The Portland Phoenix: Party On Girls

FUN, WITH MENSTRUATION: the nose is the perfect place to test out a pocket rocket.

Tampons soaked in red Kool-Aid hung from their strings on every wall. Paper cut-outs of a uterus accompanied a giant fabric vagina like back-up singers in a band. Everything was red.

This was a menarche party, in honor of 13-year-old Rebecca Zakarian, the niece of party organizer and sex educator Megan Andelloux. The party, held in Providence, Rhode Island, sought reconciliation between the misunderstood and psychologically estranged Aunt Flow and her nieces of the world.

For many it was our first time rejoicing over leak week, the bleedies, riding the cotton pony, or more specifically ” ‘that time of the month’ where ‘I’m not at my best’ because ‘my vagina is bleeding.’ ” Rather than dread or detest our blood, we celebrated it.

More specifically, we celebrated menarche, the first menstruation, when our mothers claimed with traces of fear in their voices that now we were women. Andelloux doesn’t adhere to the myth that womanhood is handed neatly over upon menstruation. “It’s like, now you are fuckable, you can get pregnant, now you’re a woman,” she characterizes the thinking, “as opposed to her earning her power and becoming a woman.”

Along with that thinking, we were taught that bleeding is shameful and when you are bleeding, you should do anything to conceal it.

“Everywhere you go somebody is  bleeding,” notes Andelloux. “Our culture says, ‘Don’t talk about it.’ It’s a way of repressing women.”

Though the shame of menses has dominated since before the Bible proclaimed the impurity of bleeding women, there are cultures that embrace the powers of menstruation. For example, the Brahmins of South India celebrate menarche with Samati Sadang, a ritual celebration in promotion of fertility. The menstruating girl sits on a banana leaf eating raw eggs with ginger oil, and is then bathed in milk. Afterwards, the family parties down with good eats and rejoices in the girl’s maturation. Unfortunately, this is not the norm in our American society.

Not only do women endure shame while walking along the beach in soft focus, but the products designed for concealing this shameful experience have proven deadly in some cases. In 1980, Proctor and Gamble introduced Rely tampons, advertised as the most absorbent tampon on the market. Made of synthetics like polyester, their greedy fibers drank up the fluids of menses, while breeding the deadly bacteria of Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS); According to Karen Houppert’s The Curse and the 1995 Village Voicearticle “Pulling the Plug on the Sanitary Protection Industry,” 38 women died that year, poisoned by TSS. Rely was quickly pulled from the market.

Because of this, the market, formerly unregulated, was forced to standardize absorbency. Though the occurrence of TSS has dropped dramatically (by ’96 there were fewer than 100 cases reported to the Center for Disease Control in the US, as opposed to 892 in 1980), the health threats of mainstream tampons have not disappeared.

In 1997, New York Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney first introduced the Tampon Safety and Research Act in hopes of protecting the 73 million women (that’s one third of the US population) who use tampons in the US. The bill proposed that the National Institute of Health, rather than the tampon companies, conduct research on TSS, and the threats of dioxin, a chemical produced during the bleaching process of paper and pulp. The bill, reintroduced in 2001, has gone nowhere.

Though tampon manufacturers insist dioxin is present only in trace levels, there haven’t been any conclusive studies about the significance of dioxin accumulation in the body.

Dioxin has been connected to the chronic and painful uterine disease endometriosis, characterized by lesions on the outside of the uterus that shed monthly with menses, causing internal bleeding and scar-tissue. Endometriosis can also lead to infertility. Seventy-nine percent of monkeys fed dioxin in the early ’80s developed endometriosis nearly 10 years later, according to the Endometriosis Association. The occurrence of the disease increased as the dose of dioxin increased, but even monkeys administered only five parts per trillion developed the disease. According to the FDA, tampons today contain .1 to 1 part per trillion.

Though companies like Kotex, Playtex, and Tampax dominate the feminine hygiene market, constituting 90 percent of sales, there are alternatives to these products.

Andelloux introduced many of these products at her party. Cotton tampons completely free of dioxin; reusable (the Keeper, and Divacups) and disposable (Instead) cups worn internally that catch rather than absorb the blood of menses; sea sponges also worn internally that act similarly to a tampon, absorbing the menstrual discharge; and washable fabric pads.

You’ll see none of these items at your local supermarket. These products are outside of the mainstream for many reasons. For one thing, the Keeper, Divacups, and sea sponges all require women to touch themselves during insertion.

“One of the things I learned from this party is how much power women’s bodies have and how scared people are of them,” says Andelloux.

Andelloux believes that education can change our perceptions about menstruation and women’s bodies. “If we just normalize it and say, ‘Okay, that’s all right that we bleed,’ people will feel less screwed-up about it.”

Michelle Ryan, a party attendee, illustrated the historical inadequacy in menstruation education with a story her Grandma told her about her first period. Her grandma, who didn’t know anything about menstruation when she first bled, ran to her mother in anxiety and fear, thinking she was dying. Her mother in frustration and annoyance responded in a harsh voice, “Go talk to your sister — and stay away from boys!”

That’s not the message I want to leave my sisters, nieces, or maybe someday even my daughters with. Fortunately for the menarche party’s guest of honor, Rebecca Zakarian, that’s not the message she received either.