More Period


Period Panic Moments….
Warning! NSFGM (Not Safe for Gay Men! Sorry guys this is a gross one! Read at your own risk)

1) Stuck in traffic.
This is also a dangerous time for shitting your pants. For some reason, I really never worry about peeing in my pants even though I drink a lot of water. Shit is so much more unstoppable. Maybe it’s the volume? Or the temperature? Shit gets hot (i.e.‘hot shit’) and usually it gets me thermally. It’s like volcano hot up in there. And especially because I have a love of spicy foods like Korean and Thai and ask for things “thai hot” in restaurants so I get what I get I suppose.

But being in the car, knowing you have just seconds left on your tampon and/or pad because we know how much time we have left on those things -I can be pretty exact like a parking meter that takes credit cards – and i don’t want to get a ticket if you know what I mean. I try to push the blood out into the pad before I get out of the car because if I just let the entire contents of my uterus spill out onto my ‘protection’ it’ll just run over the pad and into my pants. Usually there’s a big blood clot that is preventing the pad or tampon from absorbing its true maximum capacity. That is the worst. It’s like a jellyfish in your net.

I have white seats in my car, which i knew was unwise when I bought the car, but for some reason, perhaps a spiritual reward for my own faith and optimism, the stains haven’t stained. They are removed with relative ease. So I take for granted that I can make wet impressions of my junk in blood through my pants and they will just be gone with the swipe of a pre-moistened makeup remover cloth. It really does look like parenthesis sometimes, and it looks so perfect often I don’t even clean it off, I just let the daily consequent rubbing of my black jeans on the car seat chip off the bloody tracks bit by bit until it’s all gone. Of course when I shit in my car i clean it up.

2) At the Movies.
This is bad if you like to go to film festivals and potentially sit through more than one film at a time. For some reason, movies make me bleed harder, especially if there is some kind of car chase. There’s also the safe dark of the theatre that seems to enhance and increase my blood flow. Maybe my veins and arteries dilate like my pupils, these openings throughout my body having a uniform reaction, which truly is the nature of nature. But all I know is that near the end of the third act, i worry about whether or not my tampon/pad can take it.

3) Without Warning.
Sometimes you bear down not expecting to get anything, kind of like the way I used to look for change in old school coin operated video games and telephones. I don’t know, it’s just a thing I do. I push out not thinking anything is gonna happen and then it fucking does. This is the worst in bed, early in the morning, when you wake up a moment before, savoring the warmth of the bed and not wanting to leave it, which is the most basic of the creature comforts. You want to lie in, the time that is guarded closely by snooze buttons, because you could fall right back into the loving arms of morpheus and be distressingly late for work. Then you bear down, and your unexpected period splashes right out. Then is the tricky part of trying to get out of bed while trying to keep the blood somehow contained in your underwear or pajamas, or at least trying to do some damage control by keeping the stain contained. I have jumped one legged to the bathroom with one leg bent up trying to hold my vagina together, like a bloody stork, a not pink but red flamingo. I have actually cupped my hand up to the site of bleeding, attempting to staunch the flow, as the brown blood of first blood escapes through my fingers.

One time, many years ago, I had a lover who was in the Navy, and on one of his long anticipated weekend nights on land we lay exhausted in his big most of the time unused bed after ardent and military style sex. My legs wrapped around his body as if I could keep him from going back to his ship and I bore down and he was suddenly covered in unexpected, unprovoked and unbelievable period blood. I panicked and tried to get up and he opened his eyes and looked down and merely grabbed my legs and pulled me closer to him, the blood unimportant and inconsequential as it came from me and he loved me.



11 thoughts on “More Period

  1. I wasn’t going to read this one, after I thought “how bad could it be?”, and discovered it was every bit as gross as you warned. I think even William S. Burroughs would have grimaced over what you wrote. But then I thought, “people that are grossed out by that are precisely the one’s that should read it, to give them a sense of how it feels to be a woman.” And I have to say: I had no idea, I mean I really had no fucking idea, what women go through when it comes to shit and piss and having their period. What a mess!! I don’t exactly want to say thanks, but sharing all of that helps to dispel straight men’s illusions about women. It’s not all sugar and spice and everything nice. By the way I am one of your straight male fans. I think there are couple of us.

  2. Hi Margaret, I know that you like to joke about this, but please remember that many gay men aren’t afraid of periods, and some gay men HAVE periods, because they were born with uteruses. It sort of hurts when you forget that. Love!

  3. This is so funny. I am a lady that gets periods only once in a while, on account of that I am at “that age’ and three days ago, the powerful full moon that is Tu B’Shavat done got me and yes. The strange surprise.

    No one articulated this for me before…and it makes me glad that I read the fuck Karl Lagerfield and came here because of it. (Incidentally, my gay husband used to have a fantasy about a voyeur Karl sitting on the sidelines…observing….and ever since I have felt rather simpatico towards old Karl).
    Black blood and kisses to you.

  4. so I just went to the bathroom and looked in my mini pad and saw the shape of a man jumping upside down…got me to thinking…period rorschach! Like, fortune telling through bloodstains.
    And I thought back and thought of the times when I inadvertentally bled on sheets and there was always a pattern! I bet lots of girls saw Jesus in their pad and never said anything.

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