Break the period taboo: my name is Lindy West and I bleed

In this second exclusive extract from her new book, Shrill, West dares to imagine a world where girls feel free to talk about menstruation in shouts instead of whispers

• The ‘perfect body’ is a lie. I believed it for a long time and let it shrink my life

When you’re a little kid, everyone talks about your period like it’s going to be a party bus to WOOOOOOOOOO! Mountain. It’s all romantic metaphors about “blossoming gardens” and “unfurling crotch orchids”, and kids buy into it because they don’t know what a euphemism is because they are 11. But it’s also a profoundly secret thing – a confidence for closed-door meetings between women. Those two contradictory approaches (“periods are the best!” and “we must never ever speak of them”), made me feel as if I was the only not-brainwashed one in a culty dystopian novel. “Oh, yes, you can’t imagine the joy readings in your subjectivity port when the Administration gifts you your woman’s flow! SPEAKING OF THE FLOW OUTSIDE OF THE MENARCHE BUNKER WILL RESULT IN DEACTIVATION.”

The reality, of course, is that when you hit puberty you don’t magically blossom into a woman – you’re still the same tiny fool you were at puberty-minus-one, only now, once a month, hot brown blood just glops and glops out of your private area like a broken Slurpee machine. For ever. Or, at least, until you’re inconceivably elderly, in an 11-year-old’s estimation. Don’t worry, to deal, you just have to cork up your hole with this thing that’s like a severed toe made out of cotton (and if you don’t swap it out often enough, your legs fall off and you die). Or you wear a diaper. Also, your uterus is knives and you poop a bunch and you’re hormonal and you get acne. Have fun in sixth grade, Margaret.

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from Health & wellbeing | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1T4hOGK
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