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Query Letter to Rolling Stone Magazine |
April 30, 1999
Editor Rolling Stone Magazine 1290 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10104-0298 Dear Rolling Stone: Yes, it’s the ‘m’ word: menstruation. As in The
Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health (MUM for short), founded in 1994 by
Harry Finley and located in his Washington, D.C. area home. Availing myself
of the MUM collection, I am writing ‘Come Together Over Me(nstruation),’ in
which I tackle a question which has yet to elicit a single insightful answer,
and, in its power to generate streams of empty but well-meaning phrases,
ought to be asked only of beauty pageant contestants: why aren’t there more
women in the music business? In 1926, Virginia Woolf pondered "...what
would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called
Judith..." Woolf imagined Judith finding herself "with child"
by a stage manager, and then in despair "kill[ing] herself one winter’s
night." I instead imagine such a sister for John Lennon: Let us call her
Jane, a female musician who finds herself not "with child," but
"with periods," and in a band with Paula, Georgia, and (?) Ringa. In the 1980 Playboy Interview, John Lennon
described the Beatles’ "early days": "...the four of us
sleeping in the same room, practically in the same bed...living together
night and day, eating, shitting and pissing together...doing everything
together." Putting on our rose-colored (menstrual) glasses, we
see that Jane and the girls would most likely have all bled together as well,
as predicted* by Martha McClintock’s groundbreaking 1971 study,
"Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression," in which she observed that
"menstrual synchrony is often reported by all-female living groups and
by mothers, daughters, and sisters who are living together." In a later
study with K. Stern, she demonstrated that it was "odorless compounds
from the armpits of women," or pheromones, responsible for menstrual
synchronicity. Certainly our Fab (female) Four would have had
plenty of opportunity while "eating, shitting and pissing
together...doing everything together," to get a whiff of the odorless
compounds emanating from each other’s armpits. We can further imagine a
studio session in which Jane, being the same "loudmouth lunatic
poet" her brother was, announcing once again she’s on her period, to
which her bandmates reply that they’re all on theirs too. Being the wonderfully
gifted musicians they are, they recognize this 12-times-a-year menstrual
cycle as a rhythm, and, exploring this musically, they release an album whose
first words are: it was 20 years ago today that Aunt Ruby taught the band to play In 1997 then, at Lilith Fair, Paula Cole would
probably not have made reference to an "insidious" sexism that
"starts early with mothers and fathers not encouraging their daughters
to be drummers or electric guitarists." (How many parents encourage
their sons to do so?). Nor would she have gone on, while
"point[ing] out...the musicians in every backing band are mostly
male..." to say with true beauty contestant earnestness: "We need
to challenge women to play their own instruments, to write their own music,
to be their own producers, to run their own business and develop their own
voice and not be so lazy." If Aunt Ruby’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had ever
existed, women today would probably be doing all these things in numbers
equal to that of men. If you would like to visit the Museum of Menstruation
and Women’s Health website yourselves, the address is www.mum.org. I think
you will be pleasantly surprised by what you find there: The New York Times
described it as "odd, funny and well-researched." To contact Harry
Finley, founder and director of the museum, he can be emailed at
hfinley@mum.org. If you have questions for me, and/or (hopefully) a suggested
article length and deadline, I can be reached at rcknchair@aol.com, or the
address below. Have a bleedin’ day,** Geneva Kachman **As Daisy Decapite, editor of The Curse (Available
Monthly) likes to put it. *There may be some problems with
the study this letter is based upon: Read Menstrual Synchrony or Menstrual Overlap: What
Difference Does It Make? to find out more. |
X Menstrual Synchrony or Menstrual Overlap: What Difference Does It Make?