Abstract
This chapter will use data from the study to examine the different ways in which young people learn about menstruation. It will focus on menstruation as discussed in the vernacular language of adolescents.
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Notes
- 1.
In my own secondary school days (the mid-1990s), girls would hide tampons up their sleeves. One day, my friend dropped a tampon in class. The tampon slid out of her sleeve, and the female teacher asked, in front our small group, whether my friend ‘had lost something’. Too embarrassed to bend down and pick it up, my friend denied all knowledge of the tampon on the floor.
- 2.
Common also was a phrase which came up throughout the research in school: ‘get your brolly [umbrella] out’ or ‘get your brolly out, don’t slip’. Both boys and girls were aware of this phrase, and some equated it to a gush of blood (like rain):
M3A: I don’t know, I just think they think it’s like a gush of blood.
VLN: Yeah.
M5A: That’s just gonna [going to] go ‘whoosh’ [laughter].
- 3.
The alleged time between the purported event and the telling and transmission of the legend is short, and often the location of the event is local. Contemporary legends are never traceable to an exact source, they have always happened to a ‘friend of a friend’, and not directly to the narrator (Bennett 2005, p. xi).
- 4.
Soggy Biscuit: ‘A male masturbating game. Contestants all jack off onto a digestive biscuit. Whoever shoots his load first onto the biscuit is deemed the winner! The loser…. eats the biscuit’ [sic] www.urbandictionary.com. Accessed 19 January 2009.
- 5.
I was also provided with a similar narrative (M3E, adult, 60 plus) in a jocular aside, about the bacon sandwiches prepared by one particular menstruating woman which were greatly valued for their positively enhanced flavour [M3E].
- 6.
M3B recalled a further legend of menstrual contemporary legend, which had come up in the film ‘Anchorman’ [2004]: ‘It was one of Brick’s lines, you know the dumb guy. He just goes: “Bears can smell their periods!” […] But then you think about it for two seconds and cities would just be, like, overwhelmed with bears … they’d be everywhere’. In the movie, Brick was objecting to the presence of women in TV station newsrooms. His actual lines were: ‘I read somewhere their periods attract bears. Bears can smell the menstruation.’
- 7.
Vagina infinita, Latin for ‘infinite vagina’, is a term used by Whatley and Henken (2000, pp. 118–21): ‘The view of the vagina as huge and engulfing appears in jokes and stories about the “vagina infinita”. For example, a bawdy folksong, referring to a woman of “large dimension”, tells how the entire soccer team went in last night and “none has yet come out of it”. Folklore depicts the vagina as capable of being of enormous size, in which anything might become lost or stored’. The term echoes the older Vagina dentata: (OED) ‘the motif or theme of a vagina equipped with teeth which occurs in myth, folklore, and fantasy, and is said to symbolize fear of castration, the dangers of sexual intercourse, of birth or rebirth, etc.’ The motif is logged in Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature as F547.1.1 ‘Vagina dentata’ (Thompson 1958, vol. 3, p. 164).
References
Becker, H.S. 1963. Outsiders. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Glencoe: The Free Press of Glencoe.
Bennett, G. 2005. Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fingerson, L. 2006. Girls in Power: Gender, Body, and Menstruation in Adolescence. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Henken, E.R. 2002. “Escalating Danger in Contemporary Legends”. Western Folklore 61(3/4): 259–276.
Newton, V.L. 2012. “Status Passage, Stigma and Menstrual Management: ‘Starting’ and ‘Being On’”. Social Theory and Health 10: 392–407.
Thompson, S. 1958. Motif-Index of Folk Literature, vol. 3. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Whatley, M.H., and E.R. Henken. 2000. Did You Hear About the Girl Who? Contemporary Legends, Folklore & Human Sexuality. New York: New York University Press.
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Newton, V.L. (2016). On the Blob: Young Adulthood and Menstrual Lore. In: Everyday Discourses of Menstruation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48775-9_4
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