We Talk About Cancer. We Don't Talk About Periods.

Scroll

On 25 January 2023, Mikaela Shiffrin stood in the finish area at Kronplatz, having just won her second giant slalom in two days. World Cup win number 84. The ORF reporter asked about the Stenmark record, and Shiffrin answered: "I'm kind of in an unfortunate time of my monthly cycle." She was more tired than usual because of it — and talking about something like that ought to be normal.

The ORF simultaneous interpreter turned that into: "I don't even get around to cycling, which I do every month."

That is the best joke this subject has ever produced, and it wasn't meant as one. A professional with a microphone heard "monthly cycle" and thought of a bicycle. Not because his English is bad. Because it apparently struck him as unthinkable that an athlete in the finish area would talk about her period.

The next day Shiffrin posted a video of herself on an exercise bike, set to "Bicycle Race" by Queen: "So nice to get my monthly cycle in… just in case anyone else is confused… it's my period. We're talking about my period. #normalizeperiods"

The "it's private" argument doesn't last a minute

Right about now somebody will pipe up: that's private, no need to go on about it.

Really? We talk about toothaches. About slipped discs. About cancer — at great length, even, and that's a good thing. We talk about colonoscopies over dinner. And when someone spent two days in bed with diarrhea, he says "stomach bug" and everybody nods sympathetically.

All bodily. All unappetizing. None of it a problem.

Only with one single thing — something that affects half of humanity every month for roughly forty years — does privacy suddenly get discovered. That's not an argument about decency. That's an excuse.

Where it comes from — and who it wasn't this time

My first guess was: the Church. Original sin, sex is dirty, the whole nonsense. The research corrected me on one point, and the correction is more interesting than my guess.

Because the most extreme lines ever written about menstrual blood aren't Christian, they're pagan. Pliny the Elder writes in the 1st century, in his Naturalis historia, that menstrual blood turns new wine sour, withers crops, clouds mirrors, kills beehives, rusts bronze and iron. That's Rome — but not that Rome.

The purity rules themselves are in the Old Testament: Leviticus 15 declares a menstruating woman unclean for seven days, along with everything she sits on.

And then comes the twist. In the year 601, Augustine of Canterbury wrote to Rome to ask how this should be handled. Pope Gregory the Great answered: women may go to church and receive communion during their period. Nature's superfluity could not be held against them as guilt.

So the man at the very top rejected the taboo. In the same breath, though, he added that anyone who out of reverence voluntarily abstained from communion during that time was to be praised. And that half-sentence was the way in: no guilt, but better not to.

After that it went straight back the other way. In the 7th century, the penitential of Theodore of Canterbury banned menstruating women from church again. As late as around 1930, women who had just given birth in the Rhineland had to wait outside the church door during Mass until their "churching", or sit in the bell tower or right at the back, were let in only for the sermon, and had to be the first to leave.

I find that almost creepier than a straight ban. A ban can be abolished. An "allowed, but it would be more commendable otherwise" lasts a thousand years.

What actually does come from the Church

On original sin, though, I was right — with Augustine, at any rate.

Around 419, in De nuptiis et concupiscentia, he made carnal desire the transmission route of original sin: the child contracts the sin from the lust it was conceived in. In De civitate Dei he reads sexual arousal as punishment for the Fall — because man disobeyed God, his sexual organs have disobeyed him ever since. Hence the shame. In paradise, he reckons, you would have conceived children the way you raise a hand: at will, without lust.

Sex as the transmission route of sin — that is roughly the most effective framing of the body anyone has ever come up with, and it held for a millennium and a half.

To be fair: that isn't the teaching anymore. The Catechism says in § 404 that original sin is passed on "by propagation" — as the handing down of a weakened nature, not as infection through lust. § 405 calls it a state, not an act, and the concupiscence that remains merely an inclination to evil; that this concupiscence is not itself sin had already been settled by the Council of Trent in 1546. Augustine appears in the Catechism as a historical station, not as the valid explanation of the mechanism.

And before anyone digs out the old story that the Church banned obstetric anesthesia because Genesis says Eve shall bring forth in pain: medical historians have gone looking and found practically nothing. No decree, no bishop's word, no papal condemnation. The documented opposition to Simpson's chloroform was overwhelmingly medical. In 1956, Pius XII explicitly declared pain relief permissible. Some stories are too good to be true.

Pregnancy used to be unspeakable too

I suspected pregnancy once had it exactly as bad. The suspicion holds, and the evidence is better than expected.

In 1952, the word "pregnant" was not allowed to be spoken on "I Love Lucy". The show wrote Lucille Ball's real pregnancy into the plot, but what got said was "expecting". The episode in which she announces it is still called "Lucy Is Enceinte" to this day — they dodged into French.

The ban, by the way, didn't come from the Church but from the network CBS and the sponsor Philip Morris. A rabbi, a Catholic monsignor and a Protestant minister were handed the scripts to vet — and cut nothing.

The audience clearly had less trouble with it: around 44 million people watched the birth episode on 19 January 1953 — more than watched President Eisenhower's inauguration the day after.

Harder than the language ban was employment law. "Marriage bars", meaning the dismissal of women when they married, were normal into the 1970s; in the British Foreign Service they fell in 1973, in Ireland likewise in 1973. In Italy the "clausole di nubilato" — marriage-bar clauses in the employment contract — weren't outlawed until 1963; the maternity protection law of 1950 was fundamentally expanded in 1971. In the US, the Supreme Court ruled as late as 7 December 1976 that an employer could legally exclude pregnancy from company sick pay; it took the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 to overturn that.

And Switzerland? Paid maternity benefits have existed there since 1 July 2005. The constitutional mandate for them dates from 1945.

It's getting better — just slowly

I do actually believe it's getting better, and you can pin it to pictures.

In 1991, Annie Leibovitz photographed Demi Moore naked and seven months pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair. Critics called it "grotesque and obscene". In 2017, Serena Williams posed in almost the same position on the same cover — in the same year she won the Australian Open without dropping a set, eight weeks pregnant.

Jacinda Ardern had a baby in 2018 while running a country and took it along to the UN General Assembly in September. The US Senate changed its rules unanimously in 2018 so Tammy Duckworth could bring her baby to a vote. Nike dropped its contract cuts for pregnant athletes in 2019 after public pressure. In 2023, Germany's women's national football team signed a tampon brand as a sponsor and called the campaign #LetsTalkPeriods.

At the same time, on 16 February 2023 — three weeks after Shiffrin's sentence — Tiger Woods pressed a tampon into the hand of his playing partner Justin Thomas after out-driving him. As mockery. Both things exist side by side.

Why this isn't a feelings thing

None of this is about somebody wanting to share their emotions. Silence costs.

According to the WHO, endometriosis affects around ten percent of women of reproductive age, some 190 million worldwide. The average time to diagnosis: four to twelve years. Up to twelve years for a disease whose main symptom is a pain nobody talks about.

A Dutch study with 32,748 participants found that the main damage doesn't lie in days missed but in working through the symptoms: 8.9 days of lost productivity per year, against 1.3 days of actual absence. You don't stay home. You just don't say why things aren't working right now.

And the research? A 2025 analysis counted again, ten years after the first big survey on the question: the share of women among study participants has risen from 39 to just under 44 percent, but only 5.6 percent of studies took menstrual status into account in their design at all. The big meta-analysis on whether the cycle affects athletic performance arrives at a trivial effect — and rates the quality of its own evidence as low. So the honest answer to Shiffrin's subject is: we don't know exactly. Because hardly anyone has looked.

Stomach bug

That, for me, is the core of it. A taboo that the highest authority explicitly did not want in the year 601 — and that held for 1,400 years anyway, inside the Church just as much as outside it. It needed no law and no decree. It was enough that it just wasn't done.

And that is why the stomach bug comparison works so well. Nobody finds diarrhea pleasant. People say it anyway, and nobody flinches.

The difference isn't the disgust. The difference is the habit.

In 2023, an ORF reporter demonstrated in real time how deep that sits: he heard the word and translated it away. Two weeks later he apologized to Shiffrin. She said she was glad about the mistake — without it, nobody would have talked about the subject.

Sources