In the video game Gone Home you explore a mansion looking for a young woman. The game won BAFTA Best debut game 2013 among several other awards, and it’s a seriously good game. It’s only about two-three hours long, so you should check it out if you haven’t already, especially if you’re a woman and the right age for some 90’ies nostalgia. It’s also the first game I know of where you can interact with a tampon.

When I stepped into the mansion’s bathroom, opened the cupboard and found that tampon, I freaked out. I ran to Twitter and yelled THIS IS AWESOME!



A lot of people didn’t quite understand the outburst. “Wow, a tampon. You must really be easily impressed.” someone answered. Well, *cough*. I can see why it looked like I had lost it. What’s so special about a tampon, right?

See, that’s the thing. Feminists have been fighting really hard to get society to this point where someone can scream “TAMPON!” and get the answer, “Hey dude, chill.” Menstrual activism is a thing, there’s even a word for it: menarchy.

One of my strong childhood memories was the first time I saw a tampon in our bathroom, hidden away on the top shelf in the cabinet. The reason I remember it vividly even though I was tiny is because of my mother’s reaction when I asked her what it was. She acted so strange, avoided me and told me it was something the doctor had given her. Her mood was odd, and I got scared. Was my mum ill? I later crept back to examine the mysterious object, but it wasn’t there any more. Menstruation was so rarely mentioned in our household in my youth that I could count the times. I learned everything about it through school and youth magazines. When I first got mine at 14, I was so ashamed and filled with anxiety it took me a full week to bring up the courage to tell my mother. When I did, the silence got as awkward as that first time I found the tampon. All mum said was, “Well then, I’ll increase your monthly pocket money.” The questions I had about my period I asked to the column of one of those youth magazines I read.

The prejudice might be that I’m grew up in a conservative, religious environment, but I tell you it’s a sad, common mistake among atheists to think religious people has the monopoly on conservative ideas. My parents were liberal atheists. I’d like to call my father a fundamentalist worshipper of natural science. No, the taboo that made my mother unprepared for her child asking about a tampon had been inherited through countless of generations of shamed women.

What is the menstrual taboo?

Menstruation has through the history of mankind sometimes been celebrated as something of mystical quality granting menstruating women a godlike status, more often been seen as something shameful making women on their period religiously dirty, and rarely seen as the simple matter of bodily fact thing it is. In the Bible, Leviiticus 15:19-24, 31:

19 “When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. 20 And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. 21 And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. 22 And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. 23 Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening. 24 And if any man lies with her and her menstrual impurity comes upon him, he shall be unclean for seven days, and every bed on which he lies shall be unclean. 31 “Thus you shall keep the people of Israel separate from their uncleanness, lest they die in their uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst.”

TL;DR: Women on their periods are unclean. According to the highly dependable scientific source Wikipedia (← irony) some conservative orthodox Christians used to advice women not to participate in the holy communion, and allegedly this passage in the Bible still holds some practical merit for conservative Jews. In some practices of Hinduism women lives in separate rooms during their menstruation, there are records of women dying from this isolation in cold weather in Nepal(1). In parts of Japanese Buddhism they can’t visit temples, and Muslim women on their period aren’t allowed in the mosque. Al-Islam.org explains the Qu’ran:

A woman who is in her periods is excused from salat (prayers) because she does not have an important qualification for salat, i.e., taharat (cleanliness). She does not even have to perform them later on as qaza. Imam ‘Ali Raza (peace be upon him) said, “When a woman has her monthly period, she does not …pray because she is in the state of impurity (of blood), and Allah likes to be worshipped only by a pure (tahir) person…” (2)

The idea of menstruation as something mystical is a patriarchal idea. Imagine if we had lived in a matriarchal society. Menstruation would either be a sign of something powerful, or as mundane as a running nose. Given that many women report a surge in creativity before their period, my guess is a matriarchal society would hold the menstruation in high regard. Hormonal mood swings would be seen as the proper, natural way of being a human, and men would be pitied for their lack of PMS. Indeed, men would probably strive to simulate mood swings, just as some women today strive to hide their emotions in the same way men sadly do.

In the patriarchy, women hide our menstruation. Commercials for tampons brag about how easy it is to hide the tampon in your hand when you go to the bathroom, so no one can see your shame of having your period. Commercials show blue liquids poured onto pads, because red liquid would remind us of the uncomfortable fact that blood coming out of women is a thing. Commercials use words like safe, protection, discreet, dependable and fresh to signal we need to hide our menstrual shame, be protected from having it exposed to the world, and not feel the thousands of years heritage of being religiously unclean. One company’s campaign slogan on YouTube right now is “Live Fearless.” What are we afraid of? Is it the labour of washing stains of our favourite pants? If that was the case we would see ads with women scrubbing panties, but we’re seeing ads with women in white clothes twirling happily around in the sunshine. The thing the commercials tells us to fear is exposure. The safety we’re offered is as much for protecting our clothes as it is for the shame of publicly admit to having a menstruating body.

The wings of change

Feminists have fought really hard to counter the menstrual taboo, and amazingly, they’re winning. The commercial First Moon Party(4) about a mother throwing a menstruation themed party for her daughter went viral on YouTube with over 30 million views. The creator of the video, Naama Bloom, actually had trouble finding investors for making the video, because they thought there wouldn’t be a market for it. Interesting line of thinking, that among more than half of the world’s population there isn’t a market big enough for a fresh take on period product advertisement.

The victory of having a commercial for a period starting kit go viral is enormous. In my mind, the tampon in a video game is equally triumphant. First Moon Party is targeted at a female audience on a world wide platform. The reception of it is impressive, but also kind of an open goal kick at this point in time. (Again, thanks to the groundwork laid by feminists.) The video game tampons however are breaking barriers that are way more interesting right now, at least to me.

Video games have been such a male dominated field, men are threatening women with rape and murder for entering and having opinions of the domain(5). Game companies say it’s easier to reconstruct Paris in 1789 than design a female lead character(6). Female gamers routinely get harassed while playing(7). Terrorism against female game developers on the internet makes them leave their jobs(8), or not even consider taking the job in the first place(9).

When you take the biggest taboo about being a woman in a patriarchal society, and you portrait that taboo as some undramatic everyday thing like a roll of toilet paper, and put it in an environment historically dominated by overprotective men, it’s a freaking huge thing. When you do it twice, the revolution is here. Yes, Gone Home is not the only game that took a stand for women’s rights, In January 2015, Life is Strange was released with a tampon dispenser that prompts a comment from the lead girl when used.

Not only are these two games including this commonplace, yet controversial, item into their game. By existing in a game that encourages you to interact with every object that you see, you’re also drawn to touch the tampon and the tampon dispenser with your virtual hands. I actually had a pretty good time watching adolescent boys do Let’s plays of these two games, and enjoy their reactions when they were realizing they held a tampon. Most looked like they had to save face for their audience, nervously saying something cool. The girl I saw finding the tampon made my day. She looked at it, looked at the red stained bath tub next to her, said, “I think you need one of these” and threw the tampon at it(10).

These games are bringing the menstrual taboo out in the open. They are by game mechanic design forcing boys and men to acknowledge that women menstruate.

The only thing I can wish for now, is a public recognition that my favourite super heroes menstruate. A panel or two with Ms Marvel having her period would be just as awesome as the video game tampons. Given Kamala Khan is Muslim and I don’t know much about Islam, it would also be educational for me if I got a comment or two on how the period thing is handled in modern Islam. I would take that source way more seriously than Wikipedia! Probably with good merit, since Wikipedia is written by mostly men, and Ms Marvel is written and edited by Muslim women.

I would like to end this blog post with a video of elders who react to the First Moon Party commercial. They give some personal stories about the menstrual taboo when they were young, and are generally heart warming. The video, along with Gone Home and Life is Strange, gives me hope for tampons becoming entirely undramatic in my life time.

P.S. You artists out there, get to drawing fan art of your favorite heroes’ period woes and send them to me A.S.A.P. Extra points for menstrual cups! 😉

Notes and Links

Edit: Fixed a typo in the title, still left in the permalink though. Also, the words “liberal” and “conservative” is not used as in the meaning of political parties, but as in “not opposed to new ideas or ways of behaving that are not traditional or widely accepted” and “marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners” (Thanks, Merriam-Webster).

