Television

A Quiet Celebration of the Horny Menstruator

Media, Menstruation, Sex, Television

Guest Post by Lauren Rosewarne

Courtney Cox shocked America in 1985 when she became the first person to say “period” on TV. Period, at least, in the context of menstruation and not punctuation.

 

Tampax, 1985-style

 

Flash forward a couple of decades and this year the same daring word (along with a couple of other doozies) ruffled a few feathers in a Carefree ad. At least it did initially. The furore quickly dissipated and the ad now runs regularly, uneventfully, in Australia. We’ve seemingly learnt how to cope without the conniptions.

 

“That bit of discharge” ad, 2012

 

I daresay it’s the ingratiating of the Carefree ad – with its references to the bits of ladyhood ironically considered least feminine – into our landscape that’s paved the way for another revolutionary down-there-business ad going undetected. Undetected and surprisingly, unwhinged about.

 

Libra “Bootcamp” ad, 2012

 

The new Libra ad dares use the P-word again – sure, itself a euphemism but a) “menstruation” is probably too many syllables for a short ad and b) I’d still rather hear period than any other sanitised circumlocution.

The truly startling bit about the ad however, is the way female sexuality is presented.

For most of last year I was living and breathing menstruation while writing a book on it. My focus was on media presentations and sex n’ blood got treated to a whole chapter.

While there are signs that our culture has become more menstrually mature – we’ve evidently learnt not to dial 000 when discharge is mentioned on TV for example – some menstrual taboos remain. Menstrual sex is a biggie.

On one hand thinking of the menstruator as sexy seems outlandish in the context of film and television. A couple of wonderful Californication scenes aside, periods on screen invariably and inevitably disrupt sex lives and give women – and men – an excuse to restrict it to spoonin’.

On the other hand, feminine hygiene ads are in fact full of attractive ladies peddling products to help menstruators stay sexy all month long. In advertising, the idea of the bleeding woman as outwardly desirable is effortlessly detected.

A much more shocking – and far more insteresting – construct however, is the idea of the menstruator herself feeling sexy. By sexy here, I’m not referring to the way others see her – to her objectification – rather, to her being in touch with her own horniness at a time when women often feel – biologically or because society has coerced it – dirty and out-of-action.

“It’s like a crime scene in my pants” – No Strings Attached (2011)

 

The Libra ad involves a woman who, while initially reluctant because of her period, eventually joins her friend to perve on male boot campers.

Lecherous ladies in advertising are nothing new of course; Diet Coke has long been flogged with some mildly hideous Sex and the City-style male sexualisation:

Diet Coke, 90s style

 

Diet Coke, 00s style

 

My concept of feminism doesn’t deem women panting over men as something inherently progressive. It’s not the ogling in the Libra ad however, that interests me. Rather, it’s the act of ogling for the purposes of arousal while the woman has her period.

I can’t help but be charmed by TV offering us a horny menstruator.

While a niche genre, menstrual-themed porn – here, I refer to the indie material, rather than, say, the buckets-o’-blood-fetish stuff – hints to the idea that some women are, shock horror, actually randier during their periods. Mainstream pop culture and vanilla porn however, routinely give the idea a wide berth. As in No Strings Attached (2011), menstruation is apparently a time when a bloke is just not gonna get a look in.

Just as I’m delighted when I see a woman on TV who deviates from the young/thin/white archetype that pop culture so adores, equally happy am I to see an example of female sexuality presented as a little more complex – and a tad more messier – than what’s normally on offer.

A small win, but I’ll take it.

Republished with permission from The Conversation

Where have all the menstruators gone?

Film, Media, Menstruation, Television

Guest Post by Lauren Rosewarne, University of Melbourne

Exploring missing menstruation on screen

Periods are depicted far more often on screen than I could have ever imagined; perhaps the biggest surprise I got from spending a year researching the topic.

Less surprising however, was that most presentations depict menstruation as the messy, embarrassing, sex-interrupting, mood-swing-inducing week-long hell ride that women have grown to expect from Hollywood.

While 200 scenes were many more than I expected, given that nearly all women will menstruate monthly for some thirty-odd years, 200 scenes actually isn’t all that many.

While most of Periods in Pop Culture focuses on what those scenes themselves reveal about society’s fraught relationship with periods, one chapter in fact explores the why so few portrayals. Given how very common and normal it is, why is the topic so frequently eschewed?

I proposed a handful of reasons including Hollywood’s aversion to telling female stories, narrative distraction, and the show don’t tell nature of the screen. In this post I offer  two other explanations: menstruation as a non-event and political correctness.

As one of the millions of girls who got an (albeit long outdated) menstrual education from Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?, I learnt that some girls apparently eagerly await their first period kinda like Christmas. I wasn’t like Margaret. I didn’t pine for it, and when I got it I didn’t look down at my underpants and throw my head back in delight like Debbie (Nell Schofield) in the Australian film Puberty Blues (1981): for me it was a non-event.

The non-event nature of menstruation appears a central explanation for its absence.

In an episode of sitcom The Golden Girls (1985–1992), Sophia (Estelle Getty) reflected on her periods: “I got it, no one told me. I didn’t get it, no one told me. I figured, this is life, and went back to my meatballs.” In this scene, Sophia reflects that many women don’t see any overwhelmingly need to talk about menstruation or complain about it or even to honor it, but that it is simply something that needs to be gotten on with.

Aside from those times when pregnancy is feared or desired, there are few occasions when menstruation is experienced as particularly memorable or gets bestowed with any great significance. I think this fact significantly underpins its absence on screen.

Thinking of menstruation as somehow naturally insignificant or uninteresting however, would be premature. In the film To Sir With Love (1967), there is a scene where teacher Mark Thackeray (Sidney Poitier) reprimanded girls who he believed burnt a menstrual product in his classroom: “A decent woman keeps things private. Only a filthy slut would have done this!”  Here, Thackeray refers to the most important rule of menstruation: concealment. On screen, if audiences see menstruation or if a character identifies as bleeding, she has neglected her most important gender burden. By infrequently portraying menstruation, the secrecy imperative is upheld. When women downplay the significant of their periods, when they believe their periods are uninteresting, internalized sexism is highlighted.

Another explanation for missing menstruation is so-called political correctness; that avoiding it reflects the contemporary dictums of liberal feminism: shunning topics which play up differences between men and women.

Given that menstruation is so common and that so many taboos exist surround it, it might be assumed that including it in narratives would be a feminist act. The flipside of this however, is that doing so might do gender equality a disservice; that presenting it reminds audiences of biological inequalities between men and women.

In a scene from the series Californication (2007-), Hank (David Duchovny) is about to have sex with his daughter’s teacher Mrs. Patterson (Justine Bateman). As they undress, Mrs. Patterson says, “Just so you know, I’m on my period.” Mrs. Patterson didn’t – and likely in our culture couldn’t — automatically assume that Hank would be fine and thus gave him an exit strategy. By mentioning menstruation in a sex scene, it existed as a glaring biological power imbalance; that an opportunity was offered for Hank to reject her on the basis of her biology.

By excluding menstruation, a female character can be interpreted as having the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with her male counterpart; that she can be as sexually aggressive as she likes and not have to query whether her partner is bothered by her period. In turn, she doesn’t get limited by her biology.

Predictably, there are some serious limitations to this argument. On screen and off, women’s biology is ever present. Eliminating reference to menstruation certainly doesn’t make female characters any less female; in fact, disproportionate inclusion of, and focus on women who are stereotypically feminine demonstrates that biological differences between men are women continue to be crucially important on screen.

Over 200 scenes of menstruation did indeed surprise me, although admittedly it’s quite a bit sad that it did. Given how common menstruation is, given that the good majority of women cope each month without drama, fanfare or hijinks, one might expect that more presentations – notably more normal presentations – would redden our screens.

 

Dr Lauren Rosewarne is a political scientist based at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of four books; her newest, Periods in Pop Culture: Menstruation in Film and Television, will soon be published by Lexington Books.

Politics and Sex Education Make Strange Bedfellows

anatomy, Birth Control, Ovulation, Television

Guest Post by Lisa Leger

Yesterday (June 4) on MSNBC-TV, my girl Rachel Maddow interviewed New York Times columnist Gail Collins, author of the new book, As Texas Goes. The book criticizes the state’s politics and morality laws and their impact on the rest of the country. Now, I’m all for slagging the state of Texas for its abstinence-only sex ed policy, and I look forward to reading Collins’ book (which Maddow called “the funniest political book of the year”). However, my problem started when Maddow read a quote that seems to mock a piece of sexual health information that is actually correct.

The statement in question is “if the woman is dry, the sperm will die” , followed by the interpretation that it is some sort of colonial-era notion relating to the woman’s enjoyment or collusion in the sex act. Of course, the quote refers to fertile mucus and not lubrication or ejaculate, as the rather garbled interpretation seemed to imply. It’s a shame that a piece of perfectly useful information about fertility is confused with some arcane puritanism to make the [valid] point that abstinence-only sex ed is backward. I’m also disheartened [and vindicated] to see my assertion that mucus is either left out of sex education or inadequately taught being demonstrated once again.

In this story, though, my concern is not for the un-informed teens I champion in the blog linked here — but for the many adults who worked with Collins on her book and with Maddow on her show who let that reference get by them. Are we to assume that none of them ever learned to chart their cycles? Could there be no one on either staff trying to get pregnant? How can not a single one of the likely dozens of professional writers, fact checkers, and other staff members not have noticed that the reference they chose to hold up to ridicule is actually valid information about sperm survival in mucus?

A “Strange Bedfellows moment” for me as a Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) teacher is when what we teach is lumped in with what abstinence-only courses teach.  Another example would be finding oneself in favor or opposed to something like hormone pills for entirely different reasons.  As a Justisse Method teacher for 20 years, I’ve watched how charting is portrayed as some sort of Vatican roulette and how mucus is hidden away even more than menstrual blood is. I wince when I see perfectly good educational opportunities go by the wayside like that. How do the biological facts of fertility (sperm need mucus to survive) become invalidated simply by being taught from an authoritarian religious perspective?  I usually see the humor in a strange bedfellows moment, but hearing an evangelical Texan being mocked for teaching kids some mystical version of what I teach — this one stings a bit.

Lisa Leger is a member of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research and a Justisse Fertility Awareness teacher on Vancouver Island.

 

Menopause Isn’t for Dummies

Celebrities, Media, Menopause, Television

Roseanne’s Nuts was one of the delights of summer 2011, especially for those of us who have missed the comedic talents of Roseanne Barr. If you don’t watch television (or are outside the US), Roseanne’s Nuts is Roseanne Barr’s return to episodic television, this time in the form of a reality show set on the star’s 40-acre macadamia nut farm in Hawaii. When her eponymous sitcom ended in 1997, she made a couple of attempts at talk show hosting, then left L.A. and the limelight to raise her youngest son and macadamias in Hawaii. He’s now a teenager, and the nuts are ready to harvest.

An ongoing thread of the show is Roseanne’s plan to harvest and distribute her nuts as a low-cost protein source for impoverished people. Each episode also has its own self-contained, seemingly unscripted plotline. Unlike many of today’s popular reality shows, however, there are no manipulated showdowns or drunken feuds. Much of the time, Roseanne and her family seem like everyone else’s family — if only the rest of us could live off sitcom residuals and were followed around by a camera crew. There is laughter and teasing, and some conflict underpinned with genuine affection, but everything isn’t always tidily resolved in 22 minutes.

In the Episode #15 (original air date September 10), 58-year-old Roseanne copes with continuing symptoms of menopause. It’s handled so honestly (for the most part) that I’m going to overlook the fact that the episode was titled “Menopause for Dummies”.* The episode opens with Johnny Argent, Roseanne’s manpanion**, sharing a list of menopause symptoms he has found on the internet. Roseanne acknowledges having them all, except for tingling in her extremities, and decides to visit her friend, Dr. Allen, and to investigate whether she should receive hormone treatments. (The full episode can be watched online at Lifetime.com until Oct. 11; preview a short clip at right.)

-+-+-+- SPOILERS AHEAD -+-+-+-

Roseanne visits Dr. Allen — on camera, of course — this is a reality show — and explains her concerns. He asks about her libido and her sex life, and she replies, “It’s like an old person’s”. She responds forthrightly to his suggestion that dryness may be the cause of her ‘feminine itching’: “that’s all dried up like a sonofabitch”. Dr. Allen wants to measure Roseanne’s hormone levels with a 24-hour urine test, as he believes that will provide more precise information than any blood test. Roseanne is horrified by his description of her contribution to the procedure (“You pee in a bucket for 24 hours”), but even more horrified by his other recommendation: she needs to exercise.

Roseanne tells the camera — the proxy for us, the audience at home — that she doesn’t know if she’ll go on hormones or not. Her women friends recommend red wine, saying it’s bad for menopause (“because it makes you sweat”) but good for the libido. Her eldest son Jake is delighted to hear that his mom is considering hormones, telling the camera, “After eight years of being batshit crazy, I think she’s finally ready. I’m so happy — once she gets hormones, my life’s gonna be a lot easier.”

Some of my SMCR colleagues who study menopause may cringe at these scenes, but I think they’re representative of the kind of communication many women experience around menopause; that is, well-meaning, if ill-informed, advice from friends and family. It feels like the kinds of conversations lots of us have in our own living rooms and front porches. It is this feeling of unscripted authenticity that draws viewers to Roseanne’s Nuts. I also note the special irony of menopause; after 20 or 30 years of our hormones being blamed for erratic and irritable behavior, we’re now advised to consume hormones to rein in our erratic and irritable “batshit crazy” behavior.

This sense of authenticity and realism continues in the scenes where Roseanne works out with the trainer recommended by Dr. Allen. The trainer eases Roseanne into aerobic activity, but Roseanne is reluctant and uncomfortable, especially when the trainer starts to show enthusiasm and high-fives Roseanne. She tells the trainer, “I hate the fact that I’m supposed to act like I like it. That’s not gonna work for me. I don’t like it. I can’t lie through it.”

I couldn’t help but think what a great, if implicit, endorsement this is for Health At Every Size. Roseanne gives up on the trainer and exercise after one workout, because exercise for its own sake is seldom enjoyable to those who haven’t been active. HAES encourages people to find pleasure in moving one’s body — whether walking the dog, doing yoga, swimming, bicycling, or whatever — and doing the activity for the joy it provides rather than for an external goal. HAES also affirms Roseanne’s belief that “if you’re fat, it’s probably because you had fat parents and no amount of dieting will change that”.

In the final scenes, Roseanne and Johnny try to follow Dr. Allen’s last bit of advice, apparently delivered off-camera, to be “more romantic” to jump-start her stalled libido. The camera follows them to dinner, where they alternate between trying to enact cultural expectations of a romantic dinner and discussing their own relationship, concluding that “sex isn’t what it’s all about”.

As the final credits begin, Roseanne faces the camera and announces her final decision about hormone treatments:

I just decided, F it, I’m not gonna get anything going on some libido level. I’m not gonna pee in a bucket, I’m not gonna exercise, everything’s fine. I don’t care. I’ve got a really thick beard, and I don’t give a fuck.

Some re:Cycling readers may be uncomfortable with Roseanne’s diction, but it was this monologue that won me over. Once again, Roseanne comes across as sincere, relatable, honest, and comfortable with herself — and comfortable with getting older and with menopause. Roseanne’s Nuts just may be to the 2010s what Roseanne was to the 1980s.

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*The whole “For Dummies” book series is a personal pet peeve. I’ve never bought any of those books, as I refuse to contribute to the profits of a publisher and author whose first assumption is that I am stupid.

**I just can’t call a 62-year-old man her boyfriend, although that is the title that runs beneath his name during the interview segments.

In Search of The Perfect Vagina

anatomy, Television

“If you’d told me three months ago that I’d let a plastic surgeon examine my froufrou, that I’d show it to another woman (who wasn’t a doctor) and then allow an artist to take a cast of my Mary, I’d have laughed you out of the house. But it’s extraordinary how documentary-making changes your mind about even the most concrete of things . . . “

–Lisa Rogers, presenter of Channel 4 documentary “The Perfect Vagina”


Rogers’ film is a poignant exploration of why young women in the UK seek labiaplasty and hymenoplasty.

How much blood is too much?

Advertising, Media, Menorrhagia, Menstruation, Pharmaceutical, Television

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved tranexamic acid tablets as treatment for heavy menstrual bleeding more than a year ago, but you probably haven’t seen much of this television commercial to promote the drug (brand name Lysteda). Matthew Arnold reports in Medical Marketing and Media that television network executives are put off by the ad’s explicit mention of “periods” and “bleeding” combined with the symbolism of fall red rose petals.

(The article appeared in the December, 2010, print issue of MMM, but online October 20, 2010.)

Vintage FemCare Advertising

Advertising, Disposable menstrual products, Language, Media, Television

In my visual communication class this week, I used several femcare ads (along with a couple of cell phone commercials and other images) to illustrate Althusser’s concept of interpellation. My students got more of a lesson than they bargained for, as I ended up also talking a little about the history of advertising for femcare products. I mentioned but did not show this historically significant ad, notable to my students for the appearance of pre-Friends Courtney Cox, but more important because it was the first time the word “period” was uttered on television in a menstrual product ad.

It aired in 1985.