A Man in the Menstrual Milieu

David Linton, Ph.D.

Professor of Communication Arts

Marymount Manhattan College

     "You’re a man. What do you know about menstruation?” That’s a common response when I tell people that I teach a college course called "The Social Construction of Menstruation” and that I do research on the menstrual cycle. Once I explain that I don’t claim to know about the subject from a personal point of view but that I am fascinated by the ways that men and women engage in deciding how they will relate to each other around the presence of the period, the conversation usually opens up into an exchange of

observations and stories.

     The next question is usually, "How did you get interested in this subject?” My quick response is usually, "Prince Charles made me do it” and I relate the story of how Charles and Camilla included a tampon reference in an erotic phone call. That news story talk piqued my curiosity and eventually I coined a term to describe how men and women deal with the period: "the menstrual transaction.” However, over time I have come to a different answer to that question. Simply put, it’s this: How can you not be interested in the menstrual cycle and how it affects the ways that men and women relate to each other?

     I’ve been a teacher and scholar for over forty years. As a Professor of Communication Arts, I have taught and written about a wide range of topics: media education, Shakespeare and film, art history and theory, the Luddite movement, popular music. (Those phases of my professional life are now referred to by my family as my premenstrual period.) But despite the depth of interest those topics hold, I have never studied or taught

about anything as endlessly intriguing as the menstrual cycle. At all levels – medical, biological, social, historical, and as a media phenomenon – menstruation warrants our attention. But perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that so few people, especially so few men, are attracted to it. Even the great Alfred Kinsey avoided the inclusion of menstruation in his otherwise exhaustive personal interviews. When people neglect to mention something important, we know it’s important. 

     So that’s my story, or at least its beginning. I expect it to continue to unfold as I learn

more.