See a modern
bowl, this one for soaking used washable pads.
See menstrual artifacts from
Almora, Uttar Pradesh state, India; Rajasthan state, India;
19th-century Norway;
Italy; and instructions
for making Japanese and
German washable pads
from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Read about the washable pad project
for the neighboring Indian state, Rajasthan.
 
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Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health
Ancient art: Pre-Columbian bowl from the Nasca culture on the coast
of Perú, c. 200 BCE - 600 AD, showing a menstruating vagina
A remarkably explicit exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the
Arts, here in Washington, D.C., showed an earthenware bowl enclosing images
of menstrual blood (drawings, below) and what appear to be pubic hair and
either a clitoris or the remnants of the hymen. The pubic hair occupies
a raised portion, probably indicating the mons pubis.
Other objects in the show, called Divine and Human: Women in Ancient
Mexico and Peru, included more images of the vulva than you'd find in several
months of Playboy. And Playboy would never publish anything like the Kama
Sutra-like sculpture of couples, um, going at it in every which way, if
you get my drift. A Washington Post review hinted that men created most
of the sculpture, which figures, but to what end? A sign warns mommies that
they might not want their kids to see these clinical works. But after the
numerous visiting children took in the genitalia scattered about - all female
except for those of half the copulating figures - it was but a baby step
to see one of the things women used them for. Hm, maybe that was
an adult step.
The ladies at the information desk stopped me from using my camera to
illustrate the bowl for MUM but encouraged me to draw it, so I trotted to
an art store a block away and returned with Prismacolor pencils and paper.
Although it wasn't easy drawing in semi-darkness and standing up - any sacrifice
for my MUM visitors, which included a $6 entrance fee and vegan lunch with
non-vegan chocolate mousse! - the drawings, below, give a good idea of what
some of our ancestors employed to hold - well, what? Peanuts? The
catalog doesn't say. Could it have caught menses for some ritual?
Neither does the catalog explain the images in brown on the sides.
(A boy about 10 watched me draw the bowl and afterwards asked me if
I was an artist (I am). An hour later I saw him
and his mother and brother in the same store I had bought the pencils and
paper, where I was standing at the cash register with Arches 300-pound watercolor
paper for a double portrait I took a commissioned to do. The boy's mother
was buying him Prismacolor pencils and paper.)
One museum sign reported that these early Americans called childbirth
- depicted in the exhibit in three dimensions many times - "the
time of death," I assume a reference to the horrors sometimes
awaiting mother and child. One argument against Intelligent Design, by the
way, would be that an intelligent designer would make childbirth easy, not
hard, even fatal.
And in a detailed story of a sacrifice winding around a large bowl,
I saw what must be the ur-Saul Steinberg dog in profile, the pooch that
delighted readers years ago in the New Yorker magazine (and in an
exhibit at the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art). I laughed until I
realized that the Steinberg dog often made me shiver then as it did here,
where it accompanied ghastly acts.
The exhibit closed 28 May 2006.
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The bowl's greatest dimension is about 4.75" (c. 11.4
cm) but was hard to measure from outside its glass cabinet; I eyeballed
it with a ruler because the catalog gave no sizes. The Banco Céntral
de Reserva del Perú owns it; the stockholders would revolt if Wachovia
owned such a thing. Brown, red - ! - and cream color it, which I left out
of the drawings below to speed the download. The menstrual blood pools out
of sight to the right. I was not allowed to photograph the object but the
museum docents encouraged me to draw it (I'm an artist).
The shadow under the "clitoris" is just that, not a depression
that might form the entrance to the vagina.
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I dropped the color from the drawings above and below to
speed up download. The menstrual blood in the cup is red as shown in the
first drawing.
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The drawings are copyright 2006 Harry Finley.
See a modern bowl, this one for
soaking used washable pads.
Next artist of menstruation: Mayra Alpízar
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See menstrual artifacts from Almora,
Uttar Pradesh state, India; Rajasthan
state, India; 19th-century
Norway; Italy; and instructions
for making Japanese and
German washable pads
from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
© 2006 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce or
distribute any of the work on this Web site in any manner or medium without
written permission of the author. Please report suspected violations to
hfinley@mum.org
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