I’ve read a bit about painting with blood online. There are obviously some people who think that any painting with blood (especially menstrual blood) is disgusting, however many consider it a form of art. Here are a few comments from this forum discussion about using blood in art:

  “I paint with blood… very powerful if used right.”

“blood painting is like an artists signature within the painting itself”

“blood is beautiful its thick and thin at the same time great to paint with.”

“[Using ones own blood] shows that they put themselfs actually in their painting, they are giving a part of themselfs for their art.””

Tinet Elmgren from Germany has a website for her menstrual blood paintings (I particularly like her cute comic strip about tampons).

On her website she writes that, “Fresh blood is different from other materials. You can’t get the same result with anything else. It looks fascinating…. Menstrual painting certainly has elements of acknowledging – and even enjoying – something very important in female life, that is a taboo in our society.”

According to her, “blood is a pretty crappy material for making paintings that would last. It dries and becomes brown, and it crumbles off the paper. But thanks to technological advances, I can scan the paintings and make prints.”

“Blood doesn’t smell horrible. Blood smells a bit like metal (iron, actually), and in small doses you hardly notice any smell at all. Fresh menstrual blood doesn’t smell worse than normal blood…  A short while after I’d finished the painting, it dried out. No smell. No flies. No carnivorous beasts flocking my house …”

“How can a woman be scared of seeing blood? I’ve met some women who are. I can understand why men might be, because most of them only get exposed to blood resulting from injuries of some sorts, but women? Who bleed healthily every month through their periods?? I can understand ‘disgusted’ (though it’s sad), but scared???”

12.43 years old in the USA. (In Europe the average age of menarche has decreased rapidly from 17 in 1850 to 13 in 1970. It has stayed relatively stable since then).

Average amount of blood I lose when menstruating?

Just over 2 tablespoons (35ml) but anywhere between about 1 and 6 tablespoons of blood is normal (one tablespoon is 15ml).

Wikipedia states that, “the average blood loss during menstruation is 35 millilitres with 10-80 mL considered normal”.

Two tablespoons doesn’t sound like a lot! I have light periods but I thought that I bled more than that.

Average age of menopause?

51 years old in the West. The average age of menopause in developing nations is younger (between 44-47 years old). The symptoms of menopause last from 4-6 years.

Average number of years I’ll spend menstruating?

37 years in Western countries (if women start at age 12, stop at age 51, and have two full-term pregnancies).

How many times will I menstruate in my lifetime?

About 460 times.

How much menstrual blood will I lose in one year?

About 420 ml, which is just enough to fill up this kid’s size coca cola cup:

How much menstrual blood will I lose in a lifetime?

16 litres (that is three times the amount of blood in our body, because the human body contains an average of 5 litres of blood). Below are a couple of visual pictures of this

The first photo is 16 litres of tomato sauce (31 x 520g bottles). The second phot is 16 litres of red coloured juice (8 x 2 litre bottles):

The man most prominently associated with the development and introduction of the pill, John Rock, was an Irish Catholic doctor from Boston. Dr. Rock didn’t set out to make waves with the Vatican; in fact, he was sure that his invention would gain approval from the Vatican and finally allow Catholics to practice safe and effective family planning.

The Vatican reconsidered their ban on all artificial contraception:

Soon after the introduction of the pill (in 1963) Pope John XXIII convened a panel in order to decide whether contraception should remain a sin or not. The papal commission on birth control included married Catholic women, and the commission voted overwhelmingly to recommend that the church rescind its ban on contraception.

The Pope, however, decided to reject the commission’s recommendation & instead appointed a second commission, made up of only 15 bishops (all men).  This second commission also voted overwhelmingly to recommend that the church rescind its ban on contraception.

The results of the votes of these two commissions were leaked. It was therefore a significant shock to Catholics Pope Paul VI decided to proclaim the teaching on contraception unchanged and unchangeable (he did this in the release of the Humanae Vitae in 1968).

Did Catholic women obey the Pope’s ban on contraception?

A survey just one year later, in 1989, found that 44% of Catholic women (who were regular churchgoers) were currently using artificial contraception. In 1974, 83% of Catholics said they disagreed with the Pope’s stance on birth control. By 1999, nearly 80 percent of Catholics believed that a person could be a good Catholic without obeying the church hierarchy’s teaching on birth control. A 2005 nationwide poll by Harris Interactive showed that 90% of Catholics supported the use of birth control.

The Center of Disease Control and Prevention 2002 National Survey of Family Growth revealed that 97% of American Catholic women over age 18 have used a banned form of contraception, which is the same percentage as the general population.

HIV/AIDS prevention & the Catholic ban on contraception:

The Catholic ban on contraception has led to abortion, death and disability (eg. fistulas) for women in impoverished Catholic countries denied the ability to limit pregnancies. The Catholic hierarchy has attempted to block access to emergency contraception for women, particularly in Latin America, where it has influence at the highest levels of government.

The Catholic ban on contraception may have also influenced the spread of AIDS. Despite scientific evidence that condoms are a critical piece of AIDS-prevention efforts, the Vatican has refused to relax the ban on contraceptives. The Vatican has used its status at the UN to impose its anti-contraception policies, frustrating the development of comprehensive global family planning and anti-AIDS programs. There has been a growing recognition that abstinence is unrealistic as a primary AIDS strategy in Africa, a continent where there are significant power discrepancies between men and women and many wives are powerless to refuse sex with their husbands, even if they suspect they have been unfaithful.

Read more on the Catholic ban on artificial contraception and it’s consequences here and here.

Many countries have restricted or outlawed contraception (and abortion), and many continue to do so, but a few have taken this control over a woman’s fertility even further through forced sterilizations. This is something that goes on today in many Western countries. Many disabled and severely disabled girls and women have been forced to undergo hysterectomies that they are unable to consent to.

Here are a list of countries that carried out policies of  (forced or coerced) sterilization in the recent past:

Czechoslovakia: carried out a policy of sterilization of Roma women  from 1973-1989.

Nazi Germany: The mentally disabled, mentally ill (schizophrenia & manic depression), epileptic, blind, deaf & physically deformed were sterilized under Nazi Germany law. Though not explicitly covered by the law, 400 mixed-race “Rhineland Bastards” were also sterilized. By the end of  WWII over 400,000 individuals were sterilized under the German law.

Japan: According to the Eugenic Protection Law (1948), forced sterilization could be enforced on criminals with a genetic predisposition to commit crime, patients with genetic diseases (such as total color-blindness, hemophilia, albinism and ichthyosis) and patients with mental affections (such as schizophrenia, mani-depression & epilepsy).

India: From 1976 thousands of impoverished men and women were sterilized either by a vasectomy or by tubal ligation under coercive conditions for a sum of money.

China: Coercive sterilization to enforce the one child policy is not permitted by the law but has occured in China (some local officials have been jailed for their actions).

Sweden: Forced sterilization occurred from 1935-1955 to prevent mental illness and disease. During this time, 21,000 were forcibly sterilized (Sweden subsequently paid out damages to many of the victims).

The United States: The United States was the first country to concertedly undertake compulsory sterilization programs for the purpose of eugenics. The principal targets of the American program were the mentally disabled and the mentally ill, but also targeted under many state laws were the deaf, the blind, people with epilepsy, and the physically deformed. Over 65,000 individuals were sterilized (in 33 states) under state compulsory sterilization programs in the United States.

Interestingly, it seems to be fairly common for women to have periods that as in ‘synch’ with each other (especially for female colleagues). One study on women in the workplace showed that it is common for women who work in the same environment to have their cycles ‘synch’ together. Nevertheless, there were certain factors that increased or decreased the chances of a woman’s cycle synching with that of her colleagues.

The study results showed that there was higher menstrual synchrony when…

1. The women worked together in highly interdependent jobs.

2. The women were not living with their sexual partners.

3. The women were experiencing low levels of anxiety and job stress.

Seizures were more frequently during the few days prior to menstruation as well as the first few days of menstruation, and again near mid-cycle, prior to ovulation. This is because of an increase in estrogen levels at these points in the cycle (seizures are most common when estrogen rises).

More recently I’ve become much more sceptical about whether girls really do need to reach a certain weight before they began menstruating. R. E. Frisch first came up with this “critical weight hypothesis“. He proposed that girls needed to reach a certain weight (around 47kg) before their bodies could begin to menstruate. It is an interesting theory, but research has proven that the “critical weight hypothesis” is wrong. Girls can begin menstruating at any weight, as long as they have enough fat on their bodies.

Although the critical weight hypothesis is wrong, researchers have continued to investigate the link between weight & height and menarche. These studies have found that height is a more important indicator of menarche than weight. According to one study in Taiwan, there is no change in weight velocity at the age of menarche, but there is with height: ”height velocity reaches a peak 1 year before menarche but height velocity stopped increasing within 1 year after menarche.”

This is interesting. I just had a look at my growth chart & it seems to be consistent with the findings of this Taiwanese study. My growth rate really slowed down after menarche: it went from 6cm/year in the two years before menarche to 2cm/year in the two years post menarche.  My weight, however, didn’t seem to be connected to my menarche age at all.

Other physical indicators of menarche:

“Menarche usually occurs about two years after your breasts develop (thelarche) and between 4 and 6 months after the growth of your pubic and underarm hair.” I can’t remember when my pubic/underarm hair began to grow, but that is interesting! I do remember that my breasts began developing when I was eleven, a couple of years before I got my first period.

My hips began to widen at almost the exact same time as I began menstruating. I wonder whether hip growth is a sign that menarche is coming (or can hips widen at any time)?

Psychosocial effects of early puberty:

Girls who go through puberty early tend to get lower marks at school & have lower self-esteem than their peers (perhaps because girls who develop early are quickly sexualised and more likely to be shamed ‘sluts’). In contrast, boys who are early developers do well at school & have higher self-esteem than their peers (perhaps because they are looked up to by their peers and can ‘get’ the girls more easily). Both girls and boys who develop early are exposed to more risks than late-developers (eg. early sexual activity, alcohol & drugs).

Psychosocial and physical effects of early menarche:

At age 15-16, girls with menarche before age 11 (early) were more norm-breaking, including being delinquents. In addition, they had earlier advanced sexual experiences. Early-developed women had lower academic education. At age 43, women with early menarche were shorter and heavier, had worse physical fitness and dieted more frequently compared to other women. There was no difference in quality of life.

Early menarche is related to adult height: Research has shown that girls who go through menarche early tend to be shorter than girls who go through menarche later: “The daughters of short women matured early and continued growing heavier, but they stopped growing taller and were overtaken in height by the later-maturing daughters of tall women.” Another study found the same results: ““Our results support the general belief that women who reach their menarche at a later age will eventually grow taller compared with women who reach their menarche at an earlier age. A delay in menarche allows more growth of the long bones before the epiphyses unite and results in a taller adult height… for each year of delay in when a woman reaches menarche, she will grow approximately 0.35 cm taller in total body height.”

Angela (Australia): A family court in Queensland has granted permission for an 11-year old girl to undergo hysterectomy operation which means removal of the womb. Three leading gynecologists also feel that hysterectomy is the only solution in this case. The parents of the girl have said that the girl suffers from epileptic fits during her menstruation and has to go through hell – the disease she is afflicted with is the Retts Syndrome. She is unable to communicate and behaves like a 3-month old baby. Angela’s disorder makes her profoundly disabled and unable to talk or use sign language. She has to be fed and cared for and has no bladder control. She has a special walking frame she has to be strapped into, and has a person to help her.

Queensland Liberal Senator Sue Boyce, a disability rights advocate : “Every Australian would be appalled if an 11 year old girl without a disability was sterilised with legal blessing. It’s completely discriminatory and inhumane to treat a girl with a disability any differently,” she said. “I know of young women with a disability who have wanted a baby and have then discovered to their horror that they had been sterilised when they were a child. The only reason for courts to get involved in the sterilisation of any minor or any person with a disability must be a life-threatening illness.”

Katie Thorpe (UK):

The mother of a severely disabled girl is seeking permission from the Court for her daughter to undergo a hysterectomy, to protect Katie from the “pain, discomfort and indignity” of menstruation. 15-year-old Katie, who cannot walk or talk and is believed to understand little of what is said to her, is unable to give consent. Doctors initially suggested contraceptive pills and injections to stop Katie’s periods starting but Ms Thorpe ruled them out because of the risk of her wheelchair-bound daughter suffering from thrombosis.

Simone Aspis, of the United Kingdom’s Disabled People’s Council, said the operation was “unacceptable” when Katie could avoid menstruation through alternatives such as the Pill. “Katie, like any other nondisabled teenager, has the right to grow up with her body intact, and where she can have the same choice as anyone else to give birth to her own children.” She added: “We know of plenty of disabled people both with physical impairments and learning difficulties who give birth to their children and are great parents. This is nothing more than eugenics and abuse of Katie’s human rights.”

Paul Hardiman, a consultant gynaecologist at the Royal Free and University College London, said the matter was not black and white. “I think you have to balance the protection of her human rights against the distress she is going to suffer if something isn’t done,” he said. But he added that a hysterectomy was a radical and irreversible procedure that should only be considered as a last resort because less invasive options were available.

Faced with a patient in similar circumstances this year, Dr Hardiman recommended a device that releases hormones when it is inserted into the womb, slowing down or stopping menstruation. “It is as effective as sterilisation. but a key issue is that it is also reversible. A hysterectomy seems such a major and final thing to do to somebody.”

I love how unashamed the curious little girl is in this video. I also love how the young woman (who is currently menstruating) is so comfortable showing the girl how to change a pad

Some parents worry how their disabled daughter will cope with menstruation. They worry about how she will keep clean & deal with the bleeding. They may also worry about how she will cope with the pain or mood changes. Sometimes parents of disabled and severely disabled daughters are worried about sexuality and the possibility of their teenage daughter getting pregnant.

Some parents choose to suppress their daughter’s menstruation using the birth control pill. Occassionally, parents of severely disabled girl’s try to get a hysterectomy for their daughter (this generally requires a judge’s consent). Most disability support organizations are very opposed to the forced hyserectomy or sterilization of disabled people (especially when there are other means of coping with menstruation, such as the birth control pill).

I had started puberty thinking that I was rather ‘tough’. When my brothers and cousins had a competition to see who could keep their hand in an icey water container for the longest, I won. After I started menstruating, though, I seemed to be much more sensitive to pain than the women and girls around me. They seemed to get on with life perfectly fine when they were menstruating, whereas I was often in a huge amount of pain. In my puberty education, period pain had been severely downplayed (only some women get it, and it’s not pain it’s called “discomfort”). Because of this, I saw my severe pain as abnormal and not natural. I presumed that I experienced this pain because I was weaker than other women. This lowered my self-esteem.

Looking back now (at age 23), I understand a number of things about menstruation that I didn’t at age 13. I know that many girls experience very painful periods (I wasn’t the only one), and that it is absolutely okay to take days off school because of them (it is the most common reason why girls have days off school).

As a young teenager, the silence and shame around menstruation made me confused. I couldn’t ask questions about why menstruation was so difficult for me, so I ended up attributing the blame to myself (menstruation was painful because I was a weak person).

If I could go back in time and talk to my 13-year old self I would say…

“Puberty information books and teachers tell you that menstrual pain is not pain, it is ‘discomfort’, and severe menstrual pain is non-existant. Don’t believe them. You are experiencing severe menstrual pain. You are not simply a weaker girl than most & hypersensitive to pain. A lot of girls experience this severe pain (at least at times). The pain you are going through is normal. Vomiting from the pain is normal.

“Your body is telling you to take a break & to be gentle to yourself. Love your body, look after your body. You don’t have to ‘soldier’ on when you are in this much pain. You are allowed to have days off school because of the severe pain. Other girls have days off school because of menstrual pain (it is the most common reason why girls have days off school).

“You are not an overly sensitive or weak child because you can’t move or get on with life when you are in this much pain. The menstruating women you see ‘soldiering on’ around you aren’t stronger than you, they are just in less pain than you. Remember that you are a strong girl, even when you are in so much pain that you can’t move – you are still that girl who can endure a ‘Chinese burn’ longer than anyone else that you know. You are strong because you are in this much pain, and you are living with it.

“You are in a lot of pain right now, but in just a few years your cramps won’t be nearly as painful. You will be able to function fine & get on with your life. One day, you will enjoy your periods & you will be proud of your periods.”

Conversations with my Mother at age thirteen:

I’ve always had a very good relationship with my mother. We spend a lot of time together & talk a lot about almost everything.

When I was a young teenager, however, I very rarely talked to my mother about menstruation or or period cramps – I felt like I couldn’t, because she didn’t initiate the conversations with me. She’d talk comfortably with me about my migraines but never about my period pains (she’d just quietly give me a hot water bottle and painkillers).

It makes such a difference to have someone listen to you & talk to you when you are going through a hard time. I wanted my Mum to talk to me more, and to acknowledge the pain that I was in. I wanted a “poor little girl” from her and a bit more sympathy! I had questions that were bothering me that I wanted to ask my Mum (such as, “is it normal to vomit from the pain?” “Would it help me if I saw a doctor?”) There was also the unstated assumption in my family that if you were menstruating and had cramps you just got on with it,  you never took a day off for something ‘natural’ like that.

What I wish my mother had told me…

 “I can see that you are in a lot of pain, that must be really awful. I never got periods as painful as yours are, and most women don’t – but a good minority of girls do get a lot of pain with their periods, so what you are going through is normal. The pain will lessen as you get a bit older, the first five years of your period are usually the most painful. If you want to see a doctor about your pain, I can make an appointment for you – the doctor might be able to help you. Just look after your body and let it rest until you feel better. If you want to have the day off school, that is completely fine. A lot of girls sometimes have days off school because of bad menstrual cramps. If you still want to go to school but don’t feel like you can walk there, I can drive you there.”