There Will Be Blood: Women’s Positive and Negative Experiences with Menstruation

Abstract

Because negative views of menstruation are ubiquitous throughout the world, women’s distinctly positive and negative experiences with menstruation are rarely distinguished from each other. Semi-structured interviews with 20 women from a diverse (race, class, sexual orientation) community sample in a large Southwestern U.S. city were analyzed from a social constructionist perspective in order to examine women’s positive and negative experiences with menstruation. Three themes in women’s positive menstrual experiences were identified: (1) Evidence of not being pregnant; (2) Body as normal/intuitive; (3) Menstruation as tolerable. Four themes in women’s negative menstrual experiences were identified: (1) Fear of heavy bleeding; (2) Embarrassment about bleeding through; (3) Physical pain; and (4) Menstruation as always bad. Most women could not elicit a single positive anecdote about menstruation, but their descriptions of negative aspects of menstruation included abundant details about feeling negatively evaluated by others, particularly men. Implications for how physical symptoms of menstruation often mask negative emotions about menstruation are discussed, along with ways that women can embrace “menstrual crankiness” alongside higher positive framings of menstruation.

Keywords:

• Menstrual health
• qualitative research
• menstrual narratives
• embodiment
• body literacy
• stigma

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Kimberly Koerth, Eric Swank, and the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group for their contributions to this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.