Period.. Emma Barnett

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      I only inquire because one woman nearly did time in the can, simply because she couldn’t bear to confess she was menstruating.

      Let me tell you about the Canadian performer, Jillian Welsh. She poured her heart out to producer Diane Wu on the hugely popular podcast This American Life about a bloody evening scorched onto her brain and has kindly given me permission to reproduce her story in this book, aptly signing off her note to me ‘yours in blood’ (I love her already). The episode was focused on romance and how rom com scripts would play out in real life. Or not, as the case may be.

      Jillian was twenty and studying theatre in New York when she met and fell for Jeffrey, whom she was starring alongside in a Shakespeare production. Fast forward to the wrap party and the cast night out. One thing led to another, they kissed and ended up back at his place. So far, so good.

      Except Jillian’s Aunt Flo was in town. Due to her highly conservative background she couldn’t bring herself to even say the word period, let alone tell her new beau that she couldn’t do the dirty because she was menstruating. But, finally, she fessed up – and guess what? He didn’t care. Excellent sexy time ensued, after which Jeffrey went for his postcoital wee and shower, flicking the light on as he exited bedroom stage left.

      As Jillian recounted to This American Life:

      It looks like a crime scene. There is blood everywhere. This is the first time I had seen so much of my own menstrual fluid. I was afraid of it. I couldn’t even fathom what he was going to think about it … And then I don’t know how this happened, but my very own red, bloody hand print is on his white wall … He didn’t have any water or anything in his room, so I used my own saliva to wipe the bloody hand print off of the wall, like, out, out, damn spot.

      OK let’s pause there. It’s grim but not that grim. However, it gets worse. Deliciously so.

      Jillian then decided the best strategy to deal with Jeffrey’s desecrated bedsheets was to stuff them into her rucksack, because she couldn’t bear the idea of him having to wash them. She then covered his bed with his throw and prepared to scarper as soon as he was back from his shower. She offered a lame excuse, he looked suitably hurt and off she trotted to the subway, upset and laden with stained, stolen sheets.

      Then it really hits me that I have stolen this man’s sheets. How do you come back from that? How do you – how are you not the weird girl who took his bedsheets? … So then I’m so inside myself and I hear this voice being like, ‘Ma’am, excuse me, ma’am.’ And I look up. And in New York, they have this station outside of subway entrances with this folding table and the NYPD stands behind. And it’s a random bag search.

      Let’s pause again. What would you do? I know for certain I’d brick myself as soon as I was aware I looked like a murderer on the underground.

      Jillian also panicked and pretended not to hear the officers, playing that, ‘I am invisible game’ you enact as a kid when there is nowhere left to run and you just hope by praying hard enough no one can see you anymore. She left the subway with a quickening pace. But to no avail. The officer soon caught up with an increasingly suspicious looking Jillian, opened her rucksack and saw the fruits of her sexual labour: crusty blood-soaked sheets.

      I remember him – and the subway has such distinct lighting – like I just remember him holding up these sheets, my menstrual sheets of shame, like menstrual sheets of doom. I realise that they didn’t look like menstrual sheets of doom, they looked like murder sheets of doom. He asked me to explain it, and I just start crying. And I can barely get the words out. I’m just trying to explain to him, it’s my period on those sheets. And I stole the sheets from the guy that I was with. And I know that that’s wrong.

      Now, when I asked you if you would go to prison for your period, you might have laughed, but Jillian’s shame nearly led her down that road. Because, these two cops offered her an ultimatum: either go with them to the local police station, where they would file a report and ask her more questions, or take them (and the bedsheets) back to hot Jeffrey’s house to corroborate her story.

      It is what Jillian confesses to This American Life next which I find so fascinating:

      And I had to think about it … I honestly gave it a really solid, good think. There was a huge part of me that would rather go to the police station than have to go back and show Jeffrey these – not only show him these sheets, but also bring the police there. But, you know, my common sense caught up with me because this looks like I’ve done something very wrong.

      Fortunately, Jeffrey, like the sexy period hero he is, when confronted by the cops, a nervous Jillian and the bloodied bedsheets on his doorstep, verified her story. Without skipping a beat, he simply explained that the sheets were covered with ‘menstrual fluid’. No shame. No juvenile euphemism.

      Jillian, as you would expect, is by now a sobbing mess and in a line which could have come straight out of a Richard Curtis movie script, he calls her ‘wonderfully strange’.

      Spoiler alert: if you’re interested in finding out whether their love affair worked out, it didn’t. Period night didn’t kill the relationship, it was actually American visa issues. But it’s not their love story that we’re focused on here, what I care about is that a woman – in one of the best first sex stories I’ve ever heard – was so ashamed of her period that she nearly chose a night in the police station over returning to the ‘scene of the crime’.

      Take that in. It’s bonkers. Fully bonkers. But you know what’s even more crazy? Women the world over will understand why the police station inquisition was a serious option for a fully innocent Jillian because it seems we all have the propensity to become liars and weird little thieves when we get our periods. Anything to simply hide the evidence.

      Take another woman I know, who also robbed some bedsheets. Jane was in her final year at school when she came on her period during a night out and didn’t have any tampons with her. She deployed ye olde faithful technique of stuffing one’s knickers with tissues and hoped for the best. Crashing at male mate’s family house for the evening, she woke up the following morning to her own crime scene spread across the bedsheets. Just because her friend was a guy, she felt she couldn’t talk to him about it. So, just like Jillian, she robbed the sheet, stuffed it into her handbag and then chucked it into a public bin on the way home. To this day, her mate’s mum still asks for her sheet back, and Jane is too embarrassed to tell her the truth.

      Linen is never safe around a menstruating woman, but particularly, it seems, around a woman who is ashamed of her own blood.

      We also become super sleuth laundry women. Another woman I know, now an accomplished doctor in America, had to steal and sneakily return a guy’s jeans so she could wash them:

      My worst period story was probably in college, I had my period and needed to change my tampon but hadn’t yet – my then boyfriend СКАЧАТЬ