It's a Good Story, Period.
Stories featuring cramps, blood, and real human people. Period article #2.
Last week, I wrote about how rarely periods are represented in media. On TV, it’s more common to see blood from murder than blood from women’s fifth vital sign. But in real life, murder is not as common as periods. Surprise!
I will always argue that what we pay attention to indicates what we value. Why are we paying so much attention to pretend murder? Why aren’t we talking about periods?
Okay. So we don’t tell many period stories, and the stories we do tell don’t have range. Today, though, something more fun: Here’s a few of my favorite times periods were not ignored!
Periods in Music
These are the two best articles listing songs about periods. In the latter, Beulah Devaney says, “I have a lot of affection for songs devoted to menstruation, periods, and PMS. In a world that’s constantly deeming periods gross and shameful, any track that free bleeds over the music industry is an instant classic in my eyes.” There still aren’t many options—you might listen to all of them and not find one in your preferred genre—but listening to them as an intellectual exercise even just once through is interesting.
Here’s a playlist on Spotify that compiled some of the best period songs, many of which are mentioned in the articles above. A few of the most noteworthy:
Mary J. Blige’s “PMS,” which is everything you want it to be, perhaps the ultimate period song in that I would actually want to listen to it when I’m on my period shuffling from the kitchen to the couch
Dolly Parton’s “PMS Blues:” Yee-haw comes for periods and I have never broken a dish on purpose but now I kind of want to
“100 Tampons” by Marcia Belsky, which is about NASA and that’s all I’m going to say because listening to it for the first time knowing nothing is a delight. I immediately added this to my Weird Jams playlist
“Crimson Wave” by Tacocat, a surf-pop bop that has the goofiest beach-themed music video and a peppy, friendly vibe
Periods in TV
I told you it was coming last week: This is single instance of a regular-month period being used as a plot device in any media that I could think of. Find it on Netflix—it’s South Korea’s hit show, The Extraordinary Attorney Woo.
In The Extraordinary Attorney Woo, the main character Woo Young-woo is a new attorney at a law firm. She works in a cohort of four young professionals: her female coworker Choi, an annoying male lawyer, a kind male paralegal, and herself.
> Scene <
Coworker Choi’s boss tells her to go wedding dress shopping with the annoying male lawyer to snoop for a case. She asks if she can go with the cute, kind paralegal instead. It’s awkward, but shoot your shot, I guess, and it works—her boss says yes.
I was worried. Our main gal Woo and the cutie paralegal are supposed to end up together, I could just tell, and trying on wedding dresses together would be a great way to speed up their relationship’s development. Choi, girl, get out of Woo’s way!
But then, Choi is sidelined by stomach cramps.
She
has started
her period.
Choi made it all the way to the wedding dress shop before ducking into a bathroom stall in the building and getting stuck there.
The ambiguity of that is exactly right. Is she stuck until she gets a tampon? Is she stuck because she needs to poop intermittently for the next half hour? Is she stuck because a bathroom is the only place she can hide from the social inappropriateness of showing period pain? I don’t know, but she’s stuck!
Choi asks Woo to go to her apartment and bring her new pants. Eventually, she realizes that she can’t feel better fast enough, or she doesn’t have clean work clothes, or both, and she resignedly tells Woo to go fake wedding dress shopping/snooping in her place. Woo gets all dressed up in a wedding dress, and the cute, kind paralegal realizes that he’s a simp for her.
Choi, still stuck in the bathroom, overhears the store’s staff discussing a secret. Which helps crack the whole case later. Then she changes into the pajama pants from Woo and goes home. At the end of the episode, the law team goes to a super fancy restaurant to celebrate, and Choi orders porridge because, cramps.
Being at work while on your period! Having something you’re excited about ruined! Enlisting help from a (usually female) coworker! This is how you do periods in TV shows!
Because this is how you do periods in real life.
Thank you, Moon Ji-Won. You have proven my theory that periods are conducive to moving forward a plot. May you have every success in your future screenwriting and general life endeavors.
Periods in Sports, etc.
Last week, I mentioned that celebrities don’t talk about their periods. That’s why I was surprised and excited when I read this ESPN interview with Mikaela Shiffrin in 2023:
If Shiffrin wins two slaloms in Spindleruv Mlyn, Czech Republic, this weekend, she could match Stenmark on Sunday.
“Technically, it is possible,” Shiffrin said with a laugh. “We’ll see if I can put the energy on my slalom skis for two more races.
“It’s been busy, and I am in a kind of an unfortunate time of my monthly cycle, so I’m more tired right now. We just normalized talking about that,” she added.
The interview with Shiffrin is longer and talks about other things, namely skiing. At the time of the interview, she was on the verge of beating Ingemar Stenmark’s record for the most World Cup wins by an alpine skier ever. But I remembered the interview because of her comment about her period. And her justification for saying so: “We just normalized talking about that.” Yes! Yes. You just did.
There was a woman named Kiran Gandhi who ran the London marathon without a tampon in and bled on her leggings. She wrote an article about it. She still does period advocacy; she’s also a musician and looks super cool. Her website led me to this article, a brief but interesting index of celebrities talking about their periods.
Periods in Nonfiction
I referenced both of these books in the last post. I’m only halfway through Maisie Hill’s Period Power, but so far so good. Invisible Women is is remarkable; it’s about women’s health at a system-level. And if you know you’re aren’t likely to read either book soon but like audio, check out 28ish Days Later, a well-researched BBC podcast. The episodes are fifteen minutes and each features various stories and experts and parts of life and I really enjoyed it.
Finally, Maddy commented this on my last post: “There’s an episode of This American Life from a few weeks ago called ‘How Are You Not Seeing This?’ that involves people trying out a period cramp simulator and it is surprisingly very emotional, highly recommend.”
I listened to it and she was completely right. Start at minute six!
To see other media—legends like Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret? and a new middle grade book called Free Period—check out my post from last week. I bought Period Power when I started researching this episode, but I’d be curious if anyone has any other nonfiction books about periods you liked. Let me know!
And, as always, thanks for reading!