Period Taboo Quotes

Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life. The disease is pervasive, from the weird obsession with virginity and the one-way birth canal through which prophets are “delivered,” through the horror of menstrual blood, all the way to the fascinated disgust with homosexuality and the pretended concern with children (who suffer worse at the hands of the faithful than any other group). Male and female genital mutilation; the terrifying of infants with hideous fictions about guilt and hell; the wild prohibition of masturbation: religion will never be able to live down the shame with which it has stained itself for generations in this regard, anymore than it can purge its own guilt for the ruining of formative periods of precious life.

Menstruation is not a problem, poor menstrual hygiene is

For three decades I have lived within a silence that declares periods too embarrassing, too unwanted, too female to talk about out loud. I have done this for so long that I almost no longer notice it. Almost. Bur now I am sick of the silence and the secrecy and the warped idea that blood is taboo when it comes out of a vagina. Because it is just not fucking good enough. To hell with covering up, with being embarrassed, with being silent.

The dissolving, uniting forces combine what to us have been incompatible: attraction with repulsion, darkness with light, the erotic with the destructive.  If we can allow these opposites to meet they move our inner resonance to a higher vibratory plane, expanding consciousness into new realms.  It was exciting, through my explorations some of which I share in later chapters, to learn firsthand that the sacred marriage or coniunctio, the impulse to unite seeming opposites, does indeed seem to lie at the heart of the subtle body’s imaginal world. One important characteristic of the coniunctio is its paradoxical dual action.  The creative process of each sacred marriage, or conjoining of opposites, involves not only the unitive moment of joining together in a new creation or ‘third,’ but also, as I have mentioned, a separating or darkening moment.5 The idea that “darkness comes before dawn” captures this essential aspect of creativity.  To state an obvious truth we as a culture are just beginning to appreciate.  In alchemical language, when darkness falls, it is said to be the beginning of the inner work or the opus of transformation. The old king (ego) must die before the new reign dawns. The early alchemists called the dark, destructive side of these psychic unions the blackness or the nigredo.  Chaos, uncertainty, disillusionment, depression, despair, or madness prevails during these liminal times of  “making death.” The experiences surrounding these inner experiences of darkness and dying (the most difficult aspects were called mortificatio) may constitute our culture’s ruling taboo. This taboo interferes with our moving naturally to Stage Two in the individuating process, a process that requires that we pass through a descent into the underworld of the Dark Feminine realities of birthing an erotic intensity that leads to dying. Entranced by our happily-ever-after prejudiced culture, we often do not see that in any relationship, project or creative endeavor or idea some form of death follows naturally after periods of intense involvement.  When dark experiences befall, we tend to turn away, to move as quickly as possible to something positive or at least distracting, away from the negative affects of grieving, rage, terror, rotting and loss we associate with darkness and dying. As

The most succssful monsters overdetermine these tansgressions to become, in Judith Halberstam's evocative phrase, 'technologies of monstrosity' that condense and process different and even contradictory anxieties about category and border. Some critics hold that the genre speaks to universal, primitive taboos about the very foundational elements of what it means to be human, yet the ebb and flow of the Gothic across the modern period invites more historical readings. Indeed, one of the princial border breaches in the Gothic is history itself- the insidious leakage of the pre-modern past into the skeptical, allegedly enlightened present. The Gothic, Robert Mighall suggests, can be thought of as a way of relating to the past and its legacies.

Paula Nicholson, a psychologist who has studied women's transition to motherhood, makes the case that it is taboo to mourn in the postpartum context, though motherhood can be many women's first experience of grief. Whereas death or divorce or other life changes usually involve a culturally and socially sanctioned period of mourning, Nicholson argues that mothers are not allowed to experience loss, and if they do, they are pathologized. 'So strong is the taboo,' she writes, 'that women themselves frequently fail to admit their sense of loss in a conscious way.' Motherhood, the ultimate "happy event", Nicholson declares, seems antithetical to loss. And yet Nicholson lists a whole host of losses inherent to having a child: loss of autonomy, identity, work, time, friends, relationship patterns, sexuality, health, comfort. Each woman may experience any one or several of these. Nicholson makes the somewhat radical claim that "some degree of postpartum depression should be considered the rule rather than the exception. It is also potentially a healthy, grieving reaction to loss.' Postpartum depression might be the only ritual American mothers have to express their grief.

The most significant source of my adolescent period anxiety was the fact that, in America in 2016 (and far more so in 1993), acknowledging the completely normal and mundane function of most uteruses is still taboo. The taboo is so strong that it contributes to the widespread stonewalling of women from seats of power - for fear that, as her first act in the White House, Hillary might change Presidents' Day to Brownie Batter Makes the Boo-Hoos Stop Day. The taboo is strong enough that a dude once broke up with me because a surprise period started while we were having sex and the sight of it shattered some pornified illusion he had of women as messless pleasure pillows. The taboo is so strong that while we've all seen swimming pools of blood shed in horror movies and action movies and even on the news, when a woman ran the 2015 London Marathon without a tampon, photos of blood spotting her running gear made the social media rounds to near-universal disgust. The blood is the same - the only difference is where it's coming from. The disgust is at women's natural bodies, not at blood itself.

The effort made to suppress sex would be difficult to understand if it were for the sake of sex as such. Not sex, however, but the breaking of human will is the reason for vilifying sex. A great number of the so-called primitive societies have no sex taboo whatever. Since they function without exploitation and domination, they do not have to break the individual’s will. They can afford not to stigmatize sex and to enjoy the pleasure of sexual relations without guilt feelings. Most remarkable in these societies is that this sexual freedom does not lead to sexual greed; that after a period of relatively transient sexual relations couples find each other; that they then have no desire to swap partners, but are also free to separate when love has gone. For these not-property-oriented groups sexual enjoyment is an expression of being, not the result of sexual possessiveness.

These previously learned methods of adaptation to life do work. Getting drunk works. Getting stoned works. Being overweight works. Being sad works, particularly in a world where being angry or horny or expressively joyful are taboo. These are all methods of survival, and if they get replaced there is a risk that the new replacement will be a big pain to accomplish and not work as well as the old way. Problems that seem unacceptable start looking better after a little suffering that is greater than that associated with the problem. THis is why the context for each person's commitment to change has to include a perspective that allows for periods of greater discomfort than that caused by the problem they are trying to fix.

The basic thing about the Amazon is that these people had a long-term period to learn about and experience and benefit from their knowledge of the environment,” Meggers said. “Any group that over-exploited their environment was going to be dead. The ones that survived, the knowledge got built into their ideology and behavior with taboos and other kinds of things.

Although all this abnormal order of things is not of recent date, the characteristic fact of the bourgeois period is that it assumed the principal, dissociated, and autonomous characteristics of a "social morality"—precisely with the "virtuism" of which Pareto accuses it, which to a certain extent was no longer subject to religious morality. Now, it is exactly this morality with a sexual basis that is the principal object of the processes of dissolution in recent times. We hear of a "sexual revolution" supposed to remove both inner inhibitions and repressive social taboos. In fact, in today’s world "sexual freedom" is being affirmed ever more, as a current practice. But we have to consider this in more detail. I must emphasize above all that the direction of the processes at work is toward a freeing of sex, but in no way a freeing from sex. Sex and women are instead becoming dominant forces in present society, an evident fact that is also part of the general phenomenology of every terminal phase of a civilization’s cycle. One might speak of a chronic sexual intoxication that is profusely manifested in public life, conduct, and art. Its counterpart is a gynocratic tendency, a sexually oriented preeminence of the woman that relates to the materialistic and practical involvement of the masculine sex: a phenomenon that is clearest in those countries, like the United States, where that involvement is more excessive. [...] The aspects of the crisis of female modesty are another part of this. Beside the cases in which almost full female nudity feeds the atmosphere of abstract, collective sexuality, we should consider those cases in which nudity has lost every serious "functional" character—cases which by their habitual, public character almost engender an involuntarily chaste glance that is capable of considering a fully undressed girl with the same aesthetic disinterest as observing a fish or a cat. Furthermore, by adding the products of commercialized mass pornography, the polarity between the sexes is diluted, as seen in the conduct of "modern" life where the youth of both sexes are everywhere intermingled, promiscuously and "unaffectedly," with almost no tension, as if they were turnips and cabbages in a vegetable garden. We can see how this particular result of the processes of dissolution relates to what I have said of the "animal ideal," as well as the correspondence between the East and the West. The primitive, erotic life so typical among American youth is not at all far from the promiscuity of male and female "comrades" in the communist realm, free from the "individualistic accidents of bourgeois decadence," who in the end reflect little on sexual matters, their prevalent interests being channeled elsewhere into collective life and class. We can consider separately the cases in which the climate of diffuse and constant eroticism leads one to seek in pure sexuality, more or less along the same lines as drugs, frantic sensations that mask the emptiness of modern existence. The testimonies of certain beatniks and similar groups reveal that their pursuit of the sexual orgasm causes an anguish aroused by the idea that they and their partner might not reach it, even to the point of exhaustion.

Some people put a spin on these old cultural practices and claim they are good for women because it ensures they get rest during their most vulnerable periods. This is an even more dangerous argument, because it distorts a harmful taboo that isolates women into a form of ‘caring’. It converts mistreatment into societal generosity. Why do women need to be labelled dirty, dangerous or impure or kept isolated or not given food in order to rest? Women’s rest is regulated because if a woman were to decide when she wants to rest she begins to exist. Culturally that is a sign of trouble.

The strangeness of the Droeshout portrait becomes especially apparent when placed next to other portraits of the period. The other authors look nicely proportional in their title page portraits.

I understand now why sex is taboo within the confines of sanctity and truth. It is a binding agent. Everything you've said moments before suddenly holds reverence, and it takes a pronounced period of abstinence to unbind from this lewd knot. I arrive home to find my mother seated alone at our dinner table equipped for a gathering of six. She's been waiting for me, I can feel it. She worries herself with a pot of tea and a box of macarons from Ladurée. And I look at her with borrowed eyes - fearing her solitude, her size and her calm. She is relieved that I'm home, but I'm no longer at an age where she can scold me. Instead she offers me a cup of tea. Her best approach is to paint our home into a place I'd rather be.

We see this “taboo-breaking” element in the French tale of Melusine, for instance. In this story, the progenitor of the French Lusignan noble house marries a fairy woman named Melusine. She marries him, but makes him promise not to ever watch her bathe on Saturday. When he violates this taboo, he sees that she turns into a serpent from the waist down during this time period. He later gives himself away by calling her an “odious serpent” in anger, and she leaves him.

And what is a “Shake-scene” anyway? The epithet suggests a powerful actor shaking the stage. Greene implies that there are other “Shake-scenes” in England, though this one is arrogant enough to suppose himself the only one (“ in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country”). This suggests that the term refers to an archetype—a type of actor—not an individual’s name. A similar epithet of the period, “shake-rags,” was a common word for a beggar.

No such void exists for other major writers of the period. Though many left fewer documents, the ones they did leave identified them as writers in payment records, manuscripts, letters, and diaries.

Books and poems of the period are strewn with many more allusions, but amongst these allusions to the poet in his lifetime, “there is none,” to quote Professor Wells, “that explicitly and incontrovertibly identifies him with Stratford-upon-Avon.

Scholars have turned up a mass of personal records from the man’s lifetime—more, it is often said, than exist for other writers of the period. They show his theatrical activities, his financial and property transactions, his lawsuits. They show that he was a businessman, an actor, a shareholder in an acting company, and a property investor. But they don’t show that he wrote. As the Oxford historian Blair Worden laments, “the extent and loudness of the documentary silence are startling.” This silence aggravates scholars in the extreme.

To consolidate his power, Pa‘ao instituted human sacrifices and changed the Hawaiians’ religious rituals. He built the first luakini (human sacrifice) heiau (temple) on the Big Island (Hawai‘i) at Waha‘ula.5 Fornander wrote that “…there was a time before that, when human sacrifices were not only not of common occurrence, and an established rule, but were absolutely prohibited. Kapu ke kanaka na Kāne, ‘sacred is the man to Kāne’…”6 Pa‘ao instituted the oppressive kapu (tapu or taboo) system and the worship of elemental spirit gods such as Pele. Fornander says that Pele worship in Hawai‘i is only subsequent to this migratory period. The Pele cult was unknown to the purer faith of the older inhabitants and her name does not even appear in the creation accounts.

Before Liv did that Justen gives me a look after the beer was dump out over her head… yeah know- I can’t explain it- it’s silly- but it’s almost looked like a pity look like she felt bad for what she did to me, like she had to do it or something, but didn’t want to. It was not over Maddie dropped her jeans in pissed right on her face, and took a small dump on her chest- her goodies were visible to everyone, but that’s Maddie she’s crazy. All of the breath leaves my body in a rush, as Liv shoves tampons up her nose, and we all walk away. ‘Payback is a b*tch!’ I feel like I’ve been punched in the ovaries, and I was slogged in the stomach… by you gusset, it Ray. He still loves to get drunk, off all the humps, rumps, and lumps he had tonight. Saying- ‘What the hell are you guys doing to her? She didn’t do anything to you.’ I said- ‘Don’t even talk to me ass hole- you’re missed up!’ He said- ‘Fine, you’re a baby anyways. And he walked off all pissed.’ (He is the one to blame, isn’t he?) I said when he was walking off- ‘If she gets knocked up at ten by you not pulling out, I will kill you!’ I know this because she just started her period last month, and I had to be like her mom and explain everything, like always. My girls had my back… when he walked off. I think that is why he backed off. Oh yeah, without thinking, I chest bump them both as hard as I can, I felt like they saved me tonight. I am sure a fist bump would have worked but… you know. They showed they carried for me. That is when I see Rays' phone on the windowsill, like most boys he is all laying it down… I go throw it and see an ammeter video of him taking my sis on Marcel’s mom and dad's bed, I deleted it, before everyone sees it, online and on their phones. I am sure it’s been sent or is going to everyone that matters. I just hope I am not too late. And just like that, I see all the sexy texts and pics, so I drop it into a full cup of beer that someone left next to it on the sill. It’s bad enough she was popped and dropped like she doesn’t need that too, on top of it all. Jenny is squeezing Kenneth like she is frightened or uncomfortable by all, that is around her with all this drama. I see him- we lock eyes for a moment. I think he saw me doing it dropping the phone in. He was going out the door to aid Justen that was surely still passed out. I can’t exactly tell what he’s thinking, but whatever it is, it’s not good. I look away, feeling hot and uncomfortable. Like I should’ve done that.