Changing the Map: Women Bleed

In the eighties, the era where I reached menarche (such a fancy word), there were few books that addressed the topic of menstruation in popular fiction. One of course, was by the unparalleled Judy Blume – Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret (1970) about a girl growing up in a mixed faith household. (And let’s face facts, we all read it. This was a standard book in every Boulder household I babysat at, along with Our Bodies, Ourselves.) Judy Blume got it right. Alas, she didn’t write fantasy – and I wanted the fantastic.

Then there was A Spell for Chameleon (1977) by Piers Anthony. From Mr. Anthony, I learned that the cycle of womanhood would make me oscillate between smart (and ugly) or beautiful (and stupid). The happy medium of normality (and I supposed, no period at all) was the ultimate goal.

And, of course, there was Carrie (1974) by Stephen King. His passage of female adolescence involved the torments of one’s peer group (frightfully realistic, as I can attest to from the delights of Centennial Junior High), developing super powers, and getting revenge. I quite liked Carrie, especially at the time.

Menstruation — that “time of the month,” “a visit from Aunt Flow,” “the Red Badge of Courage,” “code red,” “shark week,” (there’s over 5,000 slang phrases across the world) — is a natural body function present in half the population. The average woman spends ten years of her life menstruating. So why don’t we write about it? (Also, why do we tax the items required to deal with the flow as “luxury” items (cause I sure as shit found the whole monthly ritual luxuriating)? And why do we go through the ritual of trying to hide the products needed to deal with the monthly event?)

Literary fiction, an area where one would expect to see more equal shrift in biological issues among the sexes didn’t offer me any better options. Bronte, Eliot, Alcott, du Maurier, and Austens’ women don’t have a menstrual cycle at all. Faulkner dealt with the issue, as did Updike and Philip Roth (but only to express kink), in terms that aren’t exactly positive.

And then, one day in my ever-lasting adolescent quest for books involving female characters and preferably either horses or dragons, I came across Alanna, The First Adventure (1983) by Tamora Pierce, and here, finally, was a heroine who bled, in a regular, normal way, dealt with it, and moved on. A natural inheritor of girls’ fiction, Pierce followed in the path of Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Harriet the Spy, The Little Princess, and The Secret Garden, with one notable differentiation — Tamora Pierce doesn’t shy away from exploring the reality of female adolescence, with all the mess that entails.

Her series of four books (The Song of the Lioness series) follow Alanna’s training and the early years of her full knighthood, in a land where proper noble-born girls go to the convent for wifely training. Alanna goes undercover, cross-dressing as the boy Alan, and takes the position of her twin brother Thom (who also escapes gender confines by learning magic).

They’re fabulous.

Born on December 13th, 1954, Tamora Pierce started as many of us do, by writing fan fiction.

“I wrote reams of stories: I wrote Star Trek stories, Here Come the Brides stories, Time Tunnel stories, Tolkien and Howard and Moorcock and Heinlein and Bradbury stories. (In those days, nobody ever thought of calling them fan fics!) And I wrote my own, which were mishmoshes of all the above. I didn’t worry about the fact that whatever I wrote often read like the thing I’d read and loved most recently; I was just trying to entertain myself and block out the long train wreck of my parents’ divorce.” (http://www.tamora-pierce.net/about/ )

On the advice of her editor (Claire Smith), she rewrote her original version, splitting it up into four books, aimed at teenagers, which became the Song of the Lioness.

Her worlds are as intricate and developed as anything by Tolkien or Jordan, but include the inherent drama of being female and deal with the metamorphosis of female bodies — high fantasy at its purest, but dripping with the details of feminine viewpoints, including bleeding, breasts, and sexuality.

“One of the things I strive for is realism. I need to be as real as possible in the dilemmas my characters face. The difference between their world and our world, both in the case of the Circle and Tortall, is magic makes people more aware of how things work. If you canoodle at the common on Beltane and you get a big belly nine months later, we know what’s going on…If everyone knows how this works, they know how it can be prevented…If my characters are going to have sex, they’re going to do their utmost to be responsible about it. They are going to be thinking about the kids that might result.” (Tamora Pierce, in https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/06/tamora-pierce-on-twilight-girl-heroes-and-fantasy-birth-control/239861/)

So here I am, now past the point of both menarche and menopause, and thirty years later, the list of authors dealing with the subject remains mostly the same. Certainly, Mercedes Lackey is another who addresses these topics, but more modern writers have once again avoided the topic altogether. Twilight’s Bella Swan, Hunger Game’s Katniss, or anyone in the Harry Potter world, have reverted to the experience of female adolescence without the blood. Which is a pity, really, given how much time we spend doing it.