I take this new birth control pill where one of the side effects is having four menstrual periods a year. It’s menopause in a pinch! I feel like an Olympic gymnast or some other kind of professional athlete, too muscular and stressed out for feminine luxuries such as menses and the prom. When it comes time for one of my quarterly shed, it takes me by surprise and I welcome it like a long lost friend.

We have lots of euphemisms for menstruation, and we don’t refer to it unless in the company of women, and rarely even then. I had a friend who was absolutely intolerant of anyone complaining about her period. She’d never had cramps or heavy bleeding or stopping then mysteriously restarting or accidents or missed one in her life, and she staunchly believed that no one else should. If it were mentioned in her presence, she would through clenched teeth remind all of us of her freedom from pain and a manageable monthly flow and change the subject.

Then there are the judgmental ones. I have been around the alternative healing community for decades, and when confiding in a friend/amateur healer/shaman about my woman’s issues, they would almost always launch into a tirade against wheat or dairy or white sugar or caffeine. When doubled over and obsessing about banana chocolate chip muffins, the last thing on my mind is yoga. Lectures about my bad health and spiteful shaming usually greet any attempt on my part to have learned discourse about menstruation, and so the best way to get a grip on it was to get rid of it the best that I could.

It is strange how little talk there is about our periods, as if the subject, if not in a health and wellness context were morally reprehensible. It is a dirty business that women keep to ourselves. But why are we secretive? Over half the world menstruates at one time or another, and you’d never know it. Isn’t that strange?

When I first got my period, I was thirteen. My mother was not overjoyed. She gave me big, foamy white kotex pads that she had still left over from before her hysterectomy. They were old, so they had long tabs on either end for the sanitary belt that was supposed to keep it on. When I put the entire contraption on, I looked like a sumo wrestler. Usually I couldn’t be bothered to put the weird belt together, so the pad, devoid of the newfangled modern adhesive that would secure the wad inside your pants, would slip and slide all around my area, creating something akin to a potato print card.

My mother showed me how to dispose of the pads. She folded them up, wrapped them in toilet paper, shoved them inside a paper bag, crumpled up the bag into a ball, then buried them deep inside the bathroom trash. She repeated the process twice, miming the steps the second time as not to waste those gigantic pads. There was incredible shame in the whole business of bleeding, and she wanted me to be painfully aware of it. The shame could work to my benefit, because if ever I wanted to get out of doing something, I could just cry “Period!” and it was an instant no-contest. Everyone would leave me alone. It was like having a magic word.

Of course I was incredibly lax about throwing those huge pads away, and my negligence was punished with more lessons on how to properly dispose of them, as if they were radioactive nuclear waste. My father even started to shout about my lackadaisical and unsanitary sanitary pad refuse, but he never really completed his thought because I think he realized mid-scream that he was out of his jurisdiction. My father didn’t talk much. If anything, he hollered. But even then, he was brief. Korean parents are like that. It is traditional and appropriate for parents to have no discernable affection or emotion for their children. My father was positively textbook when it came to this. My mother was too watery, too in love with the French, too mommy, to comply with this rule.

My father said about five things in my entire childhood and adolescence that I remember. One was odd and unprompted. I came home from school one day and was walking up to my room when he shouted, “You will never use tampons.” That was it. Wow. Thanks Dad. Words to live by. This was during the big Rely Toxic Shock Syndrome scare, which vied with the Hillside Strangler as women’s number one fear. Toxic Shock was ominous because they never really said how you got it, or why, or what happened when you did. It just struck you dead in the cunt. It had the qualities of both nuclear fallout warnings and a stalker rapist on the loose. What an awful joke of a name Rely was! As if women sought to rely on anything they would be duly punished.

My monthly flow staged its own rebellion. I constantly bloodied my sheets with robust flamboyance. My bed often took the appearance of the scene of a crime. My mother would wash the sheets without a word, and the secrecy around the curse kept me from having to do laundry ever.

When I became a comic, it was drilled into me by several women comics that we should never talk about our periods. Male comics often stereotyped female comics and dismissed them because “all they do is talk about
their periods.” Talking about menstruation became tantamount to a black person eating watermelon. We just couldn’t do it. Even now, I am a bit ashamed that I must disclose that I menstruate at all. It is probably because I actually don’t truly menstruate anymore gives me the distance from it to actually give voice to my once hidden thoughts about it. What is the deal? Why must I feel like I bleed alone? Or that I once bled alone?

I logged onto one of those gore websites, the lurid virtual outposts of sickening images and sobering reminders of our meat bodies and the terrifyingly sharp world we live in. My friend had been playing with my computer earlier, and downloaded a RealPlayer, a fact which I had known but not really thought about. I clicked on one of the beheading videos, and expected my laptop to reject it, just like it usually does when I try to download anything, and before I could register what was happening, the video popped up on the screen. The sound was off, so I couldn’t hear what was going on, thankfully, but the gruesome images flashed by both too quickly and too slowly, too fast for me to stop it, too slow for me to miss anything.

I don’t know which hostage it was. I believe it was an American, possibly Eugene Armstrong. He looked sleepy, worn, distracted, with a shaved head and the requisite orange jumpsuit. The hooded men behind him said something into the camera, and then without warning, a large knife appeared. The tallest of the hooded men took the knife and slit the hostage’s throat. Blood spurted from the wound, dark, fresh and angry. It was like a horror movie and then not, because in scary films, the camera looks away at the impact of violence, sparing the audience visceral dismay and the special effects department more realism than they are capable of producing.

The cutaway here never happened, because this was no movie, at least we hope that it was not, for that would introduce far more sinister horrors than we are capable of comprehending. The knife worked back and forth, sawing apart the neck. Even though the video was silent, I could still hear the cracking of bone and sinew, the separation of cervical vertebrae, the tearing of artery and spinal cord. The screen filled up with the wound, blood flowing like a river from it, the hole where the head once was looking supernatural and unreal. The head was held up to the camera. The eyes still seemed alive, fluttering with shock and fear. The head was rested clumsily on the now slumped body, falling to the floor like a coconut.

The film came to an abrupt end in a still frame of the headless corpse, the bloody stump revealing the sordid detail of gristle and marrow, vein and windpipe, offering a view ourselves that we should never see. It was less than a minute long, but the images are indelible, and will be with me now for a lifetime. I was offered a glimpse of hell, without the lyrical beauty or humor of Dante or Bosch. It was plain hell, devoid of art or grace, just mere unadulterated cruelty.

I am not glad that I witnessed it, but then again, I had to, in order to fully understand the implications of war. When we distance ourselves from the atrocities, we cannot grasp the absolute tragedy of them. To limit our awareness is to further subvert the humanity that is already crippled by being at war in the first place. These horrors are catalogued and counted as strikes against us, the chalk mark tally of what must be avenged, a death to-do-list, but they are not properly experienced and therefore not properly acknowledged. They become props for inept politicians who seek power and fame more than the good of humanity. All this pain is used as a device to persuade voters and advance careers and the lesson is lost.

I don’t know where sorrow is anymore, its presence in the world has vanished, leaving behind greed and the false claims of democracy. I mourn for the victims of Tawid and Jihad, headless and hopeless and names forgotten, their lives used as bargaining chips between corrupt governments where the gangsters rule all. I must also grieve for Tawid and Jihad, that our actions led to their inestimable anger. I beat my chest and cry out hardest of all for our country, with its government so far from its people that most of us cannot see why anyone might want to harm us, take us hostage, fly planes into our towers, kill us and die trying. Most of us don’t even know why, which is the saddest fact of all.

We are like the headless corpse, confused and swiping at the air for clues, for understanding. As we bleed from our mortal wound we flail for mercy and answers with eyes and ears missing, cut off. We are removed from our sense of self, conscience, purpose, but it isn’t the fault of the body, slowly starting to slip away into death. We have lost our head, or it has been taken from us, along with our voices, our reason, our control. All that is left is dissipating strength and a heart that will soon cease to beat

We wonder why the Republicans hate gays, but the problem isn’t as simple as homophobic religious beliefs or just plain social conservatism. Republicans as a whole do not have a particular opinion about homosexuality, other than the odd grumbling about not wanting government funded programs for AIDS education or research. Gays and lesbians don’t matter much to the Republican party, unless they can be used to bait hardcore “Christians” into working for them.

Republicans know that there is a massive population of people who are too stupid to vote, and that no one in their right mind would necessarily want them for their constituency anyway, except perhaps David Duke. However, these are hard times for the GOP, and they cannot afford to be choosy when it comes to registered voters.

Republicans know that they may not be able to sway anyone with their ideas on domestic and foreign policy, or their views on the economy, but they do know that hatred and bigotry are great motivators. They get the ear of the leaders of these so called ‘family groups’ and Christian media watchdogs and warn them of the impending storm of gay ‘legitimization’ and they get them all riled up by telling them that gays are going to get married and move into their neighborhoods. As if a newly married gay couple would ever choose to live in a trailer park. They pump up these Bible thumping, cousin humping genetic mistakes with hot air and propaganda which sends them into a mullet fantasia of pink triangles and rainbow flags, and convinces them that their tax dollars will be used to foot the bill for Elton John and George Michael’s wedding.

Hatred is a powerful motivator, and these Christian soldiers will march onward, fighting tooth and nail for the theoretical hand in marriage, to protect marriage. “You’ll get this bouquet when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.” Although the Republican party doesn’t openly endorse prejudice, if it results in more votes, then no one is complaining. It really is genius, harnessing hatred in order to further your own political party. We wish that democrats would have thought of it first, but even if they had, the plan to introduce prejudice as an enlistment strategy doesn’t work with the ethical ideals of the party. Compassion really does block the way to power.

What is deeply distressing is the incredible numbers of people who are vehemently opposed to equality, and the need for them to deny equal rights to others simply because they cannot bear the thought of equality. It isn’t like anyone who is against marriage equality would be directly affected by the existence of it. Not unless they were part of the wedding industry, and then they could reserve the right to refuse service anyway. More likely, they would welcome the extra revenue. Gay marriage would create a huge boon, and it is doubtful anyone would turn away cold hard cash. Greed remarkably has no bias. This is evidenced in the way that Republicans will pander to this creepy Christ crowd and allow the asinine, the atrociously unfit and the morally repugnant to swell their ranks because it means more for them, and more is where it is at if you are a Republican.

There is an optimistic side to the whole mess that hasn’t been explored yet. We know how many people hate gays and want to create laws and legislate against them. We don’t know how many people hate the haters. It is an exciting prospect, because there has as yet been no census taken. There are huge numbers of potential voters who haven’t exercised their right because until now there has been no pressing need. There has been no cataclysmic threat looming large enough overhead, at least not until now. What if we are a sleeping giant, alarm set to the nick of time? I hope so. We need ourselves now more than ever.

I have yet to see an anti-gay marriage rally. There are the few crackpot naysayers that adorn themselves with countless placards and march against those protesting for the right to marriage equality, but usually they are unwashed and incoherent, and everyone dismisses them anyway. Right wing demonstrations are virtually unheard of.

Conservatives, unless they are full blown maniacs, are fairly ashamed of their beliefs, and could never muster up the courage to meet publicly and broadcast their idiot ideas to the world. If they are photographed by press eager to introduce conflict into their coverage, if only to inspire interest in their story, their presence is greatly exaggerated. I have been to countless marches where a ‘clash’ was reported between opposing factions, but those in the opposition were always too greatly outnumbered to capture my attention. The media fluffs up the conflict in order to mask the embarrassing fact that most conservatives are loathe to stand up for what they believe in, but will vote to keep their hatred alive, even if hatred is the only thing that keeps them together. Yet for all their invisibility on the street, these ersatz Christians have incredible pull at the polls. There are many state constitutions who have anti-gay marriage laws on the ballots, at the ready, in case there is some grievous mishap on the federal level. They are seeking to double block the possibility of gay marriage, like applying for heterosexual insurance. It is both depressing and dumb, but impossible to ignore.

Overlooking the problem of prejudice in our society has brought us to this point. How do we win the culture war started by the insidious greed and determination to domination of the Republican party? I think it might be better to look at it another way. How can we possibly lose? Just because legislation passes doesn’t mean it cannot be reversed. Just because people are dumb doesn’t mean that there are more that are dumber.