The museum of WHAT??

Um, menstruation.

Why in the world . . . ?

Because there wasn't such a museum in 1994, when I started it, and apparently there never had been. When I - I'm Harry Finley, the founder and director of MUM - requested information about their companies from the public relations folks at Kotex and Tampax, and asked if there was such a thing as a museum for menstruation, they appeared stunned by the latter question, and couldn't, or wouldn't, supply the company information. It was then, my moment of epiphany, that I figured I had to do it.

Read also about the function and future of this museum.

But, but...

Right, it didn't just come out of the blue.

As the inexperienced - and male - art director (I'm actually an illustrator, among other things) of a little magazine for the U.S. government in Frankfurt, Germany, I was collecting magazine layouts, illustrations and advertising in order to get ideas for designs. Part of the thousands of tear sheets from publications around the world that I collected were ads for menstrual hygiene. Taboo subject that it was and is, people in different cultures approached the subject with vastly different degrees of circumspection. This intrigued me. I started reading about the marketing and the history of the way people have explained and reacted to menstruation in many of the cultures of the world.

When I returned to the United Stated for good, I offered the use of the ads to several women's magazines, in case they ever wanted to write about the subject. I read more about the cultural history of menstruation, thought about it, and decided I would do the world a favor and liven up my life by starting the first museum.

I find the subject interesting because of its great breadth and depth, touching medicine, anthropology, sociology, history and even art, and it allows me to use my research and language abilities - and the subject is taboo in many cultures, which gives it added piquancy. It also has relevance to women's health of today.

And I also like women.

Read - and see - another reason I started MUM, maybe the most important.

But you're a guy - shouldn't a woman be doing this?

Maybe, but a woman hasn't done this, as far as I know, apart from the SCA Mølnlyke company exhibit in Norway, which is curated by a female staff member of the museum. And it's apparently a temporary exhibit. It started in 1995.

Someone - a woman - suggested to me that a man gives more credibility to the enterprise, as offensive as that may seem, because men generally run things in our society. Another woman felt that if the museum were run by a woman, she would probably be far left in politics, and perhaps a lesbian, thus putting off the vast majority of the public in two ways. The museum would be marginalized as a feminist whim. Remember, a woman told me that.

When I was dating in high school and college, women baffled me. I was shy - I was the middle of three brothers in a male and military household, my mother being the lone female (see FAQ 2) - and this museum is a late attempt to understand women and their culture, which have always puzzled and interested me, an outsider to that feminine world.

And as an artist, women's faces are my favorite subject.

By the way, I was my mother's favorite kid.

Aren't you a little strange?

Until the art director's job in Germany, menstruation for me was only an impediment to sexual relations with girl friends. Blood was and is a turn-off for me. The taboo nature of the subject interested me at first, but since then I have learned that people, and societies, look at menstruation in all sorts of ways, which makes the subject much more interesting.

Visitors to the museum have told me that even if a woman were running MUM, people would consider MUM (and her) strange. Other visitors, from Ph.D.s doing contraceptive research to psychoanalysts, have said that anyone studying something "down there" is regarded with suspicion. You can't win.

By the way, MUM has not at all improved my love life, but it has vastly increased the number of interesting people I have met, and greatly widened my perspective.

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