How the world taught you to fear your

“Don’t you get angry when the boys laugh and tease you?”

“No,” Saudah says, sitting in her home in Bwaise, one of the poorest areas in Kampala, Uganda. She is wearing a school uniform with a purple polo shirt, striped tie and dark blue skirt.

“But why not?”

Her reply is a simple stating of fact: “They’re laughing because the girls can’t keep themselves clean.”

In her opinion, those who laugh are not doing anything wrong. The girls with the blood stains are. They have themselves to blame if they fail to hide the menstrual blood.

Saudah herself has never been in that situation. N e v e r s t o o d shamefully in front of the others in the classroom. But she is well aware of the risk and of her own responsibility. Every month, she tries hard to ensure that her menstrual blood, which so persistently demands attention, remains invisible.

That it is not something that should be noticed or talked about was one of the two things she first learned about menstruation.

The other was that she had to stop spending time with boys.

In many times and places, great significance has been attributed to menstruation. Menstrual blood has been seen as a force, both holy and cursed, good and evil, life-giving and destructive.

“Contact with it turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren … the bright surface of mirrors in which it is merely reflected is dimmed … hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust and a horrible smell fills the air.”

Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, who died in 79AD, wrote this exposition about the destructive capacity of menstrual blood in Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia that would serve as a reference work for more than 1 000 years.

In Manipur, India, an older woman explains that she was told to drink a drop of menstrual blood when she celebrated her first period, in the belief that it would protect her from sickness.

Menstrual blood was indeed something magical in 19th-century Swedish society. It had a special status in the supernatural imagination and could be used both to cure and to bewitch, not least as a love potion.

In the 1920s, American researchers tried to take the “destructive” capacity of menstrual blood to a whole new level by studying what they called “menotoxin” — a supposed toxic substance in the menses that turned out to be nothing but a fantasy. All the way into the 1950s, researchers continued to search for the alleged poison and connected it to ideas about the body being cleansed during menstruation.

Today, in Uganda and Kenya, most of the people I’ve spoken to know a myth about menstrual blood and