When you’re a little kid, everyone talks about your period like it’s going to be a party bus to WOOOOOOOOOO! Mountain. It’s all romantic metaphors about “blossoming gardens” and “unfurling crotch orchids”, and kids buy into it because they don’t know what a euphemism is because they are 11. But it’s also a profoundly secret thing – a confidence for closed-door meetings between women. Those two contradictory approaches (“periods are the best!” and “we must never ever speak of them”), made me feel as if I was the only not-brainwashed one in a culty dystopian novel. “Oh, yes, you can’t imagine the joy readings in your subjectivity port when the Administration gifts you your woman’s flow! SPEAKING OF THE FLOW OUTSIDE OF THE MENARCHE BUNKER WILL RESULT IN DEACTIVATION.”

The reality, of course, is that when you hit puberty you don’t magically blossom into a woman – you’re still the same tiny fool you were at puberty-minus-one, only now, once a month, hot brown blood just glops and glops out of your private area like a broken Slurpee machine. For ever. Or, at least, until you’re inconceivably elderly, in an 11-year-old’s estimation. Don’t worry, to deal, you just have to cork up your hole with this thing that’s like a severed toe made out of cotton (and if you don’t swap it out often enough, your legs fall off and you die). Or you wear a diaper. Also, your uterus is knives and you poop a bunch and you’re hormonal and you get acne. Have fun in sixth grade, Margaret.

‘I invariably failed to tell my menopausal mom when we had run out of stuffin’ corks and diaper nuggets’: Lindy West as a child. Photograph: Lindy West

When my “Aunt Period Blood” eventually did come to town, my avoidance was so finely calibrated that I blocked out the memory almost completely. I think, although I don’t know for sure, that I was swimming in the ocean near my uncle’s house. I can recall quick ashes of confusion and panic, guiltily unspooling toilet paper in an unfamiliar bathroom by the beach.

I did not want to talk about it. I avoided talking about it so assiduously that – for years – I invariably failed to tell my menopausal mom when we had run out of stuffin’ corks and diaper nuggets (#copyrighted), forcing her to run to the grocery store at inhumane hours while I squeezed out silent, single tears in the car.

One time, I noticed that the little waxy strips you peel off the maxi pad adhesive were printed, over and over, with a slogan: “Kotex Understands.” In the worst moments, when my period felt like a death – the death of innocence, the death of safety, the harbinger of a world where I was too fat, too weird, too childish, too ungainly – I’d sit hunched over on the toilet and stare at that slogan, and I’d cry. Kotex understands. Somebody, somewhere, understands. (Some 47-year-old advertising copywriter in Culver City named Craig understands.)

In the worst moments, my period felt like a death – the death of innocence, the death of safety

The most significant source of my adolescent period anxiety was the fact that, in the US and much of the west, 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 Clinton 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.

We can mention periods obliquely, of course, when we want to delegitimise women’s real concerns, dismiss their more inconvenient emotions. But to suggest that having a period isn’t an abomination, but is, in fact, natural and good, or – my God – to actually let people see what period blood looks like? (This is going to blow a lot of you guys’ minds, but: it looks like blood.) You might as well suggest replacing the national anthem with Donald Trump harmonising with an air horn.

Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it’s annoying and gross, but it’s not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It’s not more gross than faeces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all – in my mother’s professional opinion – phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatise people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny.

Maybe periods wouldn’t be so frightening if we didn’t refer to them as “red tide” or “shark week” or any other euphemism that evokes neurotoxicity or dismemberment. Maybe if we didn’t perpetuate the idea that vaginas are disgusting garbage dumps, government officials wouldn’t think of vagina care as literally throwing money away. Maybe if girls felt free to talk about their periods in shouts instead of whispers, boys wouldn’t grow up thinking that vaginas are disgusting and mysterious either. Maybe women would go to the doctor more. Maybe fewer women would die of cervical and uterine cancer. Maybe everyone would have better sex. Maybe women would finally be considered fully formed human beings, instead of off–brand men with defective genitals.

The truth is, my discomfort with my period didn’t have anything to do with the thing itself – it was just part of the lifelong, pervasive alienation from my body that every woman absorbs to some extent. Your body is never yours. Your body is your enemy. Your body is gross. Your body is wrong. Your body is broken. Your body isn’t what men like. Your body is less important than a foetus. Your body should be “perfect” or it should be hidden.

Yeah, well, my name is Lindy West and I’m fat and I bleed out of my hole sometimes. My body is mine now. Kotex understands.