Menstruation Play

This blog post is about something that happened in my personal/academic life.

So, I have a drama class, and our final project is to write and produce a play. I had a really hard time thinking of a good topic for the play. I had two male actors and one female actor. After much debate, I came up with the idea of writing a play about menstruation. I thought that using the male actors to discuss menstruation in the ways we discuss it when it first happens to us would not only be funny, but also would shed light on the ridiculousness of the ways in which we discuss menstruation in our culture.

However, I have met people before and realized this might not go over too well, so I also wrote a back-up script. I took both scripts to the meeting between my group, after having emailed them the menstruation script. They were all mad, including my teacher. They said that my menstruation script was offensive. When I asked how it was offensive, they basically told me that nothing I said was offensive, it was the topic of menstruation. I argued for quite a while, and tried to explain my vision, but no one was buying what I was selling. So I pulled out my back up script which they rejected simply on the basis that it was "bad". So now, I have had to write three scripts for this group project.

I think it's really too bad that menstruation seems to be such an offensive subject. We are all grown-ups in the class, and we should be able to talk about things that we maybe couldn't if children were involved. One thing I said to my drama teacher was "I menstruate, you menstruate, every woman in this classroom menstruates, why is something our bodies do something we shouldn't talk about?" There was no real response. I can assure you all that I will be going to the department head, and discussing the issue with that person. It's ridiculous that I should have to do three times the work of anyone else in the class.

Good journey!