia - so it's learning to manage and understand and regulate them. Anger is a valid and constructive emotion. Frustration is not. Turning anger at your dog is not constructive. So it's all in how you handle it. We need angry people who will use that anger constructively. It's the same with sadness, and confusion.

You might seriously consider setting up your life to grant yourself two days every cycle that are your retreat times, when you meditate and study blood wisdom. Likely you can't find a career that will enable you to take two days off from work, but you can observe it the way someone who can't take religious holidays off will observe it, by holding rituals while following those activities that you can't avoid. By treating those days as spiritual events and opportunities for spiritual growth they could be less of a challenge and more of a foundation that you can build personal strength on. I am thinking of things like having calming rituals which you can follow during your breaks, (yoga for menstrual cramps? readings on blood wisdom? meditation? affirmation rituals?) and using symbolic items to help ground you.

That is rather New Age and woo, but these things work. You create your own symbols. Example: This necklace belonged to my grandmother. My grandmother was the strongest, angriest person I knew. She broke out of an abusive relationship and had her husband put in prison. I wear her necklace during my "blessing days " to remind me that I am strong to and that I will use my anger constructively too. I will not allow my anger to harm myself. I will only use my anger to protect myself effectively. This is perfectly valid as an accessory with other religions too. You're not saying that the necklace is magic. It's a reminder, and a link, and a comfort, like having pictures of family on your phone, and reminder app, but the necklace is worn and is stronger because it engages your emotions.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:53 AM on July 22, 2017 [14 favorites]


Check out the book Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Off to the top of my head, I can't recall menstruation-specific bits, but it's a classic work on connecting to the essential power of womanhood, integrating an anthropological and Jungian look at folklore, myth, fairytales, oral histories.
posted by thetarium at 10:15 AM on July 22, 2017


A Jewish perspective
And another one
posted by SyraCarol at 5:28 PM on July 22, 2017


You might be interested in the upcoming book The Hormone Myth. (I actually won a copy in a goodreads giveaway, but haven't received it yet so I can't review.)
posted by gennessee at 5:08 PM on July 23, 2017


Not philosophy, but saw this trending. It's pretty cute.
posted by benadryl at 11:20 PM on July 26, 2017


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