MENSTRUATION: THE LAST TABOO?

In the world of pornography, menstrual fluid is categorized on the same level as shit and piss. Images of menstruation are classified as "extreme" and "bizarre", and credit card processors usually refuse to process payments for porn that includes women visibly on the rag. Depictions of chicks having their periods are considered "obscene" by most of the adult industry; with Ashcroft draping nude statues in federal buildings and waging a war on pornography, producing internet porn that might be deemed obscene* is a huge risk most adult webmasters won't take. For the average pornographer, leaving blood out of porn isn't a big sacrifice or compromise anyway so the subject doesn't come up. Because menstruation hasn't been portrayed as a normal ingredient in sex, most people don't even give "Aunt Flo's" absence a second thought.

Judging from the commercials for tampons we see on television and the lack of menstruation in porn, we women can ride horses at a bouncy trot and do gymnastics when we're menstruating, but we can't have sex. It's so closeted I'll bet there are some people who envision menstruation as a time when women go into the bathroom and pour blue-tinted fluid onto maxi pads just like in the advertisements, concocting secret feminine chemical compouds.

Doesn't it seem completely bizarre to have porn embrace anal sex, facial cum shots, and unprotected sex with multiple partners, but never show a plumbing shot featuring a hard cock sliding in and out of a wet red pussy made slippery with blood? I'm not going to say I think that it's the porn industry's job to rectify this gross oversight, I'm just pointing out how completely LUDICROUS and unnatural our boundaries are when it comes to what's "obscene". These idiotic standards apply to pop culture in general: why is it okay to show blood dripping from people's knife and gunshot wounds on television shows, but it's NOT okay to show a bloody twat on adult websites and in adult films??

You may argue that porn, pop culture, and the general public are not interested in "reality" or healthy attitudes towards sexuality. By and large, that may be true. That doesn't mean we should tolerate corporate and government censorship of media depicting menstruation in explicit images. I am all for encouraging media LITERACY, not media CENSORSHIP. With better literacy and critical thinking about these matters we should be able to dispense with the powers that be doing our thinking for us.

Leaving menstruation out of porn and lumping graphic sexual depictions of menstruation together with shit and piss reflect and reinforce a primitive backwater ignorance about women and the human body, reinforcing centuries-old myths, suspicions, & fears about blood and the function of women's cycles. This type of ignorance is the TRUE obscenity.

It's ignorant and insulting to equate a woman's monthly flow with pee and poop. There's a huge difference between the excretory system, the digestive system, and the reproductive system. Pissing is an excretory function. Shitting is a digestive function. And menstruation is a reproductive function. To mix these things up is like saying that babies live in a womb full of shit for nine to ten months. How moronic is THAT??***

I welcome you to join me in dispensing with idiocy and acknowledging menstruation as a healthy FACT of life rather than an obscenity. -Trixie, June 24th, 2004