When female animals are in heat, they bleed wherever. Once humans evolved, women tried not to do that. Bleeding wherever is incredibly messy. In primitive areas, it invites predatory animals. In pre-modern times when washing clothes was difficult, unrestricted bleeding destroyed clothes, bedding, and furniture. The arrival of disposable pads was a quantum leap into convenience for women, as were tampons. Now, though, a generation of “people who menstruate” has decided that the animal way is best. It’s de-evolution in action.

The New York Post re-published an Australian article about “free bleeding,” which the Post titled “Gen Z women are ditching pads, tampons and embracing ‘free bleeding’ in latest trend.” When you read the article, though, you discover that the Australian writer was a bit more hip than that. While she eventually forgets herself and starts using the word “women,” she opens with the phrase “people who menstruate” (which, of course, means women):

Who needs tampons and pads?

Your knee-jerk reaction might be to say people that menstruate but actually Gen Z girlies are embracing a world without sanitary products.

The trend is called “free bleeding”, which means that you don’t wear anything to absorb the blood when you are menstruating.

[snip]

Creator Charlee declared that she’d started free bleeding and, while she said she knew it was an “insane” choice, she added that it was “healthy” and she saved money by doing it.

It wasn’t well received by everyone.

“So you are just staining all your clothes,” someone asked.

That comment was promptly ignored.

TikTok is apparently awash in bloo…er, videos of women boasting about their blood and where it goes—and it’s not going neatly into receptacles. Instead, they’re either just bleeding into their clothes or they’re running around naked in their homes. Some of the women are even claiming that, by ditching pads and tampons, they’re experiencing lighter periods.

I’m not impressed.

First, if they’re bleeding into their clothes, they not experiencing a “non-absorbent period.” Instead, their clothes are absorbing the blood. They’ve just abandoned the neatness of a pad for the messiness of clothes.

Second, I don’t even want to think about the furniture they sit on and then expect others can comfortably use, too.

Third, if they’re staying home to celebrate this whole experience, they’ve managed to revert to pre-modern times when women were treated as unclean and were locked away for the duration of their periods. In ancient Israel, women having their periods were sequestered and couldn’t return to the community until they’d gone through a ritual cleansing. This actually made sense in a desert culture when the ability to clean oneself and one's clothes was limited, but in 21st-century America and Australia, it’s a bat fecal matter crazy reversion to the primitive.

And fourth, regarding their periods being lighter…maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. I’ll leave it to your imaginations to guess at reasons why this might be true or might just be a perception.

Normally, I don’t write about topics such as this—i.e., seemingly silly cultural trends—but I think this one matters. We are living in a reversionary era. My generation is accustomed to the freedom of gas-powered cars, the comforts (often life-sustaining) of heaters and air conditioners to combat aggressive climate conditions, and, if we’re women, the convenience and freedom of modern period products. And one by one, the left is taking those things away, all the while making a virtue out of returning us to the conditions that made life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Image by freepik.