“Condoms”, “anal sex”, all sorts of previously banned terms are regularly bandied about by the mainstream media with scarcely a wince to be seen. Yet how often do you see the word “menstruation”? Nothing (necessarily) to do with the sexual act, so, you’d think, less likely to be taboo, but somehow it is still seen as something not to be mentioned in polite company, or “family newspapers”.

I’ve been reflecting on this after reading Menstruation: A Cultural History, edited by Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie, which provides a historical framework for understanding the strength of the taboo. Also, it makes clear how much beliefs about women contributed to the framing of women as inferior.

It starts, as so often, with Aristotle. For him, there was only one sex, females being merely an inferior form of male. This conclusion arose because as the normal human shape was male, for a woman to be capable of producing a male, menstrual blood must be male, in effect a lesser form of sperm.

When this got picked up by medieval cleric scholars who, theoretically at least, had no contact with women, it only got worse. Menstruation was a cleansing process – uniquely required by the female body – (so emmenagogues – preparations for bring on menstruation – could be seen as pro-natal, rather than abortifacients). Although I wonder how many women really understood what was going on. As a consequence of this belief, menstrual blood and women who were menstruating, could be seen as impure, and dangerous. (The process of churching women after birth certainly had something to do with this – although not according to official theology.)

And it meant that menstruating women would stain mirrors. “If a woman has this flow and looks into a mirror during this time, this mirror becomes like a bloody cloud. And if the mirror is new, one can hardly remove the red staining from the mirror, but if it is old, one can easily remove it,” said the Secreta Mullierum [Secrets of Women, written circa 1300.

Then such a lovely image: “Therefore Avicenna says that the uterus of women is like a toilet that stands in the middle of town and to which people go to defecate, just like all residues of the blood from all over the woman’s body go to the uterus and are cleaned there.” (p. 66)

And a menstruating woman can pollute in all sorts of ways – speaking to one makes a man’s voice hoarse; a baby conceived when a woman is menstruating would become leprous, it could give children the evil eye, and sex with a menstruating woman could give men all manner of diseases.

It is not until the 20th century that you start to get to heroes in this story – usually female doctors and researchers, the “most definitive expression of the approach” was in The Hygiene of Menstruation: AN Authoritative Statement by the Medical Women’s Federation in 1925, which said: “Menstruation is a natural function; it is not an illness, and girls should therefore continue their normal work and play during the period. It should not be and is not normally accompanied by pain or malaise.” (p. 112)

Yet there were still social hangovers. In 1926 Johnson & Johnson printed a “silent purchase coupon” for Modess sanitary napkins, so it “may be obtained in a crowded store without embarrassment or discussion”. But still women complained that the shape of the box was easily identifiable. (p. 250)

(Tampons, by the way, for the historical record, were patented in 1931 and put on sale in 1934.)

What strikes me is that growing up in the early Seventies in Australia I was still affected by many of these attitudes. Mum told me carefully that I had to make sure Dad didn’t see my sanitary pads. (I don’t recall any explanation being given, there was just an air of this being something shameful and dirty.) And this wasn’t surprising when I read the sex education books that she’d had at my age, which still referred to “clearing out impurities” in the body and similar.

I wonder what messages young teens get today. Are they any better?

* An interesting side-point: a 14th-century London cleric wrote that some girls started menstruating “in the eleventh or in the tenth year. And at that point they are capable of conception.” Which certainly doesn’t seem to square with our ideas about medieval nutrition and health. (p. 55)

The technical definition of “drought” is of prolonged, abnormally dry weather. Yet somehow, whenever I check in on the Australian rural world, most of Australia is “in” drought, or “just coming out of” drought, or “facing” a drought. There’s a simple failure here to face the reality of the continent’s climate. It is dry, normally dry, and Australian agriculture is often trying to do things that the climatic conditions cannot support.

I thought of this when I read a piece in the Guardian suggesting that one in ten pre-school children might be suffering from mental illness. Now I assume that most people would agree that mental illness is by definition an abnormality. But if one in 10 in a population is suffering from something, isn’t that just a variation of normal, and something that should be catered to and allowed for, rather than “treated”?

“What do women WANT?” It is a classic question asked by an anti-feminist bloke, usually with a stagey layer of overlaid sarcasm, implying that half of the human race is unreasonable and impossible to satisfy. And if they are unhappy, it is neither this man’s fault, nor any other man’s.

The Women’s Library has the perfect answer, in its exhibition titled simply What Do Women Want?” Drawn entirely from its collections, covering a span of around 150 years, it comes to the conclusion that women over that time have wanted broadly the same things – access to decisionmaking in public and private spheres, safety, opportunity, respect …. and they’ve had to keep fighting for them, because they have often not been delivered until decades of campaigning, and even when delivered, they’ve been continually under threat.

As is usual with Women’s Library exhibitions there is a strong interactive component, developed here through an innovative design. It looks a bit odd at first glance, but it grows on you. Each section of the exhibition has its own “tower”, from which accompanying artworks – created for it – are strung, while it also forms a desk where visitors are invited to write their comments. These contributions take up one whole wall of the exhibition, and as usual make likely reading.

Housework, and why it is still seen as a woman’s job, is the scene of one of the hottest debates. Comments range from a joyous “hurray, don’t do it”, to a despairing “because it is crap work”, to the sarcastic “because men don’t do it ‘properly’ … clever boys”. Read more

I was questioning earlier today the claims that self-harm is a modern phenomenon, and a small piece of admittedly anecdotal evidence can be found in H.V. Morton’s The Spell of London, first published in 1926. At this time there was a special river police station under Westminister Bridge. Morton, after reporting that nine out of ten suicide attempts on the Thames in London were made from this bridge, asks:

“How many Londoners know that day and night a police boat waits in the shadow of the bridge?
It is tied to its morrings by a loose knot. One pull and it is free. It is a curious boat. At the stern is a roller.
‘Have you ever tried to pull anyone out of water into a small boat>’ asked a policeman. ‘If so, you’ll understand why that roller is there.'”

Then Morton visits a nearby room for the reception of would-be suicides, including a hot bath and neat bundles of dry clothing, for men and women.

“Does a suicide repent and welcome rescue as soon as he touches the water?’ I asked.
‘Not often,’ they replied.
‘Mostly they fight and try to get back into the water,’ said the patrol sergeant.
The three of us say in the Suicide Room, and the two policemen swapped memories of rescues. I wish I could tell some of the stories, but they were not quite — You understand?” (pp. 42-43)

With such elaborate arrangements, you get the feeling there must have been an awful lot of suicides.

And of course the other “great” suicide spot of the era was what is now the Hornsey Lane Bridge over the start of the A1 in Archway. (I used to live just down the hill from it.) It was the higest public point in London for many years, so I’ve read, and it still has a Samaritans phone on it.

Watch out if you are cycling in central London. This afternoon at about 3pm at Holborn Circus there were eight – count ’em eight – police standing around (well two of them were on bicycles). Terrorist scare? armed robbery? you are probably thinking.

No, they are cracking down on cyclists’ behaviour on the road. Not other road-users, just cyclists.

Now there are undoubtedly some cyclists who do need to be penalised – one tore past me when I was stopped at lights in Whitechapel a little later, scattering pedestrians. If he was booked, I wouldn’t complain at all, except that I doubt the cops could catch him.

But what did a police officer have cause to take me to task for at Holborn Circus? I drew up at a red light, and since a taxi was occupying all of the marked bicycle space on the road, at the front of the queue, I went forward of the bicycle stop line, although still back from the pedestrian crossing space. I took back about a third of the space to which I am entitled, to make sure the taxi couldn’t suddenly decide to turn left across the front of me.

So a middle-aged policeman came bustling over and started to lecture me. I pointed out that he should have been lecturing the taxi-driver, he claimed I’d been there before the taxi, I suggested that I’d be happy to look at the CCTV, since I knew I hadn’t. He started to bluster, then the lights changed and that was that. (Well the bike courier bloke said “good on you” to me as he left.)

As I’ve posted previously, my encounters with London police have given me a general view of incompetence, laziness and bullying – now that feeling has only been multiplied.

Oddly enough, the policeman didn’t pick on the cyclist beside me – a large, young, male courier, and he didn’t pick on the taxi driver, who’d broken the law first, forcing me to do likewise if I had concern for my own skin (perhaps because the taxi-driver was a middle-aged bloke like him with whom he identified). I, however, was the helmeted, well-dressed, middle-class cyclist – perfect target, he thought, for a bit of hectoring.

I should be, by class and social position, a natural supporter of the police, but I’ve now decided there is nothing about the London force that is worth supporting. (And that’s without mentioning the crazy way they drive – I consider a speeding police car one of the greatest threats to cyclists in London. Yes ambulance drivers go fast too, but they seem to do so with a great deal more sense – and usually, I suspect, more reason.)

Perhaps I’ve become more critical over the years, or perhaps newspapers have got worse – probably it is a bit of both – but increasingly I read newspaper articles, get to the end, and ask, what? What evidence have you got to support the contention you’ve made here? Why is the paragraph that debunks the whole story (if it is there at all) buried in the depths of the article? (Well I know why, but why was the reporter allowed to get away with it?)

Two examples. They’re from the Guardian and Observer, probably the least worst in their respective markets in this regard, but nonetheless, there they are, on their websites.

Case One

Today there’s a piece about teenage self-harm. The headline reads: “Sense of failure: the scale of teenage self-harm. Study shows one in five girls has wounded herself. ‘Must-have’ culture brings feelings of inadequacy”. And that’s probably all a majority of readers will look at, and go away with the common message: “society is going to hell”.

But I read on. And an alarm flag went up in paragraph two. “A survey published today by The Priory, which specialises in treating mental health problems and addictions…” A hunt through the rest of the story provides no more details about who conducted the survey – a university department, or even survey company, or an employee of The Priory. Mmmmm … a survey company or employee finds that there’s much more need for services of the company that commissioned it to do the survey. (Because had there been a university it would surely have been mentioned to bolster the story.) And this is the whole foundation for the story. Bit of a worry …

Next: Applied to the general population, survey means more than 1 million British adolescents have considered self-harm and more than 800,000 (13%) actually inflicted injuries on themselves. But was this survey representative of the general population? No data provided, but I have a funny suspicion that it will have been conducted in London and environs, probably amid middle-class kids – the ones likely to end up at The Priory … hardly representative of a whole country. Interesting too, that there is no attribution for who is making the extrapolation.

… A national inquiry into the prevalence of self-harm among British teenagers by the Mental Health Foundation and the Camelot Foundation is due to report next year. That, hopefully, will have proper methodology, and will be the study this story should be waiting for.

…According to Childline, the numbers of youngsters calling its helpline about self-harm has risen by 20% in the last 10 years, with a marked increase – 30% – this year. Has it increased services in that time, has it done more to encourage children to ring, has the issue got more publicity? Does this figure mean anything at all? (Except that the charity – probably with good intentions, wants more money?)

… According to Dr Griffiths, the increased reports of self-harm may also be a reflection of contemporary society and the media, with their emphasis on fame, celebrity and “instant gratification”. I do like that “may”.

Finally, the last paragraph .. According to The Priory, most self-harming is symbolic – typically involving small cuts that do not draw blood and are invisible to teachers and parents. The practice releases natural opioids which can be “incredibly addictive”. So after we’ve all been having lurid images of wrists dripping blood and attempted suicide, we get small scratches. If, and it is a big if, we’ve read to the last paragraph.

So the one-sentence summary – Commercial company commissions survey that finds a greater need for its services. A bit weaker than the original, but more accurate.

Case 2
In the Observer, Why the have-it-all woman has decided she doesn’t want it all. The sub-head reads: “As a new generation of mothers seeks to change the balance between work and home, Tessa Jowell calls for a debate on how we all live”. And there’s a “politics” section logo.

Paragraph two: “But now, the Having All It All generation are giving way to the Actually, I Don’t Want It All – or at least, Not All At The Same Time generation. And their champion comes from a somewhat unusual quarter. The government’s minister for women declares today that modern women are increasingly unwilling to bear the stress of trying to do everything at once – and calls on men to share more of the responsibilities at home.”

So goes the whole story. The basic premise here is “we are responding to a fundamental change in what women want”. But, wait a minute, where is the evidence that this has changed – maybe some statistics on workforce participation, some solid social science survey, hell, even a well-conducted “pop” survey?

None, nada, not a word. The whole story is built on a premise – a very large premise – that it makes no attempt to justify or back up.

But it is worse than that: More than half of British women are currently working in a job for which they are overqualified, often because domestic responsibilities leave them too little time or energy to pursue more senior positions. “Often” – what does that mean? I could equally say – and would say – “often” women are stalled in their jobs because of male prejudice and discrimination, “often” all workers, men and women, are stalled in their careers for all sorts of reasons – from their boss not liking them to their inability to move location because of their children’s schooling …

Now I don’t want to pick on these two particular journalists – they are only cogs in the wheel, and the stories products of the huge pressure to produce great headlines. But such a pity those headlines so often have no solid foundation whatsoever, and yet these are what give readers their view of the world, that guides their votes and their actions.