Girlstruation
Antonia Zerbisias had this column in the Toronto Star the other day. It was linked to on my forum (where SooeySays readers can feel free to register and comment):
Menstruation?What Am I? 12? Is That Friggin' War on Terror Still On?
It's the accompanying picture to the article that caught my attention, though, because I seem to recall (and I'm about 100 years younger than Ms. Zerbisias - in work years, anyway) seeing the same cartoon woman on the menstruation pamphlet they gave out to us in grades five and six (I was in a split class).
Inside the pamphlet, the woman was waltzing with her partner, a man in a suit, and underneath the cartoon couple it advised, "You can do this..." and then on the next page there was the same woman but she was jiving with a different partner in a way jazzier suit and the caption underneath them warned, "But not this."
The pamphlet was about menstruation, as I've said, except it referred to it as "that time of the month when a girl experiences the first joys of womanhood" or somesuch. I can't quite remember. All I remember is how deranged it looked to us and one of the "savvier" girls reading it aloud in a blowsy accent to some grade eight boys who were being super extra ruder and stupider than usual and acting like they were total sex machines who did it with hot babes ten times a day and not just a bunch of eedjit morons who'd had sex with her maybe 1/2 of once before she moved on to high school boys.
We less experienced girls laughed uproariously at the cartoons and captions, one of us even thinking to draw a stream of blood from the crotch of the jiving woman to the guy's head to explain to another one of us the real reason why one shouldn't jive while menstruating. Within no time at all, the couples in the drawings were mutilated beyond recognition with so many alterations to the captions that it was impossible to make out the original Modess cartoon models.
Or were they Kotex cartoon models by then...
In any case, I remember it all so well because the contrast between the propaganda and our reality was so great, that the propaganda could only backfire on itself. Probably half of my grade 5/6 split had already had sex (the girl half, anyway), a few had been molested by "funny uncles" (our grade eight teacher is currently serving 12 years for sexually molesting girls in grade six - grade eights being too old for him, apparently), and a couple were actually turning tricks - for money. The few of us who were shy of real boys and preferred to daydream of making it with David Cassidy, or in my case - Gene Hackman, could see well enough that sex at an early age probably wasn't a good thing - for the girl, anyway - but we were still in awe of our classmates who talked about doing it with Mikey Butthead in Joe Smelly's shed that time they skipped school - yesterday. We were in awe of their ability to withstand the supreme ick factor of sex with anyone we actually knew AND because they were the only source of sex education information we could trust not to be totally bullshitting us.
When I finally did have sex, several years later, I realized I probably shouldn't have trusted them, either. It was NOT the best thing ever. It is NOW. But I'm practically menopausal, too.
Anyway, it sounds kind of sad, I know, about the girls having sex in grades five and six, but these were tough kids who didn't really have much adult supervision, teachers and principals viewed them as nothing but trouble, and it was Northern Ontario in the 70s. Interestingly, I remember that pamphlet as being one of those things that crossed all divides in our class, too. It was uniformly hilarious to all of us. I even attracted the attention of one of my classmates, a girl who went on to wet tee-shirt contests and motorcycle gangs in high school, over the pamphlet when I drew a huge penis on the jiving guy and added a maniacal grin to his face, "I luvvvvv jiving with girls on their periods!" She thought it was funny and from then on I pretty much had my own bodyguard.
Unfortunately, I was in way over my head. Until then, I could pretty much count on being unpopular to keep me out of jams. After that, it was a full time job just keeping my stories straight with my Mom, who was constantly on the lookout for anybody thinking she was too big for her britches and whose standard two questions when she came upon you just hanging out not doing anything at all was, "What the hell do you think YOU'RE doing?" And "Just who the hell do you think you ARE, young lady?"
I was a nervous wreck within a few weeks and I wasn't even doing anything, OR thinking I was anybody.
Luckily, high school came soon enough and after a few weeks of extreme popularity with a couple of majorly cool girls, they moved on to boys and I was once again left in the dust, still wearing menstrual pads while they'd graduated to tampons, because as was the wisdom at the time, if you had sex, you'd be able to wear tampons.
Everybody wanted to be able to wear tampons, too, although actually inserting them was something that just seemed so wrong to me that, even though I'd busted my hymen hopping chairs at the circus when I was about 5 or 6 (my older sister was there to explain that the blood was a good thing because it meant I'd be able to wear tampons as soon as I started menstruating, so quit crying or she'd punch me in the stomach) - I insisted on wearing pads until even my Grandmother was rolling her eyes. Vindicated, was I, when the first Toxic Shock Syndrome case happened, however - although I draw the line at cotton pads as recommended by a woman from La Leche League at a drop-in I used to frequent with my first born where I felt compelled to pretend I was still breastfeeding her long after she'd been weaned.
But misinformation and no information was everywhere in those growing up years. I remember an episode of Marcus Welby that featured a girl who got pregnant because she had slept with her boyfriend. This worried me incredibly because I had slept with my brother a few times down at our farm after we'd scared ourselves silly pretending our grandmother was the psycho axe murderer who'd escaped from the North Bay loony bin and was living in the woods somewhere around Sault Ste. Marie - you know, the one the cops were always looking for - and I'd crawled into bed with him after he was asleep so at least he'd get axed, too, if my grandmother came up the stairs in the middle of the night. My sister considered my question, which I'd asked in a frantic panic upstairs after my Mom had gone out, "Could a girl get pregnant if she slept with her brother?" with much deliberation before answering decidedly, "Gross. Not only could she get pregnant, but the baby would be a total freak."
Seriously, I was 8 years old and it was another two years before I could stop worrying about whether or not I was pregnant with a freak baby because I'd slept with my brother under extreme and extenuating circumstances.
Not that there was anything in the pamphlet about sex, it's just that I'd finally figured out through some kind of osmosis - thank Gawd for osmosis learning - that "slept with" meant something else. I wasn't quite sure what, but I knew enough to know I hadn't done it.
NOT with my brother, anyway...
Girls today have no idea how good they've got it.
But I guess that's a good thing. An even better thing would be for schools to do a retro-sex-ed day so girls (and boys) today could see what used to pass for education in the good old days they hear so much about but cannot possibly imagine.
