Menstruation is increasingly a non-event in films

Even in my high school, a former girls’ school where the vast majority of the students menstruated, theatrical disgusting was reacted when an unused tampon rolled out of someone’s bag. The popular culture at that time will have had something to do with that. It was around the period that Jonah Hill in teenage comedy Super bath (2007) starts to gag and gets in blind panic when he ends up with a beautiful woman at a student party after sanding with a blood stain on his pants.

The contrast with the omnipresent walking film The Good One – now in the cinema – can hardly be bigger. In the film, teen Sam Hiken goes with her divorced father and his also divorced friend. She has her period and director India Donaldson adds short moments in which the viewer sees Sam changing a tampon. First at home, while she chatting with her girlfriend, later squatting in the green, just outside the gaze of her hiking mates. Her period is a non-event in her life, as it is for most people.

In recent years, period is increasingly being discussed in films. And not especially to illustrate a female coming of age – as happened regularly in the past. Whether or not accompanied by shame, guilt and disgust – think of Carria (1976). Menstrual blood was sometimes ‘cute and playful’: in film hit The sausage person in the world (2021) Millennial Julie smears it on her cheeks during a paddot trip – even that cannot make her unattractive for her worshipers. It emphasized the ‘animal’ sides of characters, as in horror comedy Nightbitch (2024) in which a frustrated home worker turns into a dog. While her partner nags about the milk she has forgotten to buy, she takes her first shower tired in days and the water turns towards the well red. And it didn’t have to stand in the way of eroticism, as in Saltburn (2023) or thriller Fair Play (2023).