Bad Blood
I am sitting in class, trying to focus on some specific legal rule, complete with Latin phrases and obscure jargon, and I am bleeding profusely.
Well, it’s not all blood. There’s also “viscous clumps of sloughed uterine tissue,” an ionic vaginal secretion, naturally accumulating bacteria, and a dash of copper. But, yeah, I’m bleeding. A lot.
My uterine walls are contracting, which is causing me incredibly painful cramps, and I have that wacky women’s intuition that my super jumbo max ultra large gigantic tampon is juuuuust about soaked through. So, like any normal human woman experiencing a period, I quietly stand up to leave class for a moment to use the restroom and perform yet another aspect of the monthly torture ritual that is my period.
That morning, I left the house in a hurry, and I forgot to throw a few extra tampons in my bag. The thought hit me on my way to the law school, and I panicked for a moment before remembering that there are other women in my classes who will likely be generous enough to spare one. And if the person I ask happens not to have one, then the underground spy network of menstruating warriors will be put in motion.
“I don’t have one, but I know someone who might. Let me text her.”
“Oh shoot, I just gave my last one away. Will a pad work? Here, take one just in case.”
“We’ve only spoken once, but I will rummage through my backpack until I find you what you need. Do you want a snack, too? I have extra.”
“I will cross oceans during the harshest storms to find you a tampon, and I will do it in the next three minutes before my secured transactions class starts. Godspeed to us both.”
Sooner rather than later, I will have what I need, and my day can go on as normally as it can when I am struggling to not double over from pain every few minutes.
At least, I think my day can go on normally. Until I take a routine restroom break during this one law school class and come back to a rather huffy professor. A few people before me have left and come back to the room for various reasons, and my professor is simply not having it. He stops writing on the board, right in the middle of a quote from a long-dead, white male justice that I am supposed to revere. He turns around and addresses the room.
“Let me ask you all a question. Why is it that so many of you feel that it’s acceptable to leave the room during this class? If you need to use the restroom, you need to do it before or after class, not during. It’s disrespectful of my time and of your classmates’ time. It’s a distraction to all of us.”
The room is uncomfortably quiet. My cheeks burn as red as the blood filling up my fresh new tampon (Is that too much imagery? Probably, but it’s true). I’d like to answer my professor’s question, but I don’t think he wants to hear what I have to say. What I want to tell him is that I feel it would be far more disrespectful of me to bleed all over my chair, that I cannot control the speed and volume of my bleeding, that walking around is sometimes the only thing that will help ease my cramps so that I can focus, and that he didn’t say shit about respecting people’s time when he sauntered into class five minutes late.
I want to tell him that menstruating women, on average, have a cycle of 28 days, and roughly four to eight of those days are spent on a period. Therefore, as a friend* once put it, “at any given moment, you can estimate that 1/4 of the reproductive-aged women you interact with in any given day are in fact experiencing their body clearing out their uterus.” But I don’t tell him any of this, because I’ve done some math.
When asked to calculate damages (how much money someone who wins a civil lawsuit can get), law students will often lament that they did not sign up for math school, and professors will apologize profusely for asking these routine equations. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to calculate damages either. But I’m getting used to doing math, because I and doubtless many other female law students and graduates are keenly aware that there are tons of calculations to be performed when you attend law school as a woman, such as the following:
What do I make a fuss about and what do I leave alone?
When do I call out the misogyny I see in nearly all of my classes?
When do I prioritize my mental health above my learning so that I can drown out the rape myths being presented as facts by my male classmates in my criminal law class?
Are the cramps and breast pain I experience before and during my period severe enough to risk using one of my precious, ABA-allotted absences?
Did my adjunct professor wink at me in class because I’m a woman, or does he do that for everyone?
How do I put into practice the suggestion by a male oral argument competition judge that I need to not flare my nostrils when I speak? And am I supposed to just ignore the heaping praise that my male partner in this same competition gets not for his skills, but for having such a deep, resonating voice?
Are these heels high enough to seem professional, or are they so high that they bridge the impossible-to-discern gap into sluttiness?
Do I laugh or cry at the male attorney who thinks it’s “cute” that I’m representing survivors of domestic violence as part of my clinic experience?
Do I say something to my older, male law professor when he says I almost got the correct answer to a question but immediately praises a subsequent male student as genius for repeating, verbatim, the answer I gave?
And what the hell am I supposed to say to my male classmate who, upon half-heartedly listening to my complaints about the aforementioned criminal procedure professor, tells me that he doesn’t really buy it, because he has never had any problems with this particular professor?
I’m not a mathematician, but I have to pose, work through, and answer these questions constantly, and I need to do it perfectly. And I have to do it all while bleeding through my second super tampon this morning. I have to do these things because I am a woman. And my male colleagues and professors simply don’t, and it’s because they’re men. Gay, bisexual, or straight, they don’t have to think about periods or pregnancy or institutionalized and personalized sexism, about the constant equations and theories and hypotheses and mental geometry I have to work through just to make it through the fucking day. How did these men get to such positions of power and education, all while thinking it’s acceptable to reprimand me for… checking notes… having a normal bodily function?
I‘m also very aware that I’m on the relatively lucky side of things. While the symptoms of my period have been enough to make me miss school and work, I don’t have PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome), I’m not pregnant or breastfeeding, I’m not experiencing menopause, and I probably don’t have endometriosis (doctors are hesitant to believe women about our pain, which is a different, but related, problem). Many of the women around me are experiencing those things, and all of those expert mathematicians are each having their own unique bodily functions and cycles and dealing with their own mathematical hurdles. They’re all amazing.
But look, I’m tired of being a mathematician. Because just like every other law graduate, I didn’t sign up for math school. I did, however, unknowingly sign up to be winked at, objectified, talked down to, ignored, chastised, and passed over by my male colleagues and professors. It’s bloody exhausting.
*Credit for the friend quoted in this story goes to the wonderful Suzy Marino
