This is what I was reading this morning. I remember the girls and the boys being split up in about 4th grade to see separate films. To this day I have absolutely no idea what film the boys got to see. We got to see a film made by a sanitary product manufacturer about the joys of womanhood, or more specifically what to expect and what to do when we got our periods.
That film was as good as things got for educating us on what was to come. What I didn't know was that the generation after mine doesn't even get the film. A lot of them don't get any information at all. For example, if their mothers refuse to talk to them about it (Because let's face it, fathers are both unqualified experientially and usually completely ignorant on the subject themselves, and generally would rather die than have to have that conversation.). If the girl is lucky or a little bit smart, the internet has the information, but if nobody tells you anything you might not even know to expect a period in the first place. You wouldn't know what information to search for. I imagine given this lack of information coming from either parents or educators leaves a lot of girls absolutely clueless about their own bodies. That's pretty unacceptable given that menstruation is a fact of life for nearly all humans who are born biologically female. If it doesn't happen, something has gone wrong.
That fact of life notwithstanding, there is a huge taboo surrounding menstruation. We end up learning about it by word of mouth from other people our own age, mostly. It's the blind leading the blind. I remember seeing one end result of this collective ignorance one day when I was at work and one of my male co-workers decided to mansplain periods to me, and according to him it was pure blood and women peed through their vaginas. I shudder to think that he might one day have a daughter and volunteer to tell her how her body works. He didn't even have a basic working understanding of anatomy. I suspect that everything he knew about women he had learned on the playground from the other little boys.
Most of the educational material made to inform girls of what to expect was made by sanitary pad and tampon manufacturers as a way of advertising their products. The generation of girls today don't even get that much information. And all of the educational material reinforced the taboo, making periods into something to be kept secret and hidden. It contributed to the lack of information today, ironically. It was counterproductive.
Most of the taboo seems to stem from religious taboos surrounding menstruation, and by extension primitive taboos surrounding blood. You'd be surprised how many primitive ideas we hang onto even after we know what's actually going on. To primitive man, blood was the stuff of life. If it was coming out, something was wrong and you might die. Except that women did it on a regular schedule and didn't die. Whaaaat? Must be magic, and since we don't understand it, it must also be evil and/or dirty or at the very least supernatural and something to be viewed with deep misgivings. And the most ironic part of it all? Blood was the stuff of life, but when a life started, the bleeding stopped. And I bet that even then, back in the mists of time, girls were told more about what to expect before we knew why we had periods. It boggles the mind to think about it.
Here in the Netherlands they teach their daughters all about periods. In spite of that, you don't hear too many of them discussing the topic. The Dutch are very proud of their commitment to "bespreekbaarheid", their openness to talking about anything, but when it comes right down to it there are still a couple of subjects they don't bring up in conversation. Among those topics are menstruation and sex. That said, they're a lot more willing to talk about it than the average American. It results in less neurosis as near as I can tell. Maybe the difference is that if a young woman here needed to know something about her period or sex, she could ask someone and they'd explain it to her. In America that might not happen. It might or might not account for the huge difference in the two countries' teenage pregnancy rate. It turns out that ignorance and stonewalling result in kids not knowing enough to avoid life's pitfalls. It does them a great disservice in the long run, all because we're uncomfortable talking about it.
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