Period

And that’s how my husband’s romantic university proposal ended up leading to one of the most memorable conversations I’ve had about my menstrual flow.

We barely had a chance to sit down upon meeting our informal guides, before the foreign concept of niddah was brought up.

Before my fiancé and I could exchange quizzical looks, I was invited to speak privately with the female volunteer. Finally, I thought, this was more like it. It was time for the good stuff in my girls-only chat.

Settling into a comfy sofa, the friendly woman began what has now become known in my friendship circle as ‘the legendary period talk’. Smiling at me, she said something along the lines of: ‘Emma, when you bleed each month, you become niddah. Impure. Unclean for your husband. And this lasts until the very last drop of blood has come out of you and you have cleansed your whole self in the mikveh pool. Do you understand?’

She then told me that, during this two-week window of time,

I was wasn’t even allowed to touch my husband’s sleeve, or, in my favourite example, pass him a piece of steak I’d cooked for his dinner.

As I was still digesting her words and mulling over how he was better at cooking steak than me, she began confiding the romantic and practical benefits of niddah. She told me that, like with anything in life, restraint makes something sweeter when you have it again after a while. Not touching for nearly two weeks every month meant you couldn’t wait to touch each other again, after the mikveh. And, handily, this would also be the right time in your cycle to get pregnant. Who’da thunk it? Plus, she confided, it’s sometimes nice to have a break from sex and your husband for half a month, every month.

My softly-spoken guide sat back, pleased with her explanation of how the Orthodox Jewish way had thought of everything. And while a small part of it seemed plausible (i.e. the part about abstinence making the sexual pull stronger), I felt as if I’d fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole and was struggling to re-emerge from Wonderland.

But the truly jaw-dropping revelation was yet to come. Before entering the mikveh pool – a pool which, I should add, you cannot enter with nail varnish on or even your hair plaited (a place my mother had religiously avoided her whole life) – I had to be completely sure that my period had finished. So how can you be 100 per cent sure, beyond your own eyes telling you that your tampon is clear and your pants are pristine?

A kosher rag.

Yes, you read that right. There is a special cloth you can buy to wipe yourself with so that you can double and triple check that your period has properly ended. But oh, no, no – that’s not all you can do to ensure your purity …

If at the end of your cycle, after you’ve wiped yourself with said specially blessed rag, you are still in doubt, you can post the scrap to your local rabbi in an envelope with your mobile number enclosed. After he’s inspected it, you will simply receive a text telling you whether you are kosher or not for swim time at the mikveh. According to my smiling guide, they are ‘specially trained’.

Yes, Jewish women are wiping themselves with and then posting bits of cloth to a bearded man down the road.

My own brazenness started to falter here, and I didn’t press any further. I have often wondered since about the identity of the first dude who figured he had the expertise to pass on this knowledge to all the other men who have never menstruated in their lives. I can’t recall much more from that session other than the moment my fiancé suddenly reappeared from his part of the house and swept me out of there. We both felt a bit sick – him from too many salty and sweet snacks, and me from a very odd period chat.

‘They do WHAT?’ was his general reaction, as I explained about the rabbi rag watch.

Meanwhile, in the other room, my fiancé had been given a more pared down version of how periods affect women, with a similar emphasis on ‘no touching’ during my ‘impure’ period. But I’ll never forget what else he had been told: ‘Women are a little crazy when they are on their periods’ – with the implication that, in fact, it was good for all husbands to have a break from their wives at this point in our monthly cycle. Yes, really.

(Later, in a totally unrelated conversation with a friend, I also discovered that women who are trying to fall pregnant can post vials of their period blood to clinics in Greece, who claim they can analyse the sample to spot potential fertility problems. It makes you wonder what other bizarre packages are being sent through the post, doesn’t it? Again, another rabbit hole.)

I must stress this: the people we met were kind and only trying to educate us in the ways of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. I don’t wish to be uncharitable towards them; my criticisms aren’t personal. And, of course, other folk could have sold this purity period-obsessed side of marriage to us in a softer way. Or not focused on it as much. But I am grateful for receiving an unvarnished insight into what one of the oldest religions in the world teaches couples about women, our bodies and purpose on this earth.

I know that some modern Orthodox Jewish women have reclaimed the mikveh as an empowering space for them to feel cleansed and almost reborn each month – but why is period purity even still a thing in the first place? A step forward in the dark isn’t a step forward to me. Teaching girls and women that they are dirty and in need of rebirth after something as perfectly natural as a period isn’t right, however it is spun.

Nor am I looking to solely point the figure at Judaism. God knows (and he really does), it’s a religion with enough haters already. Judaism is certainly not unique when it comes to the major world faiths pillorying or discriminating against women for menstruating. Far from it.

Factions of Islam believe women shouldn’t touch the Qur’an, pray or have sexual intercourse with their husbands while menstruating. Muslim women are similarly deemed impure and must be limited in terms of contaminating their faith or their men.

Catholics fare no better, but seem to prefer to whitewash the whole affair. According to Elissa Stein and Susan Kim’s book, Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation, when Pope Benedict visited Poland in 2006, TV bosses banned tampon adverts from the airwaves for the duration of his stay – in case his papal Excellency was grossed out.

Certain Buddhists still have placards outside temples that bleeding women shouldn’t enter. I recently saw such a sign outside a stunning temple in the heart of modern buzzing Hong Kong, of all places.

In Uganda, particular tribes still ban menstruating women from drinking cows’ milk because they could contaminate the entire herd. And in Nepal, right now, menstruating women and girls are relegated to thatched sheds outside the home and are prevented from visiting others, in a charming practice known as ‘Chapadi’, because it’s believed that a bleeding woman in contact with people or animals will cause illness and is just wrong.

Most Hindu temples also ban women from entering when they are bleeding. Some go further by banning women of menstruating age altogether. A particularly eye-opening case made headlines in India in 2018, when activists were successful in getting the country’s Supreme Court to overrule such a ban at one of Hinduism’s holiest temples. Historically, the Sabarimala temple has not allowed women between the ages of ten and fifty to attend because they could be menstruating and therefore will be unclean. Violent protests broke out at the temple after the ban was lifted, with many extremely angry men accusing the courts and politicians of trying to ‘destroy their culture and religion’ by allowing menstruating women access to what should be a peaceful place of prayer. Crowds tried to block any plucky female worshippers, female journalists were attacked and one of the women who tried to attend the temple ended up needing a police escort.

The saddest part of the whole unnecessary debacle? The number of women who attended the protest in support of their own ban. That’s how deep these myths can run. Women can be so convinced by men of their own filth that they turn on other women.

Devastatingly, Hindu girls and women also miss out on mourning their loved ones while menstruating because of this type of temple ban. Instead, they have to stay at home while the rest of the family pay their respects. Or, in the case of BBC journalist Megha Mohan, loiter outside the temple in Rameswaram (an island off the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu) as her family observed the final ritual for her grandmother.

While waiting, she recalls in a piece for the BBC News website, texting a female cousin, who couldn’t make it to the final ritual, to tell her about her aunt stopping her from going to temple as she had asked for a sanitary towel:

She sympathised with me and then she paused, typing for a few moments. ‘You shouldn’t have told them you were on your period,’ she wrote, finally. ‘They wouldn’t have known.’

‘Have you been to the temple on your period?’ I asked.

‘Most women our age have,’ she said casually and, contradicting my aunt’s earlier statement just half an hour earlier. She added, ‘It’s not that big a deal if no one knows.’

So, she could have just lied. And probably should have done to get her way.

Looking back further, Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote in AD 60 that having sex with a woman on her period during a solar eclipse could prove deadly.

Sure, mate. But this example shows just how long we have lived with this ritualised shaming of women.

Jump forward two millennia, back to London and my wedding lessons – it was so very odd to hear such backward advice still underpinning the way women are made to feel today. In the developed world, religion may not have the control it once had, but it’s still a huge cultural force that shapes norms and makes people feel a certain way about things.

Often, as with so many other day-to-day battles that make us weary, we can zone out when a religious teacher says something we would normally question. But keeping this shaming, impure narrative around periods going within our oldest religious institutions, despite leaps in medical advancements, at the very least has the subliminal effect of making women feel dirty and wrong.

And it reinforces the idea amongst men that our periods are something to fear and be sickened by.

So, question the nonsense when you happen to hear it. By all means laugh at it. Make sure you ridicule anyone who tells you that you are impure for your body doing something so natural that the entire human race depends on it. It isn’t easy. I failed to do so out of a mixture of shock and a fear of offending the kind people trying to prepare me for my wedding. And I still regret it.

You are a warrior – who bleeds and goes to work every day. Not some dirty hermit who deserves to be quarantined and needs male approval to be reintegrated into mainstream society after your monthly bleed.

Religion has no borders. It was viral before the internet. That is why a privileged educated woman like myself can be told, while living in one of the most advanced societies on earth, not to hand my husband a piece a steak I’ve made for him while menstruating. I am about as far away as you could get from a girl in Nepal banished to menstrual huts away from her home while she bleeds. And yet, we ended up getting a similar memo. Except I have the tools, power and voice to push back.

You see, without us realising it, these myths permeate, settle and erode confidences. Keep your antennae up and tuned. And have the confidence to belly laugh and challenge the shaming beliefs in religion.

Our periods hold the key to bringing the next generation of society into being. The least we can do is make sure we have the right attitudes towards them and diagnose any lingering bullshit from the days when only men had the power to tell the stories that narrated and controlled our destinies, regardless of whether they understood us or not.

Today, women control our bodies and our narrative.

We must not lose control of that hard-won right – especially over our periods – at a time when our voices are louder than ever before.

You can choose your reaction. That’s a power which must not be forgotten. Don’t internalise any of the shame these myths propagate. And remember to actively call out nonsense when you hear it.

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