1. Miserable Menstruators: Toward a Cranky Approach to Bleeding

Menstrual Negativity and the Hatred of Bleeders

The interdisciplinary field of critical menstruation studies catalogs the profound menstrual negativity found in both Western and non-Western cultures (e.g., Ginsburg 1996; Guterman, Mehta, and Gibbs 2008). Menstrual negativity references the deep disdain for one particular type of bleeding (menstrual bleeding) and the bodies that produce it, and it has been an effective tool in both sexist and transphobic discourses. Living in a context of menstrual negativity—indeed, menstrual hatred—one is taught that menstrual bleeding is disgusting and shameful and that it is proof of one’s inherent weakness and inferiority. Menstruation studies scholars talk about menstruation as a social stigma that includes menstrual blood’s perception as more disgusting than other bodily fluids, with any evidence or reminder of menstruation, including leaks and wrappers from menstrual products, as stigmatizing the menstruator themself (Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler 2013). For example, people who are currently menstruating are more negatively perceived than those who are not and are kept at greater physical distance (Marván et al. 2008; Kowalski and Chapple 2000). This stigma is socially conveyed through educational materials, popular culture (including advertising), and the imposition of silence and becomes internalized, affecting menstruators’ experiences of and attitudes toward bleeding.

Menstruation has historically been tightly wound with ideas of women’s inferiority rooted in essentialist ideas about gender. Medical science and body lore have configured menstrual bodies as tainted by menstrual blood, dirty, unruly, shame-worthy, and pathological or failed. Since “we have bodies, but we are also, in a specific sense, bodies” (Turner 1996, as cited in Lupton 2003, 22), negative ideas about menstrual blood become glued to the identities of menstruators themselves. Memorably, in her pivotal text on cisgender women’s embodiment, Emily Martin analyzes medical textbooks from the 1970s and 1980s, uncovering that one of the most common ways to discuss menstruation is as a failure to reproduce. While, she argues, cisgender men’s anatomy is discussed on triumphant terms, cisgender women’s anatomy is clad in loss-laden, failure-bound, and doomsday language, including through the use of such words as deprive, regression, diminishment, disintegration, hemorrhage, and sloughing (2001). This rhetoric, Martin holds, trained doctors in upholding menstrual negativity through seeing the menstruating body as a site of failure with bleeding as an outward sign of a body that has not fulfilled its reproductive goals.

Ideas of female inferiority have long circulated in medical science, including during the emergence of theories of sexual dimorphism in the nineteenth century, which developed alongside and in dialogue with race science, upholding white cisgender masculinity as the somatic norm (Verbrugge 2000; Lacquer 1990; Markowitz 2001). In her recent book Period: The Real Story of Menstruation (2023), Kate Clancy discusses how many historical and contemporary ideas around menstruation stem from a sexist and racist science rooted in eugenics. For example, age of menstruation was often investigated by colonial science in comparative xenophobic accounts, with earlier menarche seen as evidence of less-evolved societies and as tied to child marriage (McCarthy and Lahiri-Dutt 2020; Tambe 2011). In the eighteenth century, Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller put forward a “latitude theory” of menstruation, arguing that age of menarche was influenced by climate, so that the closer a culture was to the equator the lower was the age of menarche ([1786] 1966). This in turn fed into ideas that “early sexual maturity itself was a sign of civilizational backwardness, and late menstruation was equated with modernity” (Tambe 2011, 119). Today, Western accounts of menstruation in low-income countries continue to uphold narratives of menstrual panic and what Chris Bobel refers to as “zombie statistics” that are unfounded but that create the impression that menstruation for those not in the West is singularly a more horrible experience than for Westerners, or a “Western imaginary of the spectacle of the ‘third world girl’ and the politics of rescue” (2019, 132, 159).

Menstrual negativity today is also centrally expressed through narratives of silence, cleanliness, and so-called hygiene. As many menstruation studies scholars discuss, menstrual blood continues to be regarded as “dirtier” than any other blood and as in need of particular means of containment and sanitization (Bobel 2006, 2010; Fahs 2016; Truax 2017). For example, the use of blue liquid in advertising for menstrual products stems from absorbency-level testing for tampons, which up until the 1990s were tested not through the use of blood but through the use of a blue liquid. Unfortunately, this led to the inability to predict that the accumulation of blood on a tampon in the vaginal canal could lead to toxic shock syndrome for some tampon users, myself included (Sanabria 2016; Vostral 2018). In the 1980s, feminist health activists organized and demanded that tampon packaging include indication of absorbency levels, as well as that menstrual blood be used in testing. Use of the blue liquid in both advertising and testing demonstrates the dangers of the obfuscating and sanitizing messaging around menstruation that is inherent in menstrual negativity. Indeed, the naming of menstrual products as “feminine hygiene” reinscribes a level of secrecy, containment, and cleanliness and ties it up with a feminization of menstruation, binding menstruation to femininity while absenting the other gendered possibilities of menstruators. Configured through a logic of feminine hygiene, menstrual products become gender-bound products and are denied their full due as necessary, assistive, and life-supporting technologies needed by an assortment of bodies to complete daily functions and lead full lives.

The pressure to hide and contain one’s period creates what Breanne Fahs calls a “cultural code of silence” for those who menstruate that can lead to the internalization of silence, shame, and the “wrongness” of one’s own body (Przybyło and Fahs 2018, 210). This leads to the association of menstruation with negativity, especially at and following menarche and with the avoidance of sex during menstruation (Schooler et al. 2005; Allen and Goldberg 2009; Fahs 2011). Feelings of shame and the need for concealment are overemphasized in educational content on menstruation, which changed little between the 1930s and the 1990s and continued to hail menstruators as responsible for hiding periods from others (Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler 2013). For people with disabilities, menstrual suppression is often prescribed as part of an attempt to desexualize them and prevent them from reproducing, demonstrating that menstrual blood is deemed not only part of “womanhood” but part of nondisabled womanhood (Dizon, Allen, and Ornstein 2005; Kirkham et al. 2013; Steele and Goldblatt 2020).

In a context of menstrual negativity, a preference for bodies that do not bleed could easily feed into the support of menstrual suppression. If the somatic norm is that of a nonmenstruating body, and if menstrual blood is deemed excessive and disgusting, menstrual suppression offers an entry point into stopping the flows of menstruation, preventing the bleeding (Johnston-Robledo, Barnack, and Wares 2006). While menstrual suppression is not commonly supported within many contexts, Brazil, as Emilia Sanabria (2016) lays out, is one country in which menstrual suppression is widely encouraged by doctors not only as a form of birth control but also as a practice of wellness, fitness, and beauty. Ironically, menstrual suppression, while a necessary technology for navigating menstrual pain and dysphoria, is often prescribed for weirdly misogynist as well as ableist, racist, and classist reasons, and it is also tied up in a broader social fabric of menstrual negativity that frames menstruating and sometimes menstruators as pathological (e.g., Coutinho 1999).

Representations of periods in advertisements, film, and TV, until recently, when not completely elided, have likewise tended to dwell on the negative elements of menstruation as a shameful experience that should be hidden, in particular from cisgender men. Advertising has arguably been a central source of menstrual negativity in U.S. culture, trafficking in shame to sell products and emphasizing individual responsibility for avoiding leaks and signs of bleeding (Przybyło and Fahs 2020, 377; Kissling 2006). Often relying on contradictory messages, menstrual product ads focus on avoiding leaks and signs of bleeding. In addition to the use of the blue liquid as a form of sanitizing menstrual blood, they rely on pink and soft tones, and primarily thin cisgender women are represented. In short, these ads reinforce ideas that the main concern with menstruation is disguising it from others through the selection of the correct commercial brands. As mentioned in the opening to this chapter, menstrual product advertising also adapts to changes in attitudes toward bleeding by co-opting feminist messages and selling menstrual products as forms of “liberation,” as seen through names such as Always, Libresse, Stayfree, and Rely (Vostral 2008). In this context of menstrual negativity, it has thus been centrally important for feminists and menstrual activists to strive to shift the discourse and rhetoric of menstruation to be more positive.

Positive Periods: The Feminist Importance of Menstrual Positivity

Menstrual positivity grapples with the idea of “how to celebrate something that is supposed to be hidden” (Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler 2013, 12) and stems from and is related to parallel movements of body positivity that have their origins in disability justice, Black Power, fat activism, and transgender and queer liberation (Przybyło and Fahs 2020). Menstrual activism has played a key role is shifting narratives of menstruation since at least the 1970s women’s health movement and has seen a renewed and reconceptualized interest with menstrual justice grassroots organizations of the last twenty years. Historically, as Bobel discusses (2008), menstrual activism began to grow out of the Boston Women’s Health Collective and the many editions of their feminist health book Our Bodies, Ourselves (first published as Women and Their Bodies in 1970) and into the 1980s with calls to hold menstrual product companies to account for the rise of cases of toxic shock syndrome. Many feminists from the 1970s onward wrote manuals, guidebooks, and tracts educating others about the menstrual experience, reevaluating it on positive terms, sometimes linking it to spirituality, and commonly emphasizing it as a natural part of embodiment (e.g., Rome and Culpepper [1977] 1981; Parvati 1978; Slayton 1990; Golub 1985; Steinem 1978). Products such as tampons and pads were evaluated by activists for their safety, challenging menstrual product companies to address inherent issues such as the absence of absorbency ratings, the creation of products without proper testing—such as Procter & Gamble’s 1975 superabsorbent tampon Rely, which was advertised as being able to absorb one entire cycle of period blood—and toxic levels of carcinogenic and environmentally unsafe chemicals and materials such as polyester foam and dioxin in products. Successes included the removal of the product Rely, acknowledgment of TSS on tampon packaging, the standardization of absorbency ratings in 1990, and, in the United Kingdom though not the United States, the end of the chlorine bleaching of menstrual products. Also, new products and technologies were developed or promoted by feminists, including the use of sea sponges in lieu of tampons and the process of period extraction, which involves clearing out the uterus to hasten the end of the menstrual cycle (Bobel 2006, 332). Bobel discusses the ways in which menstrual activism from the 1970s to the 1990s “cultivated a critical menstrual consciousness” that included a suspicion of menstrual product companies, with their often toxic, insufficiently tested, and chlorine-ridden products, and their advertisements (2008, 740). Importantly, this shift in consciousness, while more evident among feminist activists than the general public, did have the effect of beginning to shift menstrual negativity, promoting countercultural discourses around menstruation.

Since the 1990s, menstrual activism has taken on dynamic forms, often attuned to menstrual justice in recent years. For example, Bobel discusses the importance of do-it-yourself zine culture and e-zines of the 1990s as spaces to dispute menstrual negativity and come up with alternative ways for approaching bleeding as well as alternative menstrual products that challenge the monopoly of the industry through “critical menstrual product consciousness” (2006, 332; 2010). In one zine Bobel reviews, “It’s Your Fucking Body#2: Reclaim Your Cunt,” author Marie A acknowledges the ways in which menstrual bleeding is discussed in transphobic terms, writing that “[I]’ve realized . . . that all of the resources I’ve come across . . . seem to neglect these 2 really important facts: 1. Not all women menstruate 2. Not just women menstruate” (quoted in Bobel 2006, 341). Cultural production including zines, art, performance, protest signage, writing, and online discourse have played a central role in transforming our understanding of menstruation and shifting “menstrual consciousness” (Bobel 2006, 2010; Clemmer 2017; Fahs 2016; Truax 2017). Countless artists, spanning from Judy Chicago in the 1970s to the present day, incorporate themes of menstrual blood or actual menstrual blood into their work as a way of challenging ideas that menstrual blood is gross and dirty (Hughes and Røstvik 2020). On TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms, creators openly address menstruation to hone menstrual positivity through humorous and educational approaches.

One well-known example of destigmatizing menstrual blood on social media was undertaken by poet Rupi Kaur in 2015, when she posted a photograph of herself laying on her side and bleeding through her sweatpants, which, along with other photos that included her menstrual blood—but, importantly, no nudity—was taken down shortly after by Instagram for violating “community guidelines.” In response to her photos being censored, Kaur poignantly wrote, “Their patriarchy is leaking. Their misogyny is leaking. We will not be censored” (Kaur quoted in Cascone 2015). Similar attempts at normalizing bleeding have been undertaken for and by nonbinary and transmasculine bleeders, as with Cass Clemmer’s work that includes photos of them with menstrual stains and with the hashtag #BleedingWhileTrans (Wilson 2020). Importantly, Kaur and Clemmer, as well as many other creators, hone menstrual positivity in the sense that they refuse to erase and silence menstruation and because they render it “normal,” a regular and cyclical occurrence that is part of being embodied, but they also acknowledge the difficulties and realities of bleeding, rather than partaking in one-sided peppy versions of bleeding, as many co-optations of menstrual positivity do in advertising. Broadly speaking, as a movement, menstrual positivity strives to transform both cultural and individual approaches to menstruation through “challenging the stigma of menstruation and learning to appreciate, or at least not loathe, menstruation” (Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler 2013, 16).

Against the Indictment to Be Happy Bleeders

Despite the need for shifting menstrual negativity, menstrual positivity has too easily become co-optable, including by companies that sell menstrual products and until recently have been trafficking in menstrual shame. Messages of self-love and body positivity are transformed at the hands of advertisers to give a diminished sense of what a challenge to menstrual negativity should look like, responsibilizing consumers for internalized negativity surrounding menstruation. For example, the Always ad (2014) with which I opened this chapter relies on a distilled sense of girls’ empowerment that refuses to engage with structural and systemic issues that might limit one’s capacity to love their period. Such ad campaigns rely on the research and activism of feminist and other movements, which they then adapt to sell the same products as before but with different messages attached.

Rosalind Gill and Ana Sofia Elias (2014) argue that advertising that hones “love your body” messaging partakes in features of psychic regulation, creating a new disciplinary norm that calls on feminine-presenting people in particular to model self and body love and enact positivity. Ironically, even as the representation of different body types increases in advertising, the pressure to feel a particular and specific way about our bodies narrows, and the same is true for menstruation. “Emotional capitalism” (Illouz 2007) thus includes an imperative to “love” one’s body, one’s self, without a consideration of the misogyny, ableism, transphobia, fatphobia, racism, and ageism that actually affect how one feels about their body in a social context. Instead, an individualized responsibility is imparted on consumers to do better, to rise above and claim love for one’s self and body and blame oneself as the reason for a “relationship to the self [that] has gone bad or been broken” (Gill and Elias 2014, 181). Through an individualized, atomistic approach to self-love and positivity—including through the cooptation of menstrual positivity by advertisements—collective struggle, activism, and social transformation are overlooked and one’s relationship with the self on neoliberal terms becomes the priority. The positivity that emerges is shallow, disconnected from reality, and reroutes energy away from political struggle and toward a personal ethic of overcoming negativity within oneself and with regard to one’s body, as well as toward consumer culture.

I argue that in order for a shift in “menstrual consciousness” (Bobel 2008, 740) to be possible, menstrual positivity must be complemented with menstrual crankiness. While menstrual positivity and other forms of bodily celebration are an important element of challenging discourses that hold menstruation and menstruators in a negative light, it is equally important to hone cranky approaches to embodiment and the body—ones that are attuned to discomfort, pain, trauma, and dysphoria. It is only through honing cranky approaches to menstruation that menstruators can recognize the difficult, dissident, and uncomfortable feelings that are central to menstrual experiences and argue for an approach to menstrual justice that demands the framing of menstruation not as an individual set of feelings about bleeding but as a collective concern for justice.

More on Pain and Gender

Developing a cranky approach to bleeding acknowledges the embodied feelings of menstruation as not always positive in nature. Menstruation is an often-taxing and difficult experience, characterized by pain (including dysmenorrhea and endometriosis), dips in mental health, and discomfort, and it can be a site of gender dysphoria for nonbinary, gender-variant, and transmasculine bleeders (Chrisler et al. 2016; Fahs 2016; Lowik 2021). First, menstrual pain is often conceived of as the price one pays for being or becoming “a woman.” In this sense, menstrual pain is “coded feminine” and diminished as not “real pain” (C. E. Jones 2016, 558). Menstrual pain continues to be denied the status of “real” pain even while studies suggest that upward of 80 percent of menstruators experience pain related to menstruation and 30 percent experience severe menstrual pain that can feel as intense as pain experienced during a heart attack (Przybyło and Fahs 2018; Fenton 2016; C. E. Jones 2016; Balbi et al. 2000; Banikarim, Chacko, and Kelder 2001; Grandi et al. 2012; Ju, Jones, and Mishra 2014). Notably, because white pain sufferers more commonly have their pain believed, Black menstruators underreport menstrual pain for layered reasons, including distrust of Western medicine due to widespread medical malpractice against Black patients, especially with regard to reproductive health, as well as the racist perception that Black people are less susceptible to pain (Bunch 2021; Snorton 2017). Through “misogynoir”—or the intersection of anti-Blackness and misogyny that Moya Bailey (2021) names and theoretically develops—Black women’s pain in particular is disbelieved. The high rate of fibroids in Black people with uteri (two to three times the rate of uterine fibroids found in white people, with greater overall severity) can likewise affect periods, making them heavier and more painful (Stewart et al. 2013).

There are also ample studies that suggest that women’s pain is more commonly disbelieved than men’s pain (the studies rely on a gender binary model). Cisgender men thus receive more, faster, and better medical care, as well as more and higher doses of pain medication, because their pain is more commonly believed and treated seriously (Hoffmann and Tarzian 2001, 17). Also, women’s pain is more commonly rendered “psychosomatic” or “psychologized”—that is, “their pain is discounted as being psychic or nonexistent”—rather than “somatic,” especially when it is chronic in nature or hard to see with the naked eye (Samulowitz et al. 2018, 10, 5). Conditions such as endometriosis and fibromyalgia—overwhelmingly experienced by people with uteri—are rarely treated seriously or recognized as causing “real” pain. Even when pain is addressed by health professionals, there are few drugs they can prescribe that adequately lessen menstrual pain, though some recent undertakings—such as Somedays, a natural period pain relief company—strive to render, record, and address the specificity of menstrual pain and provide directed pain relief.

In the case of endometriosis, until recently there was little effort to recognize the realness of this disability, and little support exists even now for people experiencing it. Endometriosis occurs when tissue commonly located within the uterus (endometrium) travels to other parts of the body, leading to intense pain and possible health complications. Too often, endometriosis is ascribed to poor lifestyle choices, not having children early enough, an invention of the mind, or is simply expected as part of having a menstruating body (C. E. Jones 2016). While it is perceived as a singularly cisgender women’s disability, endometrial tissue has been found in a variety of bodies, including postmenopausal and posthysterectomy people, infants, cis men, and trans men (C. E. Jones 2016, 561). Also, while much less researched, use of hormone-replacement therapy by trans women can replicate some symptoms of having a period, including cramps, pain, bloating, and mood changes (Lowik 2021, 118–19; Riedel 2016). For these women, the expectation that they are not menstruators can ignite further pain invalidation and disbelief, compounded by transmisogyny (Przybyło and Fahs 2018, 208; Riedel 2016).

Medicine has been complicit in dismissing the realness of both menstrual and endometrial pain, necessitating the need for relational and political approaches. Even though it is important to resignify menstruation on positive terms, and some menstruators do relate positive and meaning-rich engagements with menstruation, many menstruators talk of difficult feelings of disgust, embarrassment, shame, and horror, in addition to pain (McPherson and Korfine 2004; T.-A. Roberts 2004). Ob-gyn and “Period Doctor” Charis Chambers classifies these experiences as “period trauma”—“sustained psychological, social, or emotional injury/distress related to or caused by menstruation” (quoted in Bunch 2021). While these feelings are certainly socially augmented, they can make it impossible for individual menstruators to suddenly make the leap to having positive accounts of their periods or feeling favorably and pridefully about menstruating, as messages of menstrual positivity suggest they should. Feelings of menstrual distress are certainly rooted in social stigma, but they are also somatic and psychic realities for many.

The first period is an exceptionally traumatic experience for many, as a menstruator might experience shock, distress, and dread, not knowing why they are bleeding or realizing that they will bleed monthly from here on out (Rice 2014, 227–28). Periods are also related to gender dysphoria, or the distress accompanying one’s perceived body appearance not aligning with one’s gender (Bell 2017; Reading 2014). For some it is an embodied reaction to the sight of blood that is dysphoric and jarring and for others it might be a response to the way menstruation is connected to cultural understandings of cisgender womanhood (Frank and Dellaria 2020; Lowik 2021). Questions of access also become especially salient for masculine-presenting bleeders, especially around gender-segregated toilets. For transmasculine or masculine-of-center menstruators, avoiding public restrooms can become a central part of the menstrual experience so as to avoid disclosing information about one’s body to others in a potentially hostile environment where strangers subconsciously surveil each other for signs of gender trouble (Chrisler et al. 2016).

Advertising itself can have a dysphoric, triggering, and disorienting effect for transmasculine and genderqueer menstruators, as one can “feel mocked by the celebratory ads and the excited-looking packaging” and it “enforces the otherness of [one’s] period” (Zulch 2017). Further, seeing representations of happy bleeders performing menstruation as a joyful and positive experience can feel staggering and jarring for those of us who experience menstruation as difficult, painful, and uncomfortable. For those women who do not bleed—for example, trans women and posthysterectomy or postmenopausal women—advertising can create a sensation of being excluded from the rituals of “being a woman,” being left out of the contours of womanhood that menstrual product ads establish (Bobel 2010). Many menstruation materials—including educational materials, advertisements, and other representations—exclude transgender women through a discourse of menstrual celebration and the implication that menstruation is a wholly feminine process, part of “being a woman.” In light of the ways that menstruation can be difficult, even while it is represented as delightful in recent menstrual product advertising, a cranky turn to menstrual bleeding is needed.

Getting Cranky about Bleeding

A cranky approach to menstruation involves at least two layers: acknowledging the embodied difficulties of bleeding and seeking to grasp menstrual injustice on a systemic rather than individual level, including through a critique of menstrual capitalism. First, a cranky methodology sits with embodiment, attuned to the potential difficulties of bleeding. It acknowledges the ways in which the pressure to be positive can be used against menstruators so as to individually blame them for discomfort, stigma, and pain. Sara Ahmed (2010) discusses how the pressure to be happy and positive is a form of social regulation used in particular against oppressed people. As such, happiness is “not so much a right as a responsibility. We have a responsibility for our own happiness insofar as promoting our own happiness is what enables us to increase other people’s happiness” (9). However, to not be happy and positive, even when one is uncomfortable, in pain, or struggling, is individualized as a person’s own “fault,” “a consequence of a bad attitude” (Halberstam 2011, 3; Ehrenreich 2009). Especially central to the United States, an expectation of positivity is seen as necessary for social functioning and negativity as a personal problem that must be overcome to hone a better relationship to self and others.

In conjunction with menstruation, happiness and positivity rhetoric suggest that if one has a painful period or an uncomfortable one, it is their own responsibility to shift this mind-view to come to love one’s bleeding self. Yet positive thinking cannot wish away bodily pain or trauma connected with menstruation. One’s menstrual experience, whether it is a difficult or happy one, is not attributable mainly to one’s outlook; it lies in the realities of one’s body as well as in structural inequalities and materialities of pain and discomfort. A cranky approach to menstruation thus creates distance from a prescriptive positive outlook on bleeding that is disconnected from the body and from reality. A menstrual crankiness acknowledges the negative elements of periods for those who do experience them.

Crankiness creates spaces for dissatisfaction with our bodies and experiences of menstruating. For those who experience cyclical pain and endometriosis, cranky menstruation invites menstruators to move in the direction of “crip time” as elucidated by Ellen Samuels, Alison Kafer, and other crip and disability studies scholars—a time necessarily slowed by disability, illness, and pain. Crip time, as Kafer puts forward in Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013) speaks to how disabled people, inclusive of those with chronic pain, have a different experience of time, with altered temporalities from nondisabled people. Crip time thus “bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” (Kafer quoted in Samuels 2017). Pain associated with menstruation is rarely given full credit and attention, making it possible for my years of menstrual hurling to be unremarked on and unremarkable. Because pain is so normalized as part of the menstrual experience, intense menstrual pain can go without notice or medical attention and be understood instead as part of the charge of becoming or being “a woman.” A cranky approach to bleeding sits with this pain, drawing on a political and relational model of disability to “push back against a medical model that has in many ways failed menstruators by failing to see menstrual pain as legitimate” (Przybyło and Fahs 2018, 208). Cranky approaches to menstruation provide permission for acknowledging the painful and sometimes chronic elements of being an embodied menstruator and the lower reservoir of energy one has to pull on. Because chronic pain is “unending, repetitive, incessant, protracted, stubborn, persistent, frequent, relentless,” based on management rather than “cure,” those with chronic pain associated with menstruation require the chance to be dissatisfied and indeed cranky with round-the-clock models of productivity (Ferzacca 2010, 158).

A cranky methodology instead pursues justice rather than positivity. This begins with recognizing that the vision of positivity often articulated in co-opted form by menstrual product brands excludes many. One of the effects of menstrual product advertising over the years has been to delineate who the ideal menstruator is—often white, thin, feminine, active, and well-off. These representations shape the idea of who can attain menstrual happiness and positivity through not representing many bodies in their vision, including fat bodies, transfeminine bodies, masculine-of-center and genderqueer bodies, and disabled bodies. If menstrual celebration is not envisioned for everyone, it is not partaking in a vision of menstrual justice. The first part of understanding menstrual injustice through a cranky methodology is thus remaining suspicious about how and for whom menstrual positivity is being sold.

It is true that some people may love their periods and be invested in positively rendering and approaching bleeding. Yet recent years have seen the prescription of these feelings of positivity to bleeding in ways that strive to regulate the menstrual experience and dictate the effects associated with it. The cranky menstruator recognizes that not everyone will love their period and that some will only love their period sometimes or on certain terms. The cranky menstruator is suspicious of celebratory scripts pushed forth by advertising with the intent of selling period gear to consumers. In this sense, a cranky menstruator is a killjoy, a “troublemaker [who] might be trouble because [they get] in the way of the happiness of others” (Ahmed 2010, 60). Menstrual crankiness thus offers a sustained attention to the absorption of menstrual activist energies by capitalism and demands that we sit longer with, rather than gloss over, the pained aspects of bleeding. Crankiness can offer a slowing, a chance to recognize that for many, menstruation stimulates loathing and body hate rather than love. This is not the same as buying into a culture of menstrual negativity and shame or of decrying menstruation and hating menstruators. A slowness around bleeding questions the goals of ableist immersion in capitalism at all times of the month and the recognition that menstrual love is not the preferred model for many people to cope with their periods. Rather, menstrual positivity has been subsumed by capitalist schemes to encourage productivity round the month, to ignore menstrual pain and trauma as if it were nothing, and to model a nonleaky, self-sustained, ever-productive, nondisabled body. A cranky menstruator is thus frustrated with visions of the fit and ever-productive bleeder and the image of the bleeder that is pushed forth by advertising in particular.

Menstrual crankiness invites rest, slowness, and disavowal if and when it is possible for menstruators. Menstrual pain cannot be wished away or overcome; it requires access to menstrual suppressants, health experts who acknowledge the pain, and medication to help cope with the pain. Periods can and do prevent inclusion in social life, and they can affect sports performance, as Chinese Olympic swimmer Fu Yuanhui admitted in 2016 upon performing less well than she desired due to period pain (Crockett 2016). Periods are related to depression, trauma, and dysphoria, and they can and do incite dissonance and anger rather than purely happy feelings. In this sense, crankiness is aligned with feminist discussions of anger as a necessary tool to fight oppression and injustice (e.g., Lorde 1981).

Menstrual crankiness demands a deep crankiness about the dialogue of menstrual liberation surfacing in advertising as it totally neglects and overlooks the lack of access to menstrual gear, including tampons, cups, pads, and painkillers, both in the United States and across the world. The cost of menstrual gear increases annually even with recent fights on the tampon tax, and menstrual products are available only to those with the most First World privilege, class privilege, and white privilege. This lack of access to menstrual products for economic reasons is commonly referred to as “period poverty.” In the United States alone, over sixteen million menstruators are experiencing poverty and might not have access to menstrual gear—including people experiencing homelessness, incarcerated people, and hospitalized people—even while menstrual products are a basic human necessity (Singh, Zhang, and Segars 2020; Menstrual Equity for All Act of 2019, H.R. 1882). Activists have been cranky about menstrual injustice for decades, stretching from the women’s health movement to efforts to end the tampon tax (Crawford and Spivack 2017) and make menstrual products available to incarcerated people (Marusic 2016; White 2018), as well as cranky about white savior approaches to menstruation in lower- and lower-middle-income countries (Bobel 2019). As of early 2025, countries that have successfully eliminated taxes on period products include Canada, Australia, Kenya, Colombia, India, Germany, Colombia, and Rwanda (Wikipedia 2025). On August 15, 2022, thanks to efforts at raising awareness around period poverty, Scotland became the first country to make period products free under a Period Products Act (Diamond 2022). Menstrual product ads championing menstrual empowerment with their history of health risks and menstrual negativity, as well their control of this basic human necessity, should make menstruators and nonmenstruators very cranky indeed. Crankiness asks that we remain open to many ways of approaching bleeding, allowing for the presence of cranky feelings toward the menstrual experience. On my view, a cranky approach to menstruation is integral to moving toward menstrual justice and to remaining suspicious of how liberation is being packaged by menstrual product companies. Menstrual crankiness, in sum, provides a deeper affective challenge to consumer capitalism than positivity can provide, complements feminist efforts at undermining menstrual negativity, and builds a framework for acknowledging menstrual injustice, trauma, gendering, and pain.