Written by Ahendrila Goswami
The copious amount of information available on the world wide web about any and every topic can be very overwhelming at any given time. In my teenage years, when the internet was still quite a luxury and cell phones not as popular among school students, I had looked up the side effects of bleeding every month on the internet at a cyber café in my town.
I had come home with the idea that I had blood cancer (I didn’t know it was called menstruation back then). Years later, I don’t believe the internet has been able to improve as a justifiable source of information, especially on menstruation.
When I type the word ‘menstruation’ in the search engine, a drop-down list of results categorises this natural biological process as exclusive to girls. This immediately segregates it as a heteronormative act and nothing about the queer folk who menstruate appear in these search results at all.
This heteronormative portrayal of periods is further asserted by one of the most common questions appearing in the search options: What should Boys know about Girls’ Periods? This constant emphasis on gender binaries in each search results has successfully kept the people on the internet in the dark about the spectrum of menstruators in real life.
Pre-Menstrual Syndrome (PMS) includes symptoms in menstruators typically occurring between ovulation and menstruation. Still, in the popular internet culture, it is a “suffering” that requires a “cure“. The wobbly feelings in the body due to changing hormonal levels can be quite stressful as it is. However, the meme culture has a very reductive outlook towards PMS – one that is definitely centred on women and portrays them as Monica from F.R.I.E.N.D.S popularly saying “No uterus. No Opinion“.
Some of the memes are constant reminders to boys that PMS-ing women become unapproachable, unlovable and difficult to handle because of their mood swings. The larger effect of this can be felt in the constant trivialisation of PMS among the boys and an angry retaliation from the menstruators which seeks to completely do away with the boys in the narratives surrounding menstruation. This, in turn, widens the gulf between both the parties, making menstruation look like an enigma.
No matter how much we might have troubles talking about menstruation in real life, the internet is full of period talk – from embarrassing stories of menarche to serious menstrual health-related symptoms. While this ensures that awareness about menstruation reaches all internet users, I was once told by a senior that it was tiring to have to see menstruation being hyped so much.
The question then arises, do we hype periods up? How does the representation of periods, in general, on social media lead to wider conclusions about a person and their opinions? Since the stigma around menstruation is age-old and very difficult to do away with completely, two almost neat factions exist in this scenario – one, supporting the awareness drive and two, the people who would rather keep the idea closeted in black plastic packets.
Unfortunately, the biological process of menstruation then has lost all the naturalness. It is now a war of words between the newer generation and the old, the liberals and the conservatives. Of course, without the internet and its resources, the little knowledge that we tend to develop about menstruation would have been lost to many but the importance of sharing the right kind of information about menstruation, sans the stereotypes, is essential to help menstruation be treated as what it is – a natural phenomenon.