And I had to think about it … I honestly gave it a really solid, good think. There was a huge part of me that would rather go to the police station than have to go back and show Jeffrey these – not only show him these sheets, but also bring the police there. But, you know, my common sense caught up with me because this looks like I’ve done something very wrong.
Fortunately, Jeffrey, like the sexy period hero he is, when confronted by the cops, a nervous Jillian and the bloodied bedsheets on his doorstep, verified her story. Without skipping a beat, he simply explained that the sheets were covered with ‘menstrual fluid’. No shame. No juvenile euphemism.
Jillian, as you would expect, is by now a sobbing mess and in a line which could have come straight out of a Richard Curtis movie script, he calls her ‘wonderfully strange’.
Spoiler alert: if you’re interested in finding out whether their love affair worked out, it didn’t. Period night didn’t kill the relationship, it was actually American visa issues. But it’s not their love story that we’re focused on here, what I care about is that a woman – in one of the best first sex stories I’ve ever heard – was so ashamed of her period that she nearly chose a night in the police station over returning to the ‘scene of the crime’.
Take that in. It’s bonkers. Fully bonkers. But you know what’s even more crazy? Women the world over will understand why the police station inquisition was a serious option for a fully innocent Jillian because it seems we all have the propensity to become liars and weird little thieves when we get our periods. Anything to simply hide the evidence.
Take another woman I know, who also robbed some bedsheets. Jane was in her final year at school when she came on her period during a night out and didn’t have any tampons with her. She deployed ye olde faithful technique of stuffing one’s knickers with tissues and hoped for the best. Crashing at male mate’s family house for the evening, she woke up the following morning to her own crime scene spread across the bedsheets. Just because her friend was a guy, she felt she couldn’t talk to him about it. So, just like Jillian, she robbed the sheet, stuffed it into her handbag and then chucked it into a public bin on the way home. To this day, her mate’s mum still asks for her sheet back, and Jane is too embarrassed to tell her the truth.
Linen is never safe around a menstruating woman, but particularly, it seems, around a woman who is ashamed of her own blood.
We also become super sleuth laundry women. Another woman I know, now an accomplished doctor in America, had to steal and sneakily return a guy’s jeans so she could wash them:
My worst period story was probably in college, I had my period and needed to change my tampon but hadn’t yet – my then boyfriend came in to my dorm room and pulled me onto his lap … I’m sure you can see where this is going. I’m pretty sure I realised that I was sort of leaking through and then decided I just had to stay there forever. But eventually (obviously) I stood up and there was a real life Superbad moment AND I WANTED TO DIE. But actually, I just stole his jeans and immediately washed them, returned them and said nothing about it.
Truly horrifying.
You get the picture. Ludicrous behaviour abounds in women from all backgrounds and of all ages. All over some spilt blood.
And yet there is a serious level of irony that most young girls crave their first period, fretting about when they can join the ‘P-Club’ but spend the rest of their lives covering it up.
For one of my friends, this happened almost immediately. She’d just turned thirteen when her first period started, and her initial reaction was ‘BEHOLD ME, NOW I AM ALL WOMAN’. However, this was somewhat tempered by the fact that she was on a five-day school trip to the countryside and had to figure out how to climb down a rope frame without anyone realising she was bleeding (whilst simultaneously giving off the laid back, mature vibe of one who has just ‘become a woman’).
Crucially, I raise this mad urge towards concealment not because I think women should be talking about their periods all time, but because this culture can harm women’s health when they fail to seek diagnosis for menstrual conditions or gynaecological problems and furthers the stigma around periods – so it’s time to shine a glaring spotlight on this silence and our bloodied sheets.
Let’s take a step back for a minute and consider: what is the point of a period?
Other than the important business of reproducing, according to most doctors there is very little point. Galling, isn’t it?
Considering that this bleeding window in our lives is a relatively short amount of time – and only for those women who want or try to have babies – we are spending a heck of a lot of time and effort bleeding, when perhaps we don’t have to. (Not to mention the energy expended hiding this natural process from colleagues, friends and other halves.)
Dr Jane Dickson, the straight-talking vice president of the UK’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare tells me:
A woman is built around her reproductive cycles. She is set up as a pregnancy machine … A period is a natural, in-built preparation system for pregnancy. But in this day and age there is no reason a woman should have periods if they don’t want them. It’s totally healthy to use contraceptives which stop bleeds altogether or create artificial periods.
Moreover, (and I hate to break it to you) artificial periods, the ones you have on many pills during the seven-day break, are also hangovers from an even more puritan age.
There is no reason for a one week break [within which to bleed] any more either. When the pill was first developed, it contained an extremely high dose of hormones – five times what the modern day pill contains now. It made many women feel sick and unwell. So, they liked the idea of a seven-day break from the heavy hormones.
But the pill was also developed in America – a heavily Catholic society – where contraception was frowned upon. If women could still have periods while on the pill, they could mask the fact they were using a contraceptive and it would be less stigmatising. And women themselves were reassured by seeing a period every month as healthy menstrual function.
As science has developed and the dosage is now greatly reduced – and contraception in many parts of the world is far less stigmatised – none of those reasons for a bleed exist any more. The pill just switches your ovaries off and keeps the womb lining suppressed. The injection dupes the body into thinking it’s pregnant; the Mirena coil suppresses the period – there is no point having a period whatsoever other than when you want to reproduce.
In fact, while writing this book, the official health guidance in the UK changed, finally revealing to women on the pill that they no longer needed to take the traditional break to have a bleed. I quote the guidance: ‘There is no health benefit from the seven-day hormone-free interval.’ And, ‘women can safely take fewer (or no) hormone-free intervals to avoid monthly bleeds, cramps and other symptoms.’
This is game-changing. And very overdue.
Pill-taking women across the world erupted in shocked and righteous anger at the news. For decades, women had been bleeding when they didn’t need to. It’s ludicrous. Why has it taken until 2019 for the official health advice to tell them their pill-periods were nonsense?
And the real red rag to the raging bull? Those fake bleeds were designed to make an old man in a white hat happy. Yup. It all comes back to the Pope. Professor John Guillebaud, a professor of reproductive health at University College London, told the Sunday Telegraph that gynaecologist John Rock suggested the break in the 1950s ‘because he hoped that the Pope would accept the pill and make it acceptable for Catholics to use’. Rock thought if it did imitate the natural cycle then the Pope would accept it.’
For more than six decades most women have unknowingly been taking the pill in a way that