When Republicans rule the rules

Florida Republicans have decided that after their assault on sexual minority rights, talking to elementary school children about the menstrual cycle is the other exclusionary bill to legislate. So, we learned this week that they are working on a project to ban explaining to young girls basic knowledge about their reproductive system.

In my former life, I taught reproductive physiology to a few cohorts of undergraduate nursing students. To evoke the systemic character of this historical demonization of menstruation, I liked to talk to them about the theses of the Viennese doctor Bela Schick. In 1920, this doctor came out with a theory called menotoxins that will do a lot of damage.

It all started the day the clinician said he noticed that his bouquet of roses, given to a menstruating woman, had faded too quickly. He’s scratching his head in his lab and probably validating what he knew was ideologically undeniable. Periods contain menotoxins; poisons which come out through the skin of women and which can cause the withering of plants and the hasty rotting of food. He had just updated a belief from Roman times.

Here, menstruation was also considered to carry toxins that could drive a woman crazy. Even the famous Pliny the Elder will say that menstruating women are capable of spoiling the taste of wine, causing hecatombs in bee colonies and spoiling food. Menstrual toxins emanated from the woman’s skin, her touch, her gaze and even her breath, wrote the wise man. A misogynistic caricature that many Western thinkers will perpetuate. I laughed when I discovered a French remnant of this bullshit reported in the review Clio by Jean-Yves Le Naour and Catherine Valenti.

Towards the end of the 19th^e century, they say, in Anjou, we still tried to get rid of the caterpillars that infested a cabbage field by having a menstruating woman cross it several times.

Quebec has not escaped this nonsense. Even talking directly about menstrual blood was taboo not so long ago. In an interview with the magazine Quebec Science, ethnologist Suzanne Marchand said that between 1900 and 1950, certain expressions used to speak indirectly of menstruation had a link with the color red. We said “the English have arrived”, because the English uniform was that color. One could also mention the arrival of the cardinal, whose priestly habit recalled the red of menstrual blood.

Here too, she said, were the beliefs that menstruation spoiled food, prevented cakes from rising, spoiled sauces and soured preserves. To know if the menopause freed the woman from this burden, Suzanne Marchand replies that when the menstruation stopped, it was assumed that all that remained inside and that the woman could become “contagious”. Being menopausal therefore rhymed with being menotoxic.

Long silenced in the Western world by science, sexual liberation and feminist struggles, now, thanks to the regressive evolution of a certain retrograde right, the gaze marked with defilement and disgust that religions have always posed about menstruation comes back to haunt America.

This morbid obsession for the female body is often the result of males terrified by this great natural female power represented by the certainty of incubating one’s genetics. Faced with the uncertainty of paternity that nature has given to guys, phallocracy has surpassed itself in history to monitor, lock up, control, exclude and even demonize women’s sexuality. Violence that owes to jealousy, possessiveness, fear and the pathological insecurity of a certain masculinity. I am mainly talking here about the fear of not being the depositary of the fertilizing spermatozoon which will cross this mysterious uterus and which, since the dawn of time, has been the object of all the anxiety-provoking myths for the human male.

Yet, periods are just an expression of a woman’s generosity to increase the comfort and nutritional resources in her uterus in anticipation of the arrival of a fertilized egg that hasn’t come.

Why not open up to science and see them poetically as a simple movement of ebb and flow that punctuates the perpetuation of our species in the biosphere?

The America that squeezes science in favor of dogmatism is deja vu. At the beginning of the XX^e century, many teachers there have been ostracized by those people who curse Darwin and think that the Earth is the center of the universe. Only by realizing that the Soviets were secretly preparing to go to the moon will America wake up with a start. She will understand, as the late Stephen Jay Gould said, that science and religion are two magisteriums that gain by not sharing areas of encroachment.

Today, it is China which must examine advantageously this new republican program of brutalization which exploits the ignorance, the conspiracy and the exclusion to keep the power. A movement that culminated with the election of Trump and whose control of the female body is at the center of priorities. I pity those men who don’t know the line between loving a woman and owning a female. As the planet dies, these people make womb appropriation their top priority. Really pitiful!