The strange rules around menstruation in fiction
Part 1: From desire to the female body
*Trigger warning: this post briefly touches on the topic of miscarriage.
For centuries, one of the most effective ways to control women was to make them ashamed of their own bodies.
There are many novels that mention menstruation. The more interesting question is what they’re allowed to say about it. Many novels describe periods, thematically link them to wider plot points and, if you’ll forgive me, paint the town red. From Mira’s rite of passage in Artichoke Hearts to the scraps of shirt Elide Lochan used as a makeshift sanitary pad in the Throne of Glass series, I’ve read enough fictional depictions of menstruation to claim that periods are no longer as taboo as the critics would have you believe.
So why am I still annoyed about it?
Because existing and being represented are not the same thing—and that quiet, persistent distinction matters enormously.
In my last piece, I looked at how romantasy engineers desire. But desire is only one part of the story. The female body in fiction is just as controlled in what it’s allowed to do—and not do.
Let’s start with a brief history. (I promise it’s relevant.)
Historically, menstruation was treated as something to be whispered between women but never spoken about in polite society. Branded as unclean and shameful across cultures and religions, periods were wrapped in mythology and fear. Roman writer Pliny the Elder described menstrual blood as dangerous enough to destroy crops, rust iron and drive dogs mad (oh my). The Book of Leviticus states that a menstruating woman should be perceived as unclean for several days, and that whosoever touches her shall likewise be unclean until evening (Leviticus 15:19). Inspiring stuff.
The pattern persisted, and the treatment of periods became, inescapably, a treatment of the people who have them. Women were shunned and hidden away. Banned from temples and sacred sites. Barred from kitchens and food preparation. Isolated in menstrual huts, sequestered from their own homes. In the nineteenth century, physicians claimed that menstruation rendered women unreliable and hysterical—conveniently justifying their exclusion from political life and their confinement to the domestic sphere. It is not an overstatement to say that the stigma surrounding menstruation has historically aided the subjugation of an entire sex, holding women back for centuries.
Periods were so uncouth that it’s estimated that menstruation goes by over 5,000 pseudonyms worldwide. Today, millions of women, girls and people who menstruate are still excluded from social, educational and public life due to shame, stigma and lack of resources—a phenomenon broadly referred to as period stigma. This is not ancient history. This is ongoing.
Notably absent from art, too, periods are theorised to have been symbolised far more than depicted. Most artists were male—because, you guessed it, female artists were historically and systematically excluded from the professional, educational and institutional structures of the art world. Patriarchal ideology shaped societal norms, and women were excluded from formal instruction, particularly in anatomy and life drawing (heavens forbid women see nudity; did you know everyone is born fully clothed?).
So perhaps it’s not surprising that even our art hid periods away: wrapped in vulvic symbolism, steeped in myth and mystery, treated as something to gesture at rather than name. The moon cycle. Red stains. Flowers.
When artists did name it, the world took notice—and not always kindly. Judy Chicago’s Red Flag (1971), a pioneering work of feminist art that depicts a close-up image of a woman removing a tampon, was met with equal parts reverence and outrage. Two decades later, Vanessa Tiegs coined the term menstrala for her artwork created using menstrual blood as its medium—celebrated by some, condemned by others. Both artists prove the same point: periods have to be loud to be paid any attention. And even then, they remain divisive.
Reading is always political. Just as actuality informs literature, literature informs how we understand the world. And this is where the Catch-22 begins.
To stop treating menstruation as taboo, we needed literature to acknowledge it plainly. But for writers to write about bleeding, comfortably, and for publishers to print it willingly, audiences needed to be already primed and receptive. The call, as they say, was coming from inside the house. Someone had to go first, and for a very long time, nobody wanted to.
So the systematic omission of menstruation from fiction—particularly in fantasy, young adult and adventure genres—persisted in ways that became, frankly, absurd. This absence becomes even more noticeable in contemporary genres that are otherwise deeply embodied (as I discussed previously). In romantasy, for example—where characters in A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fourth Wing experience violence, desire, illness, transformation and physical extremity in explicit detail—the menstrual body is still largely absent unless it serves a narrative function. Could that female protagonist really have travelled half the known world, narrating every waking moment of her journey, without once mentioning she got her period? No. Probably not. But she did, for decades, without anyone raising an eyebrow.
Eventually, authors started talking about periods. Which is good. Genuinely.
And yet.
Here is what I’ve noticed: periods in fiction are only permitted if they justify their own existence.
They have to earn their place.
Let me explain. In most novels in which a character notably menstruates, the acknowledgement serves as a checkbox. Authors include it because readers have been asking for it—much like the checkbox game I observe with diversity representation, where characters are shoehorned in to hit a bingo without much consideration for authentic, careful portrayal. A period appears. The box is ticked. We move on.
More often, though, periods are deployed with very specific narrative intent. They are sanctioned in particular forms, and those forms are telling.
There is the devoted love interest, arriving with a hot water bottle and supplies, transformed by his willingness to engage with basic human biology into a glowing romantic ideal. There is the coming-of-age bleed—Sansa Stark’s first period in A Song of Ice and Fire, which functions as a plot device, a signal that she is now a woman and will face an entirely new category of trial (because, as we all know, ‘protect our girls,’ does not extend to ‘protect our women’). There is the ominous foreshadowing: she knew something was wrong—the period that preempts tragedy, that whispers miscarriage before the narrative confirms it. And there is the warm, bonding moment I encountered recently in Elsie Silver’s Wild Love, in which the female protagonist and the love interest’s daughter get their periods simultaneously—a moment that is warm and tender and ultimately exists to bring the characters closer, thus strengthening the central romance.
None of these are bad representations of menstruation. I want to be clear about that. Hot water bottles are lovely. Coming-of-age stories are important. Grief deserves to be foreshadowed. Wild Love was a fun, warm-hearted read. But the pattern, taken together, is worth examining: in every case, the period exists in service of something else.
His devotion. Her growth. Her loss. Their bond.
The cycle exists for the plot. The woman exists for someone else’s story.
And if periods are only permitted when they can be contained within a purpose—when they justify their own presence on the page—then we are, in a quiet and literary way, doing exactly what cultures have always done to menstruating women. We are hiding them away until we can use them.
I should pause here to acknowledge the medieval plumbing problem, because it is one of my favourite hypocrisies in fiction and I refuse to let it go unaddressed.
Fantasy worldbuilding is extraordinarily selective about its realism. Swords: yes. Elaborate political intrigue: absolutely. Magic systems governed by internally consistent rules that the author spent three years developing: obviously. Plumbing: somehow, in many fantasy worlds, also yes—running water, indoor bathing facilities, the works, all existing in what is otherwise a pre-industrial society that should, by rights, know nothing of modern sanitation.
Menstruation, meanwhile? A biological reality affecting roughly half the population, requiring no infrastructure whatsoever, just a character acknowledging that their body is doing what bodies do, remains optional.
That selectivity is the point. Authors will build entire economies and magic systems from scratch, but will not write a throwaway line about a character changing her tampon. The absence is a choice, whether it feels like one or not.
So what do we actually want?
Not periods on every other page. Not menstruation as spectacle or agenda. Not every fantasy heroine pausing mid-battle to address her cycle, because frankly, I don’t want that either, and it would be its own form of reductive.
What I want is simple: treat menstruation the way fiction treats hunger, exhaustion and desire—as a physical reality of being a body in the world, present when relevant and unremarkable when not. Let characters change their tampons mid-journey without it becoming a plot point. Let a woman be irritable and bleeding in a scene that has nothing to do with either. Let menstruation appear as texture rather than symbol, just because it would be true to the character’s experience. Not everything that matters needs to mean something. Some things just need to be real.
And occasionally—when the story calls for it—let it carry the weight it actually holds. Because there is an entire tradition, long since sanitised out of popular consciousness, of menstruation as something other than shameful. Cultures that treated the menstrual cycle as sacred. Practices that understood bleeding as a site of power rather than contamination. The divine feminine is not a concept invented by wellness Instagram; it has deep and serious roots in pre-Christian and non-Western traditions that literature has almost entirely failed to explore.
I’m not suggesting every fantasy novel become a treatise on cyclical spirituality; I’m suggesting that writers have left an extraordinary amount on the table.
Which brings me back to the Catch-22.
Literature needs readers to be ready. Readers need literature to change. Someone has to go first, and the authors who have—who have written the hot water bottle scenes, the coming-of-age bleeds, the Elide Lochan sanitary pad moments—have done something genuinely important. They cracked the door open. I don’t want to diminish that.
But cracking a door open is not the same as walking through it. Periods exist in fiction now, yes. They exist in service of plot, in service of romance, in service of character development that ultimately belongs to someone else. They exist with purpose, justification and narrative function.
What they do not yet do, with any real consistency, is simply exist.
That is what I’m waiting for. Not the period as a symbol, a device or a devotion signal. Just a woman, bleeding, in the middle of a story about something else entirely—unremarkable and unannounced. No more in need of justification than hunger, cold or the desperate desire for a decent night’s sleep.
Half the population. Every single month. And still, almost invisible.
We can probably find room for it on the page.
Read the feminist series:
Part 2: What the witches became
You’re crushing the Substack game 🖋️📜🕰️
Point of interest. Once the question of a female mayor arose. An alderman raised his protest.
She couldn’t do the job during her minstrel period. Yup true.