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Muayyen Günler : Menstrüasyonun Gerçek Hikayesi
İnsanların yaklaşık yarısının, hayatları boyunca yüzlerce defa yaşadığı regl süreci hakkında tam olarak ne biliyoruz? Bildiklerimiz neden bu kadar kısıtlı ve muğlak?
Bu sorulardan yola çıkan biyolojik antropolog Kate Clancy, günümüzde hâlâ birçok toplumda fısıltıyla konuşulan ve gizlenmeye çalışılan menstrüasyonu hem biyolojik açıdan hem de toplumsal ve kültürel açılardan ele alıyor. Menstrüasyon neden ve nasıl gerçekleşir? Evrim sürecinde insanlığa nasıl bir katkısı olmuştur? “Normal regl döngüsü” diye bir şey var mıdır? Bedenin enerji mekanizması, bağışıklık sistemi ve psikososyal stres faktörleri regl döngüsünü nasıl etkiler? Gelecek, menstrüasyon için ne gibi yenilikler ve bakış açıları getirebilir?
Menstrüasyonu bireysel bir tecrübe olarak değil toplumsal bir mesele olarak gören Clancy şöyle diyor:
“Umarım bu kitabı benim yazdığım kadar hevesle okursunuz, rahmin failliğine ve uyum sağlama becerisine dair öğrendiklerinizden keyif alırsınız ve en azından menstrüasyona ve menstrüel onarıma karşı biraz saygı duymaya başlarsınız. Umarım menstrüasyonla ilgili yanlış kanıları açığa çıkarmak söz konusu olduğunda iktidar, toplumsal cinsiyet ve ırk arasındaki bağlantıların ne kadar girift olduğunu görürsünüz. Yazdıklarımın, bedensel özerklik için mücadele ettiğimiz ve radikal gelecekler hayal ettiğimiz bir dünyanın neye benzeyebileceğine dair yeni fikirlerin yetişeceği bereketli bir toprak sunmasını diliyorum.”
Bu sorulardan yola çıkan biyolojik antropolog Kate Clancy, günümüzde hâlâ birçok toplumda fısıltıyla konuşulan ve gizlenmeye çalışılan menstrüasyonu hem biyolojik açıdan hem de toplumsal ve kültürel açılardan ele alıyor. Menstrüasyon neden ve nasıl gerçekleşir? Evrim sürecinde insanlığa nasıl bir katkısı olmuştur? “Normal regl döngüsü” diye bir şey var mıdır? Bedenin enerji mekanizması, bağışıklık sistemi ve psikososyal stres faktörleri regl döngüsünü nasıl etkiler? Gelecek, menstrüasyon için ne gibi yenilikler ve bakış açıları getirebilir?
Menstrüasyonu bireysel bir tecrübe olarak değil toplumsal bir mesele olarak gören Clancy şöyle diyor:
“Umarım bu kitabı benim yazdığım kadar hevesle okursunuz, rahmin failliğine ve uyum sağlama becerisine dair öğrendiklerinizden keyif alırsınız ve en azından menstrüasyona ve menstrüel onarıma karşı biraz saygı duymaya başlarsınız. Umarım menstrüasyonla ilgili yanlış kanıları açığa çıkarmak söz konusu olduğunda iktidar, toplumsal cinsiyet ve ırk arasındaki bağlantıların ne kadar girift olduğunu görürsünüz. Yazdıklarımın, bedensel özerklik için mücadele ettiğimiz ve radikal gelecekler hayal ettiğimiz bir dünyanın neye benzeyebileceğine dair yeni fikirlerin yetişeceği bereketli bir toprak sunmasını diliyorum.”
312 pages, Paperback
First published April 11, 2023
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March 26, 2024
More accurate rating: 3/10 max.
Edit – 26th of March 2024:
Okay, so... I did in fact push myself to read this thing in its entirety. I hate feeling like I might be unfair to a book the contents of which I haven't actually read. And I felt a little guilty that I went off on this book, so hard... just based on its introduction. To be clear though: I don't (and never) bear any ill will towards the author; I wish her the best of luck in her future endeavours, but like... outside of diverging worldviews/attitudes, this book is legitimately bad . And I'm left wondering: Princeton University Press, what the fuck were you smoking?
This is, quite frankly, the worst non-fiction book I've read since Entangled Life, in 2021, and that was a lot better than this wishy-washy, virtue-signally nothingburger of a 'treatise' on menstruation. Next time, I swear to the freaking gods, I'm sticking to my decision to DNF, because gah dayum!
And I'm gonna go with bullet points for this one:
a) The stuff that repulsed me in the introduction very much continued in the rest of the text: it was way too 'Murican-centric, way too concerned with virtue-signalling and self-flagellation for the crime of being written by a non-dysphoric female human of European descent. To quote my boyfriend: the entirety of fucking Western medicine has colonialist, imperialist, etc... skeletons in its closet, can we thus please move the fuck on in a book purportedly about the phenomenon of menstruation itself? Like seriously, the book's conclusion all but argues women seeking information about their own bodies should first receive a class on the eugenic past of gynaecology to... create a better, more inclusive future (I guess). How about... no ? Just give me the fucking science already!
b) Which means there was also very little actual freaking science in this thing – medical or otherwise. The author tried to tackle way too many research angles (biology, anthropology, sociology, public health policy, social justice) over the span of a relatively short text, and failed to properly delve into any of them as a result. I learned next-to-nothing of note in this book (with regards to the perception of menstruation in other cultures, or the actual biology of menstruation, in relation to things like stress for instance) – it was the very incarnation of 'spread too thin' superficiality.
c) This is also because – and tying back to my first point – the author wasted way too many pages writing what essentially amounted to a political op-ed, pamphlet, manifesto, what have you... instead of an actual pop-science book.
d) Additionally, and this hits more personally, I'll admit: the section of the book that dealt with the long-term physiological impact of trauma left a very bad taste in my mouth. Yes, broader sociological factors impact individual experiences of adversity and/or trauma, but 'fighting the power' won't fucking change the fact I was abused, and raped, by individuals, and that these experiences impacted both my mind, and female body, as an individual victim. So I don't know what the author's fucking point was in contesting the importance of considering trauma in the assessment of a person's health issues. Especially since she disclosed, in her introduction, the fact she is also a victim of SA.
e) The simple fact is the book suffers from its obsession with 'identity politics/wokeness'. I always feel so freaking weird with this stuff because I consider myself a feminist, anti-racist, unspecifiedly leftist, and an environmentalist. But this... this stuff just falls into the most off-putting kind of un-nuanced, untethered, black and white thinking – blegh. I mean the book literally mentions the 'myth of personal responsibility'. Thing is: how the actual fuck is this a myth though? I get, on some level, that the author – probably – simply meant that, in this day and age of neoliberal (and still androcratic) capitalism, emphasis isn't sufficiently placed on collective (and institutional) responsibility. But why oh why this over-correction to the opposite extreme? Why does it always have to be a freaking either/or with these people?! It's both , for fuck's sake. Anyways, semi-off topic rant over.
In conclusion: this book was terrible. Read Caroline Criado Perez' Invisible Women for an infinitely better book about what I... think this one was trying to go for. And, well, something else to learn about the actual science of menstruation I guess. :/
Rant from the 17th of March 2024:
Okay I'm DNFing this one.
I won't give a rating, to try and remain fair, but holy crap am I angry.
31 pages in and the author is still harping on about 'identity politics', the Great Evils™ of the history of anthropology and gynaecology; going on completely unnecessary tangents about DSDs, and self-flagellating for being – shock horror – a 'White Cis Woman™'. Oh, and also about how she's 'doing the Lady's work by employing "feminist" methodology. No, madam, you are not; what you described there is simply called epistemology! Also congrats to the author for finally making me feel embarrassed to share the label of 'feminist' with the likes of her. 🥲
Then of course, there's the 'people who menstruate' bullshit that made me want to shoot myself. And it's hilarious, too, because the words 'women' and 'girls' were also used... so t'was all one giant, garbled mess. 🫠
Like seriously: is this what gynocentric non-fiction publishing is, just, going to be for the next couple of decades, until the 'Murican-centric Woke Wars calm the fuck down? It's bloody infuriating to me I can't read a book, and learn cool new facts about a central function of my female (yes, I said it, it's female, fucking deal with it genderists) body without being pelted in the face with nauseating, self-hating, virtue-signalling, woke punditry, and yes, anti-feminist, sexist and misogynistic female erasure. God fucking damn it.
The editors literally could've written in 'women*' instead of 'people who menstruate' (🤮) and have a footnote explaining the asterisk included trans-masc peeps. Or, they could've written in 'female humans', or 'women and trans-masc persons'. Any one of those options would've taken up less space, less ink, and... isn't saving on paper all the rage now in publishing, in any case, hmm? But nah: why do any of that when you can just reduce women to a function of their body? Whilst leaving men as, well... men, of fucking course. Can't possibly call men 'people who have testicles', amirite? 🙄
This author has absolutely no business calling herself a feminist (in this book at least, sorry not sorry), when she clearly doesn't understand feminist theory 101. 'People who menstruate have historically been controlled, with regards to their fertility, by people who don't menstruate', yes, you ---, that's men/male humans, as a class exploiting women/female humans, as a class for their reproductive labour! Jesus fucking christ this is the most basic you can freaking get in terms of feminist analysis! This is precisely what radical feminists have been pointing to for the past 20+ years: this Orwellian language capture prevents us from even naming the problem and discussing the roots of sex-based oppression!!! But of course, anti-racists and, say, marxists, can keep discussing their axes of material oppression just fine... it's women, per usual, who have to give in to accommodate the whims of others. Fuck our lives, I guess.
Okay, so you don't understand reproductive, and/or evolutionary biology, got it. And you don't understand feminist theory/analysis, got it. ✅
Okay you definitely don't even remotely understand feminist theory/analysis, got it! ✅
And yes, this is 'Murican-centric as all hell. Harping on about white privilege, slavery, eugenics and how those things shaped the emergence of gynaecology in North America (and not a peep about how midwives were pushed away from female medicine in Europe itself, of course). Yes, those things are horrible parts of history, but again: if I wanted to read about the influence of imperialism, colonialism, etc... on the development of gynaecological medicine, I'd go read a book specifically about that! As it stands: this grovelling virtue-signalling gave me second-hand embarrassment, I swear to the bloody gods.
All I wanted was to learn about menstruation, without being made to feel 'woman', and 'female', are dirty words. Is that really too much to ask?! 😫
So please, if anyone knows (of) a book about the current science of menstruation that doesn't stoop to this level of abject muppetry, do let me know. 'Cause I just can't with this one.
Edit – 26th of March 2024:
Okay, so... I did in fact push myself to read this thing in its entirety. I hate feeling like I might be unfair to a book the contents of which I haven't actually read. And I felt a little guilty that I went off on this book, so hard... just based on its introduction. To be clear though: I don't (and never) bear any ill will towards the author; I wish her the best of luck in her future endeavours, but like... outside of diverging worldviews/attitudes, this book is legitimately bad . And I'm left wondering: Princeton University Press, what the fuck were you smoking?
This is, quite frankly, the worst non-fiction book I've read since Entangled Life, in 2021, and that was a lot better than this wishy-washy, virtue-signally nothingburger of a 'treatise' on menstruation. Next time, I swear to the freaking gods, I'm sticking to my decision to DNF, because gah dayum!
And I'm gonna go with bullet points for this one:
a) The stuff that repulsed me in the introduction very much continued in the rest of the text: it was way too 'Murican-centric, way too concerned with virtue-signalling and self-flagellation for the crime of being written by a non-dysphoric female human of European descent. To quote my boyfriend: the entirety of fucking Western medicine has colonialist, imperialist, etc... skeletons in its closet, can we thus please move the fuck on in a book purportedly about the phenomenon of menstruation itself? Like seriously, the book's conclusion all but argues women seeking information about their own bodies should first receive a class on the eugenic past of gynaecology to... create a better, more inclusive future (I guess). How about... no ? Just give me the fucking science already!
b) Which means there was also very little actual freaking science in this thing – medical or otherwise. The author tried to tackle way too many research angles (biology, anthropology, sociology, public health policy, social justice) over the span of a relatively short text, and failed to properly delve into any of them as a result. I learned next-to-nothing of note in this book (with regards to the perception of menstruation in other cultures, or the actual biology of menstruation, in relation to things like stress for instance) – it was the very incarnation of 'spread too thin' superficiality.
c) This is also because – and tying back to my first point – the author wasted way too many pages writing what essentially amounted to a political op-ed, pamphlet, manifesto, what have you... instead of an actual pop-science book.
d) Additionally, and this hits more personally, I'll admit: the section of the book that dealt with the long-term physiological impact of trauma left a very bad taste in my mouth. Yes, broader sociological factors impact individual experiences of adversity and/or trauma, but 'fighting the power' won't fucking change the fact I was abused, and raped, by individuals, and that these experiences impacted both my mind, and female body, as an individual victim. So I don't know what the author's fucking point was in contesting the importance of considering trauma in the assessment of a person's health issues. Especially since she disclosed, in her introduction, the fact she is also a victim of SA.
e) The simple fact is the book suffers from its obsession with 'identity politics/wokeness'. I always feel so freaking weird with this stuff because I consider myself a feminist, anti-racist, unspecifiedly leftist, and an environmentalist. But this... this stuff just falls into the most off-putting kind of un-nuanced, untethered, black and white thinking – blegh. I mean the book literally mentions the 'myth of personal responsibility'. Thing is: how the actual fuck is this a myth though? I get, on some level, that the author – probably – simply meant that, in this day and age of neoliberal (and still androcratic) capitalism, emphasis isn't sufficiently placed on collective (and institutional) responsibility. But why oh why this over-correction to the opposite extreme? Why does it always have to be a freaking either/or with these people?! It's both , for fuck's sake. Anyways, semi-off topic rant over.
In conclusion: this book was terrible. Read Caroline Criado Perez' Invisible Women for an infinitely better book about what I... think this one was trying to go for. And, well, something else to learn about the actual science of menstruation I guess. :/
Rant from the 17th of March 2024:
Okay I'm DNFing this one.
I won't give a rating, to try and remain fair, but holy crap am I angry.
31 pages in and the author is still harping on about 'identity politics', the Great Evils™ of the history of anthropology and gynaecology; going on completely unnecessary tangents about DSDs, and self-flagellating for being – shock horror – a 'White Cis Woman™'. Oh, and also about how she's 'doing the Lady's work by employing "feminist" methodology. No, madam, you are not; what you described there is simply called epistemology! Also congrats to the author for finally making me feel embarrassed to share the label of 'feminist' with the likes of her. 🥲
Then of course, there's the 'people who menstruate' bullshit that made me want to shoot myself. And it's hilarious, too, because the words 'women' and 'girls' were also used... so t'was all one giant, garbled mess. 🫠
Like seriously: is this what gynocentric non-fiction publishing is, just, going to be for the next couple of decades, until the 'Murican-centric Woke Wars calm the fuck down? It's bloody infuriating to me I can't read a book, and learn cool new facts about a central function of my female (yes, I said it, it's female, fucking deal with it genderists) body without being pelted in the face with nauseating, self-hating, virtue-signalling, woke punditry, and yes, anti-feminist, sexist and misogynistic female erasure. God fucking damn it.
The editors literally could've written in 'women*' instead of 'people who menstruate' (🤮) and have a footnote explaining the asterisk included trans-masc peeps. Or, they could've written in 'female humans', or 'women and trans-masc persons'. Any one of those options would've taken up less space, less ink, and... isn't saving on paper all the rage now in publishing, in any case, hmm? But nah: why do any of that when you can just reduce women to a function of their body? Whilst leaving men as, well... men, of fucking course. Can't possibly call men 'people who have testicles', amirite? 🙄
This author has absolutely no business calling herself a feminist (in this book at least, sorry not sorry), when she clearly doesn't understand feminist theory 101. 'People who menstruate have historically been controlled, with regards to their fertility, by people who don't menstruate', yes, you ---, that's men/male humans, as a class exploiting women/female humans, as a class for their reproductive labour! Jesus fucking christ this is the most basic you can freaking get in terms of feminist analysis! This is precisely what radical feminists have been pointing to for the past 20+ years: this Orwellian language capture prevents us from even naming the problem and discussing the roots of sex-based oppression!!! But of course, anti-racists and, say, marxists, can keep discussing their axes of material oppression just fine... it's women, per usual, who have to give in to accommodate the whims of others. Fuck our lives, I guess.
Sex is a designation that often has to do with a person's gonads, genitals, and/or sex chromosomes, whereas gender refers more to shared cultural experiences or identity. Yet both are neither solely biological nor solely cultural, and it would be scientifically inaccurate to try to make categories for sex or gender binary.
Okay, so you don't understand reproductive, and/or evolutionary biology, got it. And you don't understand feminist theory/analysis, got it. ✅
{...} gender inequality is a series of social practices unrelated to biology that has biological consequences.
Okay you definitely don't even remotely understand feminist theory/analysis, got it! ✅
And yes, this is 'Murican-centric as all hell. Harping on about white privilege, slavery, eugenics and how those things shaped the emergence of gynaecology in North America (and not a peep about how midwives were pushed away from female medicine in Europe itself, of course). Yes, those things are horrible parts of history, but again: if I wanted to read about the influence of imperialism, colonialism, etc... on the development of gynaecological medicine, I'd go read a book specifically about that! As it stands: this grovelling virtue-signalling gave me second-hand embarrassment, I swear to the bloody gods.
All I wanted was to learn about menstruation, without being made to feel 'woman', and 'female', are dirty words. Is that really too much to ask?! 😫
So please, if anyone knows (of) a book about the current science of menstruation that doesn't stoop to this level of abject muppetry, do let me know. 'Cause I just can't with this one.
July 1, 2024
Fantastic book! This is a fascinating look at menstruation through a feminist lens- from historical, scientific, and cultural perspectives. There are probably things you don't know, even if you've been menstruating for years. Clancy does a great job of including scientific detail, while also offering scaffolding for understanding and accessibility. Well worth a read. She reads the audiobook and does a good job. I received an audio review copy from Libro.FM, all opinions are my own.
March 21, 2023
Going with 5 stars here because Kate Clancy has taken a subject matter that has been stigmatized for far too long considering 50% of the population experiences menstruation for a quarter of their adult life (!!!) & menstruation is essential to the continuation of the human race. 👏👏👏 We need more normalization on the topic of menstruation & this book should be required reading for ALL. Kate had me teary-eyed on the final pages, she approached this topic with caution, depth, research & force! I’m so glad I read this book, I learned so much about myself & fellow menstruating people & feel so empowered to change the narrative moving forward. Bravo!!!!
Thank you Libro.fm for a gifted ALC of this book in exchange for my honest review, all thoughts are my own.
Thank you Libro.fm for a gifted ALC of this book in exchange for my honest review, all thoughts are my own.
May 1, 2023
Overall, a very interesting book but the overly moralizing and normative tone of the author precludes from independently processing and interpreting the often difficult scientific truths and mistakes. Although sympathetic to the author's ambition for diversity and inclusion, the book stifles the reader. A suggestion would be to provide an overview of the problematic practice/situation, distill the core message and only then interpret it in moral terms. Instead, it reads as a moralizing book, which, unfortunately, thins out the important messages about biology and science of menstruation that everybody should know.
March 10, 2023
READ THIS BOOK! Kate Clancy is my new hero. She gives a detailed, accessible look at what is going on inside the bodies of those that menstruate AND tackles the social context surrounding the stigma, struggles, bias etc. that those people encounter. I truly cannot recommend this enough. I was able to get an advanced audiobook from Libro FM (thank you!), so make sure to add this to your lists for when this comes out!
February 1, 2024
Really wish I could give more stars as this topic is so important! But the book was very confusing from me going from topic to topic without an easy flow. And the worst for me was that I didn’t learn that much new things about periods, and to empower people that have them. It does go into a lot of details (and necessary rants) on how societies ignore periods but the book as a whole didn’t make me feel any more empowered.
March 6, 2023
DNF. I couldn’t do it. This is more about the politics & history of politics behind periods than periods themselves (i.e phases, what your body is going through, how it effects you, what to change to feel better, etc.). If you’re wanting more about the phases of periods and how each phases effects you my rec is to skip this and read In The Flo
July 4, 2023
TRUTHHHH.
If you want to learn more about periods, this is a fantastic inclusive and unapologetic bible of answers.
Some of the intense science, jargon, etc, went over my head or lost my interest but I still feel like the book is a 5.
I like this authors voice a lot! Very inclusive. Discusses the many ways that white femininity is destructive to everyone.
"A culture that sees menstruation as shameful and dirty." The tampon drop test.
I always want to take so many notes when I read nonfic women's studies books lol. So many nuggets of gold. This book reminded me why reading non-fiction is so fun and rewarding.
Some of the absolutely crazy misconceptions around menstruation that exist and are used to exclude and control women and their bodies. Specific examples used. Also explained the prevailing beliefs around the world that menstruation is dirty.
Everything is science and research based. VERY well researched.
If you want to learn more about periods, this is a fantastic inclusive and unapologetic bible of answers.
Some of the intense science, jargon, etc, went over my head or lost my interest but I still feel like the book is a 5.
I like this authors voice a lot! Very inclusive. Discusses the many ways that white femininity is destructive to everyone.
"A culture that sees menstruation as shameful and dirty." The tampon drop test.
I always want to take so many notes when I read nonfic women's studies books lol. So many nuggets of gold. This book reminded me why reading non-fiction is so fun and rewarding.
Some of the absolutely crazy misconceptions around menstruation that exist and are used to exclude and control women and their bodies. Specific examples used. Also explained the prevailing beliefs around the world that menstruation is dirty.
Everything is science and research based. VERY well researched.
April 29, 2023
I learned so much about menstruation from this book!
One thing I learned: amenorrhea (period stopping) is typically the result of disordered eating, not high levels of activity.
I also got some insight into the field of anthropology and it’s importance (the science of observing as Kate Clancy puts it).
I sincerely appreciated Kate Clancy’s pushback on fatphobia in this book.
Overall, a very good read.
One thing I learned: amenorrhea (period stopping) is typically the result of disordered eating, not high levels of activity.
I also got some insight into the field of anthropology and it’s importance (the science of observing as Kate Clancy puts it).
I sincerely appreciated Kate Clancy’s pushback on fatphobia in this book.
Overall, a very good read.
March 19, 2023
This book was nowhere on my radar but when I got an ALC from Libro.fm, I found the idea of it very interesting and because I’ve only been consuming audios recently, I got started with it almost immediately. And it turned out to be very good.
Considering how much of a taboo topic menstruation is ( my iPhone keyboard doesn’t even show the word in autofill when I’m typing it out), I’m firstly glad we have books like this. When I first started menstruating as a teenager, I got no knowledge about it except that it happens and a small 30 mins health class at school. There was nothing about why it happens, the implications surrounding it, the pain and how to manage it or just about any other information. I’m just surprised but happy that I’m reading a book about it more than 20 years after experiencing it myself.
What I did like was the author giving her credentials in the beginning, mentioning that the book would be inclusive of genders based on whoever the topic is applicable to, and then proceeded to discuss many important topics - the historical discourse surrounding menstruation and how it came to be such an unmentionable topic, the impacts of patriarchy and our world being more male centric affecting the amount of time and resources dedicated to studying something like menstruation which happens to atleast half the world population, the various stigmas attached to it, and how much less information we have on the diverse ways in which people can get their period and how it affects their body and how circumstances affect it.
I don’t think I got everything into my head already in this first read but I’m glad to have a general idea. But I definitely feel I will benefit from a more slow reread of it whenever I can in the future. And it’ll surely be a more informative experience for younger kids who are just starting out and maybe knowing so much more than we did might help them manage their bodies better.
Considering how much of a taboo topic menstruation is ( my iPhone keyboard doesn’t even show the word in autofill when I’m typing it out), I’m firstly glad we have books like this. When I first started menstruating as a teenager, I got no knowledge about it except that it happens and a small 30 mins health class at school. There was nothing about why it happens, the implications surrounding it, the pain and how to manage it or just about any other information. I’m just surprised but happy that I’m reading a book about it more than 20 years after experiencing it myself.
What I did like was the author giving her credentials in the beginning, mentioning that the book would be inclusive of genders based on whoever the topic is applicable to, and then proceeded to discuss many important topics - the historical discourse surrounding menstruation and how it came to be such an unmentionable topic, the impacts of patriarchy and our world being more male centric affecting the amount of time and resources dedicated to studying something like menstruation which happens to atleast half the world population, the various stigmas attached to it, and how much less information we have on the diverse ways in which people can get their period and how it affects their body and how circumstances affect it.
I don’t think I got everything into my head already in this first read but I’m glad to have a general idea. But I definitely feel I will benefit from a more slow reread of it whenever I can in the future. And it’ll surely be a more informative experience for younger kids who are just starting out and maybe knowing so much more than we did might help them manage their bodies better.
March 11, 2023
Thank you to libro.fm for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook. I am offering my honest opinion voluntarily.
Periods. On the rag. Getting a visit from Aunt Flo. That time of the month.
It seems like we have so many euphemisms to avoid just saying the word menstruating, almost as if it's a dirty word all on its own. And despite the fact that this is an event that happens relatively regularly to about half of the world's population, so many of us don't have a great understanding of what is actually happening in our body.
This book seeks to change that. Clancy starts out with an explanation of who exactly menstruates, and spoiler alert: it isn't just women. It's also trans men and non-binary people. Anyone with a uterus can menstruate, whether they actually identify as a woman or not. And I liked that she set the tone early on that this was going to be an inclusive book.
From there, she described her own qualifications to discuss this topic, which I also appreciated. Although she isn't a medical professional, she is a sociologist who has spent her career studying menstruation, and studying it in depth. She explored historical perspectives on menstruation, and some of the laughable ideas that were floated in the past. But what especially resonated with me was the way she discussed how racism, colonization, religion, and gender discrimination has been used to weaponize menstruation against women.
One thing that I did not like was her use of the term "Judeo-Christian." Anyone who has a decent understanding of the workings of Judaism and Christianity is aware that these two religions share almost nothing - not in beliefs and not in practice. And it is blatantly evident when she talks about the religious customs around menstruation: in Judaism, women are required to immerse in a ritual bath after their period has ended, while men are required to immerse themselves after they have ejaculated. However, the view from Christianity has to do with sin and Eve's curse, which is not a tenet of Jewish belief at all. And lumping these two together does a serious disservice, with the Christian belief assigning a punitive role to menstruation that isn't present in Jewish belief.
The author also speaks about how various factors can impact menstruation, including stress, illnesses, food resources, physical activity, and even the COVID-19 vaccine. It's one of the few times I've seen the COVID vaccine discussed in terms of how it affects menstrual cycles outside of people's individual experiences. She also discusses how women, and especially women of color are often dismissed by medical providers when talking about their menstrual complaints and pain.
Overall, this was a wonderful and informative read, and I finished this book feeling like I learned a lot about my own body and how it works.
Periods. On the rag. Getting a visit from Aunt Flo. That time of the month.
It seems like we have so many euphemisms to avoid just saying the word menstruating, almost as if it's a dirty word all on its own. And despite the fact that this is an event that happens relatively regularly to about half of the world's population, so many of us don't have a great understanding of what is actually happening in our body.
This book seeks to change that. Clancy starts out with an explanation of who exactly menstruates, and spoiler alert: it isn't just women. It's also trans men and non-binary people. Anyone with a uterus can menstruate, whether they actually identify as a woman or not. And I liked that she set the tone early on that this was going to be an inclusive book.
From there, she described her own qualifications to discuss this topic, which I also appreciated. Although she isn't a medical professional, she is a sociologist who has spent her career studying menstruation, and studying it in depth. She explored historical perspectives on menstruation, and some of the laughable ideas that were floated in the past. But what especially resonated with me was the way she discussed how racism, colonization, religion, and gender discrimination has been used to weaponize menstruation against women.
One thing that I did not like was her use of the term "Judeo-Christian." Anyone who has a decent understanding of the workings of Judaism and Christianity is aware that these two religions share almost nothing - not in beliefs and not in practice. And it is blatantly evident when she talks about the religious customs around menstruation: in Judaism, women are required to immerse in a ritual bath after their period has ended, while men are required to immerse themselves after they have ejaculated. However, the view from Christianity has to do with sin and Eve's curse, which is not a tenet of Jewish belief at all. And lumping these two together does a serious disservice, with the Christian belief assigning a punitive role to menstruation that isn't present in Jewish belief.
The author also speaks about how various factors can impact menstruation, including stress, illnesses, food resources, physical activity, and even the COVID-19 vaccine. It's one of the few times I've seen the COVID vaccine discussed in terms of how it affects menstrual cycles outside of people's individual experiences. She also discusses how women, and especially women of color are often dismissed by medical providers when talking about their menstrual complaints and pain.
Overall, this was a wonderful and informative read, and I finished this book feeling like I learned a lot about my own body and how it works.
March 30, 2023
Such an admirable profession, research interest, passion project, and goal; I hate to say that I was just a bit disappointed in it's execution. I absolutely love the authors intentions, and much of the book was good, but I do wish more of it was informative. Perhaps I was just seeking different information!
January 13, 2024
Polarizing political correctness. ‘Woman’ is not a dirty word.
September 4, 2023
I did not finish this book. I think my mistake was reading it as an audiobook. I want to try to read it again as a physical copy. I think it was too hard for me to wrap my head around the science verbally, I need to physically read it. 3 stars though because it was very informative!
April 14, 2023
An anthropologist's insight into the truth behind periods and a discussion of the complications in society that finds them shameful and unmentionable in polite company. A fascinating and heartbreaking look into the realities of women's health and all that it includes; including discussions about the fallacies and complications inherent with science and research being done in a deeply flawed patriarchal society. Includes discussions of how colonialism, racism, sexism, transphobia, and fatphobia shape experiences and health and makes room for all people who menstruate.
Thank you to Libro.fm's Audiobook Listening Copy (ALC) program for the opportunity to listen and review!
Thank you to Libro.fm's Audiobook Listening Copy (ALC) program for the opportunity to listen and review!
February 3, 2024
have a lot more respect for my period
April 9, 2023
"I hope you will not let anyone, especially legislators and bosses, tell you that something you do for a quarter of your adult life isn't important"
May 26, 2023
I thought this book was great: it was open, liberal, inclusive (all menstruating bodies!); it gave me knowledge about periods that I had no idea about (the 28-day cycle is a literal myth made up by male doctors); and was really very fascinating to understand (again and again) how the medical field fails women, fails persons of color, and fails non-binary people. “Western culture’s toxic trait (nowhere more obvious than in the United States) is pretending big structural problems are in fact personal ones.”
Honestly, I probably would’ve given this book 5 stars but I did not find it extremely accessible until the final chapter and epilogue. The first 5 chapters are heavily rooted in science (which is important!!) but it reads like a paper going to a medical/science journal rather than a book to be read/consumed by the public. Only in Chapter 6 and in the Epilogue did I find her writing style conform more to standard reading. This made it difficult to fully understand and digest all of the salient points she was making.
Still a really good read and one worth picking up, especially if you have a menstruating body.
Honestly, I probably would’ve given this book 5 stars but I did not find it extremely accessible until the final chapter and epilogue. The first 5 chapters are heavily rooted in science (which is important!!) but it reads like a paper going to a medical/science journal rather than a book to be read/consumed by the public. Only in Chapter 6 and in the Epilogue did I find her writing style conform more to standard reading. This made it difficult to fully understand and digest all of the salient points she was making.
Still a really good read and one worth picking up, especially if you have a menstruating body.
September 13, 2023
This is an important book. While I learned a bunch of interesting things about menstruation that I didn't previously know, I think my biggest takeaway from the book was reorienting and questioning my perspectives about menstruation. I actually just had a hysterectomy to solve years of horrible pain and bleeding, so I went into this with the perspective of, well, of COURSE periods suck, of COURSE everyone would want to suppress or get rid of them! But Clancy makes a compelling case for the usefulness of the menstrual cycle, and also really made me think about the structures in our culture that have been designed with cis men as the default, forcing the rest of us to conceal our messy bodies. I think this is really the heart of the anthropological perspective, which was something I had never really encountered before.
I will say that much of the science in the book went over my head - and I'm a pretty big reader of nonfiction science books! I think I could have used a primer on the menstrual cycle and maybe a glossary of terms. But that's okay. I loved the last chapter, which looks forward along with many of my favorite sci fi authors to a better future for menstruation.
I will say that much of the science in the book went over my head - and I'm a pretty big reader of nonfiction science books! I think I could have used a primer on the menstrual cycle and maybe a glossary of terms. But that's okay. I loved the last chapter, which looks forward along with many of my favorite sci fi authors to a better future for menstruation.
March 20, 2023
Did most of this book go way over my head? Yes.
Do I feel empowered about my mental cycle and how the environment play into my hormones and reproductive health? Also yes.
All menstruating bodies should take a peak at this one.
Do I feel empowered about my mental cycle and how the environment play into my hormones and reproductive health? Also yes.
All menstruating bodies should take a peak at this one.
May 10, 2023
I honestly consider Period a must read. Clancy does a fantastic job of breaking down complex topics as well as doing it in a way that includes all people who menstruate.
June 7, 2023
EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK!!! Biology, history, commentary on dominant culture and menstrual stigma!! READ. THIS. BOOK.
February 25, 2023
I first encountered Kate Clancy through her podcast, aptly named, Period Podcast. I found the information fascinating, beautiful, enraging, and compelling. When I saw that she had written a book I was excited to read it and can report that the book is equally absorbing.
For someone who experienced 400 plus periods in their lifetime, as most menstruating people will, I knew shockingly little about what was happening every month. And what I thought I knew, I found out as I read this book, was actually wrong.
I'm very glad to have read this book and plan to get a couple extra copies to pass around.
For someone who experienced 400 plus periods in their lifetime, as most menstruating people will, I knew shockingly little about what was happening every month. And what I thought I knew, I found out as I read this book, was actually wrong.
I'm very glad to have read this book and plan to get a couple extra copies to pass around.
February 11, 2024
Must read book. It covers a lot of topics related to periods, and it's extremely well researched and written
April 1, 2023
This was a fantastic read. I ended this book feeling so empowered to be someone who menstruates. There is a lot of feminist work out there that will make you feel that way but the majority doesn’t take a scientific approach to why periods are and important like this one did. I loved it! I learned so much! Thank you to Libro.fm and Princeton university press for the audio arc of this book!
December 16, 2024
A “feminist science book about periods” that engages with STS and adjacent fields (Anna Tsing, Max Liboiron, Alexis Shotwell). Chapter 3 on energetics was particularly interesting for me, and it has a lot of material to think about in relation to metabolism (which makes sense if you think about flows as a principal facet of metabolism, but also energy accounting). Some of the science stuff was hard for me to follow, but overall it was still a very interesting read, particularly in the shift (in the scientific literature) from understanding periods as something ‘useless’ to something that actually has significant biological purpose -- most interestingly to me, the theory of Beverly I. Strassmann, whose research operates around a theory that menstruation functions in order to conserve energy, and she claims the process’s metabolic cycling, over the course of four menstrual cycles, saves roughly six days’ worth of food, to ration the energy expenses involved in reproduction. Anyway, these are just a handful of excerpts touching on some of these things:
“WHAT IT MEANS TO WRITE A FEMINIST SCIENCE BOOK ABOUT PERIODS
For the last fifteen years, I have led a feminist science lab that studies the environmental stressors that can affect the menstrual cycle. We have looked at how childhood, physical activity, diet, immune challenges, inflammation, and more affect ovarian hormones and how they in turn affect the uterus. The menstrual cycle, and menstruation in particular, is a fundamental biological phenomenon that happens to about half of us and is relevant to the continuation of our species. I call the particular way we study the menstrual cycle in my lab feminist because of its practices as well as its outcomes. Feminist methodology is deceptively simple: uncover history, look to who holds power, and test the assumptions that tend to underlie it all. Feminist methodology in science requires one to be in conversation with social scientists, historians, and science and technology studies scholars to trace an idea backward and hear the stories of the people and ideas that were dominant at the time, as well as the views of those who spoke against that dominant thinking. Feminist methodology in biology, especially human biology, requires paying special attention to funder, researcher, and subject, to whose knowledge is valued, to what research aims get proposed, to what results end up in the peer-reviewed literature, and to what ideas and experiences persist even when supposedly rigorous science has ruled them out.”
Metabolism/energetics stuff:
“This way of thinking about energy—how much energy can you recruit when needed—is known as energy status. It’s a snapshot of what a person has available to them that moment. It’s also the one clinicians seem to rely on the most when making subjective decisions about the health of their patients, such as when they plug our weights and heights into a body mass index (BMI) calculator (which, while you’re here, I might as well tell you was originally conceived in the nineteenth century by Adolphe Quetelet, a physicist whose concept of the “normal man” strongly influenced both anthropology and eugenics). The second way of thinking about energetics is energy flux, which is the rate at which energy is moving through you. An example of a high-energy-flux person is an Olympic swimmer like Katie Ledecky, consuming thousands upon thousands of calories a day but also expending as many with punishing workouts. A low-energy-flux person, by contrast, is someone who is very sedentary but also consuming little, like my grandmother during her final years. You can imagine that Olympian Katie Ledecky and my grandmother may have had similar amounts of body fat, but that understanding of their available energy only captures part of the story.
The third way to think about energetics is in terms of energy balance, which is based on whether you have eaten more calories (positive balance) or expended more calories (negative balance) over a given period of time. Whereas energy status is like a screenshot, energy balance is like a GIF, as it gives you a sense of change over time. If you are logging your food intake and physical activity each day, you might get a sense of whether you are in energy balance for that day. If you are measuring someone’s body fat composition, you will capture their change in energy balance over a longer period.
As the study of metabolism and nutritional science is increasingly coming to acknowledge, this basic understanding of energetics—that we can get a measure of a person by measuring calories in and calories out—is incomplete. The number of calories we can access in food can depend on whether we cook it, the timing of what we eat matters to how it is processed in the body, and the metabolic effects of different activities can vary independent of how many calories they lead us to expend. While we once thought metabolism was a matter of simple algebra, it’s really more like multivariate calculus. Emerging evidence suggests, for instance, that the physiological effects of sitting around on our butts are not necessarily benign or neutral, even if we tack on thirty minutes of exercise at the end of the day.8
This simplistic way of thinking about energetics—as calories in and out—has also supported the mistaken belief that greater energy storage must mean too little movement or too much eating. Fat is not all bad nor is the relationship between fat storage and energy as straightforward as most people believe. It is easy to store significant amounts of fat while leading an active lifestyle, and substantial research supports a stronger relationship between physical activity and health than between body composition and health.9 Our bodies very much want to retain fat—a safeguard against drought or famine—and fat is critical to reproductive function, as well as to parental, fetal, and infant health. Later in this chapter, I will describe how our misguided belief (largely from fat stigma, which, you guessed it, also stems from eugenics!) that fat storage is itself a health problem has obscured our ability to understand certain illnesses related to the menstrual cycle.
To recap, a calorie is not always a calorie, fat is not always bad, and we need to distinguish between energy status, energy balance, and energy flux if we want to understand how we support our three possible bodily needs of maintenance, reproduction, and growth. For instance, high energy flux—someone eating food like a Kardashian makes money and expending effort like a Kardashian spends money—can create a greater sense of uncertainty about the availability of resources, which can constrain the availability of reliable energy for that reproduction bucket. That said, energy deficits are the biggest determination of whether you can fill your reproduction barrel and therefore can have the greatest effects on the menstrual cycle.”
“Looking at a wider variety of populations, particularly those with subsistence behaviors focused primarily on foraging, pastoralism, or agriculture, we see that in times of food scarcity most people alleviate nutritional stress by changing their activity patterns. Agricultural populations move around less in winter, while forager populations that experience a hunger season reduce resting metabolic rates and in some cases manage work-arounds regarding food taboos to boost calorie consumption. This suggests that our bodies and minds are generally good at making the most of a bad situation. That is, in times of energetic stress, our bodies will do what they can to reduce needs, and our brains will tell us to reduce activity or acquire more food. General energetic stress from too few calories will lead to some ovarian suppression, as will consuming too little fat. But again, this is context dependent: we shouldn’t expect a population that on average gets by on eighteen hundred calories a day of mostly fibrous carbohydrates to necessarily experience issues with fecundity because their diet doesn’t have much fat. A person who switches to such a diet after being accustomed to more calories or more fat might experiences issues with fecundity as a result.
Across our evolutionary history and across plenty of modern populations, it is adaptive for our bodies to adjust our energy expenditure and intake as needed to do our best to maintain a neutral energy balance. It is also common, however, for this to be a challenge. People living through drought, famine, or seasonal food availability may from time to time reach a sufficiently negative energy balance that their ovarian function is somewhat suppressed. Resource allocation in the body can temporarily focus on maintenance, rather than reproduction; when access to food is restored, so is ovarian functionality. But many of us live in societies and cultures where food is either unavailable to some for long stretches—those living in food deserts or with food insecurity—or where people choose to refrain from eating enough to meet their energetic demands. A diet, we should recognize, is nothing more than an intentional relative energy deficiency.
Intentionally living in a state of negative energy balance for a long time is harmful not only to menstrual health but also to many other systems in our bodies. Yet people frequently choose to restrict their caloric intake because they mistakenly believe it is healthier to do so than to carry fat on their bodies.”
“AN ABUNDANCE OF ENERGY
There is, of course, a historical and cultural context to these choices. Not all cultures prize thinness and beauty standards, and even in Western cultures, full-figured but proportionate women were prized in written works and art throughout the Renaissance. As Dr. Sabrina Strings writes in Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, beauty norms changed as white social elites sought to “create social distinctions between themselves and so-called greedy and fat racial Others.” Early travelogues noted that many Africans were in fact slender. This perception shifted over time for several reasons, one being that white Europeans who had never traveled to Africa, nor met anyone with African heritage, wrote descriptive works about Black women. These white Europeans described Black African women as fatter, more gluttonous, and often more sexualized than white women. According to Strings, by the eighteenth century an “ascetic aesthetic” arose while “at the same time that gluttony and fatness were becoming associated with African women in scientific racial literature, the values of delicacy, discipline, and a slimmer physique were becoming associated with English women by the arbiters of taste and the purveyors of morality.” This aesthetic, and the growing moral and medical beliefs that aristocratic white women should be pale skinned, slender, and fragile spread throughout the United States and the rest of Europe.
In the United States, the perception that thinness was a sign of morality and health (particularly in women) gained especially strong traction. As Strings shows, women’s media from Godey’s Lady’s Book to Cosmopolitan were invested in highlighting only sources of beauty arising from Western and Northern Europe. The best American beauties were praised for their racial ancestry, as well as their “flower-like delicacy” and the fact that they were “tall and exquisitely slim.” Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when public weighing scales became common, people also began focusing less on body proportions and more on absolute weights, as well as which were deemed more or less healthy. This focus became even more common in the early twentieth century when people began owning scales in their own homes.”
“WHAT IT MEANS TO WRITE A FEMINIST SCIENCE BOOK ABOUT PERIODS
For the last fifteen years, I have led a feminist science lab that studies the environmental stressors that can affect the menstrual cycle. We have looked at how childhood, physical activity, diet, immune challenges, inflammation, and more affect ovarian hormones and how they in turn affect the uterus. The menstrual cycle, and menstruation in particular, is a fundamental biological phenomenon that happens to about half of us and is relevant to the continuation of our species. I call the particular way we study the menstrual cycle in my lab feminist because of its practices as well as its outcomes. Feminist methodology is deceptively simple: uncover history, look to who holds power, and test the assumptions that tend to underlie it all. Feminist methodology in science requires one to be in conversation with social scientists, historians, and science and technology studies scholars to trace an idea backward and hear the stories of the people and ideas that were dominant at the time, as well as the views of those who spoke against that dominant thinking. Feminist methodology in biology, especially human biology, requires paying special attention to funder, researcher, and subject, to whose knowledge is valued, to what research aims get proposed, to what results end up in the peer-reviewed literature, and to what ideas and experiences persist even when supposedly rigorous science has ruled them out.”
Metabolism/energetics stuff:
“This way of thinking about energy—how much energy can you recruit when needed—is known as energy status. It’s a snapshot of what a person has available to them that moment. It’s also the one clinicians seem to rely on the most when making subjective decisions about the health of their patients, such as when they plug our weights and heights into a body mass index (BMI) calculator (which, while you’re here, I might as well tell you was originally conceived in the nineteenth century by Adolphe Quetelet, a physicist whose concept of the “normal man” strongly influenced both anthropology and eugenics). The second way of thinking about energetics is energy flux, which is the rate at which energy is moving through you. An example of a high-energy-flux person is an Olympic swimmer like Katie Ledecky, consuming thousands upon thousands of calories a day but also expending as many with punishing workouts. A low-energy-flux person, by contrast, is someone who is very sedentary but also consuming little, like my grandmother during her final years. You can imagine that Olympian Katie Ledecky and my grandmother may have had similar amounts of body fat, but that understanding of their available energy only captures part of the story.
The third way to think about energetics is in terms of energy balance, which is based on whether you have eaten more calories (positive balance) or expended more calories (negative balance) over a given period of time. Whereas energy status is like a screenshot, energy balance is like a GIF, as it gives you a sense of change over time. If you are logging your food intake and physical activity each day, you might get a sense of whether you are in energy balance for that day. If you are measuring someone’s body fat composition, you will capture their change in energy balance over a longer period.
As the study of metabolism and nutritional science is increasingly coming to acknowledge, this basic understanding of energetics—that we can get a measure of a person by measuring calories in and calories out—is incomplete. The number of calories we can access in food can depend on whether we cook it, the timing of what we eat matters to how it is processed in the body, and the metabolic effects of different activities can vary independent of how many calories they lead us to expend. While we once thought metabolism was a matter of simple algebra, it’s really more like multivariate calculus. Emerging evidence suggests, for instance, that the physiological effects of sitting around on our butts are not necessarily benign or neutral, even if we tack on thirty minutes of exercise at the end of the day.8
This simplistic way of thinking about energetics—as calories in and out—has also supported the mistaken belief that greater energy storage must mean too little movement or too much eating. Fat is not all bad nor is the relationship between fat storage and energy as straightforward as most people believe. It is easy to store significant amounts of fat while leading an active lifestyle, and substantial research supports a stronger relationship between physical activity and health than between body composition and health.9 Our bodies very much want to retain fat—a safeguard against drought or famine—and fat is critical to reproductive function, as well as to parental, fetal, and infant health. Later in this chapter, I will describe how our misguided belief (largely from fat stigma, which, you guessed it, also stems from eugenics!) that fat storage is itself a health problem has obscured our ability to understand certain illnesses related to the menstrual cycle.
To recap, a calorie is not always a calorie, fat is not always bad, and we need to distinguish between energy status, energy balance, and energy flux if we want to understand how we support our three possible bodily needs of maintenance, reproduction, and growth. For instance, high energy flux—someone eating food like a Kardashian makes money and expending effort like a Kardashian spends money—can create a greater sense of uncertainty about the availability of resources, which can constrain the availability of reliable energy for that reproduction bucket. That said, energy deficits are the biggest determination of whether you can fill your reproduction barrel and therefore can have the greatest effects on the menstrual cycle.”
“Looking at a wider variety of populations, particularly those with subsistence behaviors focused primarily on foraging, pastoralism, or agriculture, we see that in times of food scarcity most people alleviate nutritional stress by changing their activity patterns. Agricultural populations move around less in winter, while forager populations that experience a hunger season reduce resting metabolic rates and in some cases manage work-arounds regarding food taboos to boost calorie consumption. This suggests that our bodies and minds are generally good at making the most of a bad situation. That is, in times of energetic stress, our bodies will do what they can to reduce needs, and our brains will tell us to reduce activity or acquire more food. General energetic stress from too few calories will lead to some ovarian suppression, as will consuming too little fat. But again, this is context dependent: we shouldn’t expect a population that on average gets by on eighteen hundred calories a day of mostly fibrous carbohydrates to necessarily experience issues with fecundity because their diet doesn’t have much fat. A person who switches to such a diet after being accustomed to more calories or more fat might experiences issues with fecundity as a result.
Across our evolutionary history and across plenty of modern populations, it is adaptive for our bodies to adjust our energy expenditure and intake as needed to do our best to maintain a neutral energy balance. It is also common, however, for this to be a challenge. People living through drought, famine, or seasonal food availability may from time to time reach a sufficiently negative energy balance that their ovarian function is somewhat suppressed. Resource allocation in the body can temporarily focus on maintenance, rather than reproduction; when access to food is restored, so is ovarian functionality. But many of us live in societies and cultures where food is either unavailable to some for long stretches—those living in food deserts or with food insecurity—or where people choose to refrain from eating enough to meet their energetic demands. A diet, we should recognize, is nothing more than an intentional relative energy deficiency.
Intentionally living in a state of negative energy balance for a long time is harmful not only to menstrual health but also to many other systems in our bodies. Yet people frequently choose to restrict their caloric intake because they mistakenly believe it is healthier to do so than to carry fat on their bodies.”
“AN ABUNDANCE OF ENERGY
There is, of course, a historical and cultural context to these choices. Not all cultures prize thinness and beauty standards, and even in Western cultures, full-figured but proportionate women were prized in written works and art throughout the Renaissance. As Dr. Sabrina Strings writes in Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, beauty norms changed as white social elites sought to “create social distinctions between themselves and so-called greedy and fat racial Others.” Early travelogues noted that many Africans were in fact slender. This perception shifted over time for several reasons, one being that white Europeans who had never traveled to Africa, nor met anyone with African heritage, wrote descriptive works about Black women. These white Europeans described Black African women as fatter, more gluttonous, and often more sexualized than white women. According to Strings, by the eighteenth century an “ascetic aesthetic” arose while “at the same time that gluttony and fatness were becoming associated with African women in scientific racial literature, the values of delicacy, discipline, and a slimmer physique were becoming associated with English women by the arbiters of taste and the purveyors of morality.” This aesthetic, and the growing moral and medical beliefs that aristocratic white women should be pale skinned, slender, and fragile spread throughout the United States and the rest of Europe.
In the United States, the perception that thinness was a sign of morality and health (particularly in women) gained especially strong traction. As Strings shows, women’s media from Godey’s Lady’s Book to Cosmopolitan were invested in highlighting only sources of beauty arising from Western and Northern Europe. The best American beauties were praised for their racial ancestry, as well as their “flower-like delicacy” and the fact that they were “tall and exquisitely slim.” Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when public weighing scales became common, people also began focusing less on body proportions and more on absolute weights, as well as which were deemed more or less healthy. This focus became even more common in the early twentieth century when people began owning scales in their own homes.”
February 25, 2024
Helpful, up -to-date information in a man’s world. Education on women’s bodies is important and I appreciate the political correctness used in this book as well!
Want to read
May 5, 2023[Before-reading-thoughts]
Why would a word related to having period start with ‘men’? Kinda annoying… Reminds me of the word vagina in French which is masculine (le vagin)! 😐
And don’t bother telling me it’s because ‘mensis’ means ‘month’ in Latin, because I’d then tell you that also ‘mens’ itself means ‘mind’ in Latin, so still the masculinity-problem not solved, and harhar the joke’s on you.
Why would a word related to having period start with ‘men’? Kinda annoying… Reminds me of the word vagina in French which is masculine (le vagin)! 😐
And don’t bother telling me it’s because ‘mensis’ means ‘month’ in Latin, because I’d then tell you that also ‘mens’ itself means ‘mind’ in Latin, so still the masculinity-problem not solved, and harhar the joke’s on you.
Read
July 15, 2023Fascinating and necessary. I’d recommend it to everyone, but I think it will be an especially validating reading experience for people who menstruate.
April 29, 2023
I got real angry about the patriarchy reading this book. Reading this book as a part of my therapy “homework” to not feel as much shame about menstruation and my body. Excellent resource. Try her podcast too!
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