Blood, Sweat and Tears - On Periods and Politics

Written by: Lorelei Bonnet-Gonnet, Dec 2024

As someone who loves both hot people and British humor, I was drawn to the series Fleabag. One monologue in particular struck a chord.

“Women are born with pain built in,” she says. “It’s our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t. They have to seek it out, they invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby. We have it all going on in here inside, we have pain on a cycle for years and years and years and then just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes, the fing menopause comes, and it is the most wonderful fing thing in the world. And yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get f***ing hot and no one cares, but then you’re free, no longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person.” (Fleabag 2019)

Usually, when periods are brought up in a political capacity, it is either rife with misogyny or during the study of feminist revolution, as a powerful weapon of protest, as it seems to shock and horrify even in its ironic capacity as one of the only forms of bloodshed that is not the result of violence and transgression.

Here, I would like to approach it as a key component of the current battlefield of reproductive rights and care. Much like the battles we look back upon with a certain dose of historical condescending, this one includes flesh, blood, pain and much unnecessary death. And much like these battles, the Wealthy and Privileged send legions to their deaths from the comfort of their high horse. Every day, the horror of medical deserts and the oversaturation of reproductive care centers perspires into every aspect of life of the Land of the Free.

All of this, believe it or not, does connect to periods. Periods are part of the menstrual cycle, during which the lining of the uterus sheds itself, resulting in a flow of blood and tissue in cycles varying in length. Health apps are an industry in their own right, and the App Store is rife with period tracking apps of all shapes, sizes and questionable names: Clue, Flo, Glow, Eve, Cycles, Ovia Fertility, Magicgirl Teen Period Tracker (yikes.), My Calender - Period Tracker, etc, etc... Tracking apps have many uses for the people using them: to plan work breaks, sexual encounters, pain, medication, PCOS, endometriosis, and the many other intersecting uses of both uterus and menstrual tracking apps. Some take in account your star sign. Others let you track your shits. All have become the new shockingly dangerous tool of abortion militias.

The precedent of Roe v. Wade, in which the Supreme Court had ruled that the right to abortion, was a constitutionally protected right. This had previously protected the reproductive freedoms of people all over the United States and given the people the ability to sue their representatives if bills disrespecting their constitutional right to reproductive freedom and agency were passed, contributed increased funding for maternity and reproductive care and saved the lives of people experiencing life-threatening pregnancies.

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, stories of death, pain and suffering stain the hands of the Supreme Court Justice that ruled in favor of the overturning, as well as the politicians supporting and passing bills locally banning reproductive healthcare, and has extended beyond the obvious, and into the absurd. But how does that relate to tracking apps? These apps do not only let you know when your period is coming, but are equally essential to healthcare. Control over one’s body extends to the freedom of access to information about your health, to document it, to privatize it, to understand. The data collected on these apps is stored and gathered in bases that have shown to be poorly protected by both company and government. That extensively long text asking for your consent on their data privacy policy? In many cases, you would be consenting to your contraceptive, abortive, sexual information becoming relevant in cases of legal threat.

In some states, abortion is now an A-class felony, with the risk of up to 99 years in prison. Attempting abortion is a Class C felony, with up to 10 years in prison on the line. The app may be called Magicgirl Teen Period, but there lies very little magic in their poor data protection. This app is not your doctor, it doesn’t really need to protect your information, because as long as the app is free, and the data is the thing being sold, you are the product being monetized. So yes, I would venture to say that the Fleabag monologue is not so far off. Does our pelvic floor need to crumble entirely for us to be people, not products?

Now, this all is not meant to scare or to injure, because we live in a world where terror and pain is constantly thrown at our faces for shock value and marketing stunts. This article is meant to show that overturning Roe V. Wade is not just about abortions. It is not just about women and girls. It is not about the anti-abortion states. It is about everyone, everywhere. It is about the criminalization of freedom, about the felonization of reproductive care, of loving care, of caring. It is about the boyfriends, the partners, the women, the nurses, the doctors and especially, the people who this does not affect. Because those it does not affect seem to be those that are so set on having a word, any word, a cruel word, to say.

Power and money often come hand in hand, and in the context of American polarization, this money and power often acts as a cushion to the asses being saved by said money and power. Abortions will always be an issue of marginalized communities, from the communities of color being affected by disproportional maternal death rates, to the ability of abuse survivors to escape dangerous situations, including nearly 300,000 minors married to adults in the United States between 2000 and 2018. These are the hidden faces behind the stories we feed upon, eyes wide in front of the TV.

And to those that preach of the precious value of life, I wonder if they understand that their tears and twitter tirades result in desired pregnancies suffering from healthcare deserts, where the nearest maternal care unit is miles away, due to the lack of funding following the overturn of Roe V. Wade, to children not having access to pediatric help, and to health becoming an enemy of survival.

So, it is about tracking apps, and the politics being played on servers and behind screens. Cyber politics aren’t for science fiction, they are happening in the inferno of terms of service and of smiling CEOs and legal subpoenas. So no, it isn’t just about the words of God, or the life that seems so precious to so many. It is an issue of science, of privacy and of freedom. Reading between the lines has never been so important and the politics of small print has come to rest between our legs.

And so we wonder: how is it that a body has become peelable? From skin to muscle to fat to bone, our entrails are stripped apart and disposed of like possessions, as though the body that has cradled the very uterus being scrutinized is not shield enough for it to be protected from external ownership. And with our guts spilled upon an altar of greed, I cannot help but wonder: Where do our bodies end and where does state flesh begin?