Amy Bobeda
When the Censors Come for Your Period, Call the Brothers Grimm
I was ten the year The Care and Keeping of You: A Body Book for Girls was first published by American Girl. Republished as two books in 2012, one for young girls reaching puberty and one for those in the throes of hormonal shifts, The Care and Keeping of You arrived in my life at just the right time. I was two years shy of needing the useful infographic “How to Insert a Tampon” in which a young blonde menstruator gently demonstrates how to use a tampon with an applicator while dispelling the common worries of first-time users: “How does an applicator work?” “Will it get lost in my uterus?” “What size should I buy?” Chocked full of useful advice and warning signs for body dysmorphia, oral hygiene issues, and what to do when your armpits suddenly smell, this body book became a necessary reminder that I was not alone in puberty. It was perhaps the second book I worshiped after an illustrated copy of Grimm’s Fairytales.
American Girl has updated the text for relevance. Their once squiggly hand-drawn watercolor illustrations are now clean, crisp, and digital. Both editions feature a teacher at a desk, two division problems on the board behind her, and a young girl with an anxious face. The text reads “If your period catches you by surprise at school, ask a teacher or school nurse for help.” As a young menstruator, I returned to this passage often. If something happened, I could ask for help.
What happens when menstruators are barred from asking for help? I turn to the Grimm Brothers—an unlikely pair to understand the process of coding systems and symbolism menstruators have used for centuries. While often considered children’s stories, tales too frightening for children, or the salve to ease a psychic wound, fairytales also serve as a form of matriarchal wisdom to subvert the confines of patriarchal systems. In the structural analysis of fairytales, a reader begins to decode symbols: a spindle prick, a bloody key, a shoe danced to pieces become references to body parts, and phase transitions; these stories bloom signs of puberty.
In her book, The Goddess and Her Heroes, philosopher Heide Göttner-Abendroth traces fairytale variants back in time like breadcrumbs until they demonstrate a matriarchal structure. The popular ash girl we know as Cinderella steps back in time to become the maiden in Mother Holle, a fairytale that features a familiar stepmother, two lazy stepsisters, and not a single man. In that version, the maiden learns the crafts she needs in life from Mother Holle before being rewarded with gold. Her lazy sisters are rewarded with tar. After Mother Holle, variants change. The wise woman becomes encoded. In some versions, Cinderella’s mother devolves from a dove to a silver branch to just plain dead. When it’s not safe in the story anymore, the characters shroud themselves in a new identity, retreat to the forest, and wait for someone to decode them.
Sleeping Beauty, the anthropologist Chris Knight writes, “along with others of its kind–is in its logic entirely and consistently menstrual.”¹ The King does everything he can to prevent Princess Aurora, whose name means “dawn”, from menarche. He burns all the spindles in the kingdom, and yet coming of age cannot be stopped. When the princess finds an old woman with a spindle, pricks her finger, and bleeds her “curse” puts the castle to sleep. In Sun Moon and Talia, it’s flax her father worries about, but her curiosity can’t be stopped. Talia touches a spindle and a splinter of flax sticks her into a sleeping spell. Magical sleep, in a fairytale, often signals the kind of magical death that one will awaken from when the time is right. Like the kind of bleeding a menstruator magically recovers from. In these stories, we learn no patriarchal fear can change the biological process of time. Periods arrive when they arrive (statistically earlier and earlier). People often remember Prince Phillip as the kingdom’s savior, but it’s the briars themselves that retreat when the time is right.
Perhaps the most infamously bloody, Bluebeard, reminds women to watch whom they marry and be weary of basements. The bloody key, fairytale theorist Jack Zipes notes, is the only bit of magic to turn a murderous legend into a fairytale. Like Sleeping Beauty in reverse, Bluebeard hands his wife a key that shows her the bloody chamber, not just a room of dead wives but a memory of the menstrual body. Once asleep to this, the woman awakens and prays to her brothers (and in some versions sisters) to come save her.
When a man says, “You cannot talk about your periods,” the answer isn’t to burn all remaining copies of A Care and Keeping of You, it is to encode their wisdom in the body of a princess in a castle in the forest who waits for seven years or more for a key to bleed and a crone to help her.
Chris Knight, “Menstruation and the origins of culture.” Dissertation. University College London, 1987.
Amy Bobeda holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where she serves as director of the Naropa Writing Center and teaches pedagogy and processed-based art. She's the author of Red Memory (FlowerSong Press), What Bird Are You? (Finishing Line Press), mi sin manitos (Ethel Press), forthcoming: Self-Guilded Walking Tours (ghost city summer series) and a project from Spuytin Duyvil. She's on Twitter @amybobeda & @everystoryisamenstrualstory on Instagram. amyglenbobeda.com