Influencer Feminism and the Viral Grab
the viral grab at bloody miracles, biotech vampirism, and Nosferatu
The above image, which comes from my most recent keynote lecture delivered last week at University College Cork, is the perfect icon for one of the subjects I’m about to discuss in a most critical fashion. Namely, I want to assert that nobody should be knocking back a vampire shot.1 Yes, this is unfortunately a necessary conversation to have, and I’ll get into why shortly. I feel compelled to make my position very clear on this, given some recent events that I will elaborate on.
The above image shows one of my works, a staged photo which serves as a cheeky stab at pseudo advertising—a complete mockery, using the ad trope of a celebratory lifestyle moment. This was created for a lab-based project where I experimented with growing a branded “unclean” meat in vitro from menstrual fluid and stem cells. If you aren’t aware, lab-grown meat (or the idea of it, rather) is often referred to as “clean meat,” a moralized tech solution to industrial (red) meat production. The farce is that it still relies on animal bodies and significant energy consumption to power the bioreactors, incubators, etc. I’ve written about this over the past six years, and continue to include this discussion in my lectures.2
My unique project using menstrual blood and cells (instead of animal blood and cells) to grow a consumable tissue mass was essentially taking the piss out of such tech-evangelical claims by offering what could be a truly sustainable alternative: recurring, plentiful, and cruelty-free. However, this was with full cognition that such a speculative and provocative proposal would never actually materialize—not only because of cultural stigma, but also because: a) it would feasibly put women in control of such tech developments; and b) it isn’t researched enough—nobody should be surprised by this as women’s bodies and health are notoriously under-researched—and there are thus, a lot of potential unforeseen problems. Also, I discovered with my actual lab experimentation (to produce a proof of concept, of course) that menstrual fluid contains an enzyme or other bio-signal that reduces cell adhesion—that’s my original contribution to the scant or non-existent research.
A lack of cell adhesion means that cells won’t hang on to three-dimensional forms (spongy stuff, usually) that are the base structure for the ‘meat’—the scaffolds one needs to grow them on in order to produce a solid morsel. So, it’s a no-go for using menstrual fluid to grow meat, without some hormonal additives like progesterone or other biochemical intervention that neutralizes what I call that ‘letting go agent’ that is present.3 The fascinating thing is that human cells, especially stem cells, and ESPECIALLY menstrual stem cells are known to be super adherent—they are so sticky, in fact, that when I grow them in standard nutrient medium (not menstrual serum, but fetal calf serum), I am unable to dislodge them from the petri dishes or flasks without extreme effort. Let me explain this further: the dislodging process is an essential step in tissue culture, because the cells outgrow the flask and have to be split into more flasks as they continuously expand by the millions. Trypsin or Accutase, both enzymes (Trypsin is extracted from pig pancreas and Accutase from crustaceans), are used to dislodge the cells from the plastic surface of the dishes, so that they can then be diluted into more nutrient liquid (called a cell suspension) and either frozen or put into new flasks as a smaller population. It’s the solution to plate over-crowding, essentially. When I grow my menstrual cells, the Trypsin and Accutase don’t work as they normally would: what should take a mere two minutes to dislodge the cells (by partially digesting their cell wall) takes closer to 15 minutes, and even then, not all the cells lift. The trouble with this is that as the enzymes break down the cell wall over a series of minutes, there is a risk of destroying the cells entirely.
That being said, here is the unique observation from my experiments: when I grew the cells in menstrual serum, they proliferated well enough (meaning they grew and remained viable) but just lifted off the plastic on their own. That means that whatever is present in the menstrual fluid is potentially more effective than the enzymes typically used. I tested the pH of the menstrual serum and it was neutral, so it wasn’t an overly acidic or basic substance and shouldn’t have degraded the cells. There is something else, an enzyme or other, in menstrual fluid that makes cells easily release—which, if you think about it, makes absolutely perfect sense for shedding a uterine lining. I did find one paper that discussed a biochemical pathway for this.4 To sum this up again with regards to my project, menstrual fluid is not a good choice for growing meat in the lab purely because its biochemical properties don’t support the process. I want you to now hang on this this new tidbit of information, about how menstrual fluid effects soft tissues, for my future discussion.
There is serious potential biomedical use for menstrual fluid—mainly with the unique endometrial stem cells present in the bloody discharge. There are a few scientists who have done more recent research about this (as recent as 2022), though they still face ridiculous obstacles in pushing the research forward, as have I. Nevertheless, menstrual stem cells have been shown to be potentially beneficial for neural tissue repair and cardiac tissue repair, among other things. I’ve written about and referenced these things already in the two papers that I link in the endnotes, as indicated above (endnotes number 3 and 4).
NOW, for my critique regarding a couple of current incidents.
Spectacularized social media representations of the seemingly miraculous, unrecognized ‘powers’ of menstrual blood can be problematic, particularly when couched in mass-marketed ‘girl power,’ ‘goddess energy,’ or capitalist feminism.5 In the case of social media, I’ll call it Influencer Feminism: a niche, neoliberal strain of social marketing hugely bolstered by viral branding strategies.
…the movement for women's liberation has become entangled in a dangerous liaison with neoliberal efforts to build a free-market society… Invoking the feminist critique… it harnesses the dream of women's emancipation to the engine of capital accumulation…6
The specific social media marketing I’m talking about harnesses rebellion against stigmas surrounding menstruation and operates loudly and proudly in spite of it, which is great in principle. However, what I’ve noticed is a sometimes reckless pendulum swing from ‘forbidden’ to ‘miraculous’ in the tired, old, dichotomous ideologies of a Western culture crippled by polarized thinking. Nuance is lacking, and so is responsible behaviour. I will dissect this meticulously for you, giving a couple of concrete examples that I encountered (and have publicly countered).
But first, this post unfurls fog tentacles towards you through the lingering haze of jet-lag—imagined as a mist from each respective ocean I’ve recently traversed: Mediterranean, Irish, Atlantic, and Pacific. This has been a challenging, yet lively way to begin 2025: escaping the dry clutches of interior Canadian winter to the balmy seaside of Limassol, followed by shorter visits to the mild, moist climes of Edinburgh and Cork, then coming to rest a while on Maui.7
In Limassol, at NeMe Arts Centre, I presented an artist talk titled, Badly Behaved Biotech—Feminist Subversions. Connecting with NeMe through the lovely Nicosia-based Bioart Coven member, Marisa Satsia,8 allowed me to introduce Cyprus to my approach to biotechnologies, through feminist art and science practice.9 NeMe (pronounced ‘neem’) is focused on critical inquiry through the arts, and is an excellent contemporary cultural resource in the heart of Limassol’s charming Old Town. NeMe was founded by Cypriot architect, Yiannis Colakides and Australian artist, Helene Black.10 I was unsure of the level of receptivity my talk would receive, though it did make the national news, including use of the word ‘clitoris’ in the article (though they kept that one word in English)! I was delighted with the kinds of questions I received after the talk, including from one woman who made the analogy of capitalist biotech being vampiric in its extraction of the life blood of artistic innovations. I do love a bloody good metaphor. More on vampires to follow…
After this, I gave a keynote presentation titled Radical Feminist Methodologies Across the Arts and Sciences to the stellar research community at University College Cork’s Future Humanities Institute (directed by Canadian theatre vocalist, Yvon Bonenfant). This was such a privilege—not only to be invited to visit the hometown of my granddad’s family (and I did experience notable cultural familiarities) but also to commingle with a collective of truly engaged, genial academics. It was a restorative set of interactions, demonstrating how a well-functioning university works to support research/ researchers. I was treated like a total rock star and made numerous fruitful connections, including being invited to very exciting future collaborative projects. You’ll have to wait to see what is gestating (most literally) from those invitations.
Along the way, I also had a chance to touch down in Edinburgh to catch up with my son and his partner, and see the new Nosferatu film in the 1914 arthouse cinema, Cameo Picturehouse—a perfect location to watch it, really. SPOILER ALERT: Skip this paragraph if you haven’t seen the film yet! Nosferatu, though a cinematographic delight with remarkable renditions of scenes from the book, Dracula, left a bad taste in my mouth due to its failure to nuance the usual misogynist tropes. Where were the hungry female vampires in the castle, who exercised power by toying mercilessly with the stalwart and seemingly incorruptible Thomas, breaking his moral character? He remained relatively untainted in his heroism, and thus banal. I felt there was also so much potential for more wildish, complex interpretations of the story’s demonizing and pathologizing of female desire, as well as the blood-drenched sex scene that concludes the film.11 Basically, I felt that blood, as a sexual agent, wasn’t given its due. Lily-Rose Depp does get a few moments of refreshing manic ribaldry in her uncontained hysteria, when she (as Ellen Hunter) uses Thomas as a fuck boy to rile the supernatural jealousy of her demonic stalker whilst simultaneously freeing herself, but it could have been pushed further. Corrupted innocence redeemed through female self-sacrifice has grown as old as Count Orlock himself. Let’s not overlook the fact that Orlock is, for all intents and purposes, a wealthy pedophile who groomed a lonely young girl, leaving her with irreconcilable nightmarish yearnings for the rest of her short life. Instead of grabbing the bull by the horns and tackling her demon on the mattress of Victorian propriety, she quiesces to utter ruination (death) as ultimate absolution.
Now, back to ‘Influencer Feminism’ and the conundrum of social media proselytizing on the virtues of menstrual blood: I have two examples to discuss, both with similar problematic implications. In each case, the influencer in question was misleading, though one much, much more than the other. Example 1 is from an artistic context, while Example 2 is from a scientific context.
Example 1: Jasmine Alicia Carter, self-described Sacred Woman, Menstrual Artist, and Womb Maven, who specializes in “Womb Continuum Care.” Carter, who has over 71,000 followers on Instagram alone, creates large-scale mandalas painted with her diluted menstrual blood. They are beautiful paintings, and she gracefully performs the embodied process of working with her blood to create the flowery mandalas on her studio floor space. The results are impressive.
What I have a problem with, however, is her cherry-picking of scientific research articles about the properties of menstrual fluid to support her belief that drinking it is a health-boosting thing to do. I called her out on this on a post where I saw that she encouraged others to go ahead and try it in the comments, and she completely disregarded my caution, instead claiming that she and her friends all do it, so it must be fine. Since that post, she has created another specific post about how she drinks her menstrual blood with cacao mixed in, as an ‘elixir.’ In her caption, she now has added the disclaimer that, “I don’t invite you to drink your blood…” but then goes on to explain why she does it, framing her choice of “sipping [her] blood as a self-love ritual.” It is apparently, “…soothing, grounding and gives [her] immediate energy.”12 She then goes on to cherry pick factoids from research papers, completely out of context.
Drinking menstrual fluid is not free from harmful health effects and promoting such a thing, especially as an influencer with that kind of reach, is egregiously irresponsible. Menstruators who are sexually active will harbour not only their own microbial communities within their vaginas, but also that of sexual partners (at least, for a time) and other environmental microbes, such as those found in lakes where one might swim, for example. Some of those microbes may be pathogens. Pathogenic species can be present in the vaginal canal but kept in check by the commensal (what we call ‘friendly’) species that thrive there and thus, they don’t have much of an opportunity to overgrow. However, dump that ecosystem down your throat and what might you get? Thrush may be the first thing that comes to mind, but it could be more harmful than that: many people don’t know that they are infected with things like HPV (human papillomavirus) since it can be asymptomatic. Many of us don’t get tested for HPV unless it’s part of public health policy in our countries (and it isn’t policy yet in places like Canada, for example). Typically a gynecological exam, now required once every three years, tests for abnormal cervical cells but not for an active HPV infection. It is only when notable abnormalities are present that one is sent off for further screening. Therefore, unwittingly dumping a bloody bevvie full of HPV-infected cells and tissues down your throat could feasibly cause an HPV infection in the throat, which can lead to throat cancer.13 You see my point.
Carter’s influencer feminism is misguided in this regard, not grounded in biomedical science, despite her having read one or two scientific articles that she applies out of context. There are no studies to show health benefits from drinking menstrual fluid. That is the stuff of myth or ancient custom. I’ll be the first to vouch for the fact that myth and traditional medicinal practices often contain inklings of ancient wisdom, but these things can and do get wildly bastardized over time and cannot be blindly relied upon without rigorous study to validate them in our present context—in order to avoid causing public harm.
This leads me to the second case, not as irresponsible and potentially harmful as the example above, but still contributing to convoluted public misunderstandings and misrepresentation.
Example 2: “Alice, PhD Researcher” posting as the brand, DITTO on all major social media platforms. Alice has over 22k followers on Instagram alone. On her DITTO website (yet to be fully launched), Alice promises that by, “using the highest quality research and the coolest biotechnology…” she’s, “…created something that’s proven to actually work” and you can sign up to “be the first to know” when it’s launched. That’s great for Alice and I wish her all the best with her business and research endeavours; I’m all for increased menstrual awareness and more rigorous and helpful research. Her marketing language sounds like the usual start-up bait and hook, but there’s nothing overly problematic about that. She may well deliver on her promise, and I hope she does.
My real issue with Alice’s social media branding strategy is that she is producing numerous videos of herself at work in some unidentified lab, doing unspecified experiments, donning a lab coat and presuming the mantle of scientific authority and feminism all at once whilst overlaying captions that reference short factoids from scientific research papers that are not in her field nor what she’s actually demonstrating. The one that was brought to my attention over and over again (by people who know my work), was a short Instagram / TikTok reel with a catchy popular tune (“Just A Girl” by No Doubt) where she extols the virtues of menstrual stem cells as the future of Alzheimer’s disease research, saying that, “…menstrual stem cells are super charged!!” The bioengineering research in question is very promising, but hasn’t yet gone to clinical trials on humans, as another (more measured) influencer, Dr Karan Rajan points out in his repost of her video.14 Alice is a nutritionist, not a stem cell researcher, and not even doing general cell culture from what I see in her videos, so is not what I would consider a reliable source of information about the applications for this research. More than that, though: presenting herself as the face (let’s face it, the ‘brand’) of such research in order to build her own brand (to sell whatever it is that is, “proven to actually work”—we don’t know yet) is disingenuous and has caused a flurry of social media users to once again imagine that since menstrual stem cells are such miraculous things, perhaps drinking menstrual fluid will have some curative properties for whatever ails them. I’ve had to discourage some of these people from doing just such a thing. Although I think Alice’s research is probably pretty exciting and I look forward to seeing her results, I think that as a researcher, she should be more responsible in her representations, given the public misunderstandings that can result and possible harm that can come from it.
Think back to HPV, but more than that, think back to the tissue digesting properties of menstrual fluid, as I discovered with my research. Is that what we want in our throats, people? Beyond this, stem cells are complex and interesting cell types, that can differentiate into other cell types, based on signalling they receive from the other cells in whatever microenvironment they’re in. Thus, swallowing a bunch of stem cells isn’t necessarily going to have some controlled regenerative effect, but could have unwanted or unanticipated effects. There are so many potential outcomes, none of which are adequately understood. Yes, this is precisely because there is not enough research on women’s bodies and health. But, for the love of the goddess, we mustn’t put the cart before the lab-grown horse.
A ‘vampire shot’ is the slang term for a full menstrual cup. As Urban Dictionary explains, “A menstrual cup… is a medical-grade silicone device some women use to collect menstrual blood. Cups generally hold 1 ounce of fluid, the same volume as a standard shot glass. This nickname follows the logic of the nickname for tampons, vampire tea bag.” I don’t recommend looking up the extended slang definition of ‘vampire tea bag.’ You were warned. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Vampire%20Shot
You can read the first paper, here, though it’s behind a paywall: https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/tear_00039_1
This article is open-access: https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2023.2231666
You can read more about this set of experiments and see my list of references, including that research paper, at the above link.
Also known as neoliberal feminism or ‘choice’ feminism. For more, see https://harvardpolitics.com/girlboss-gaslight-gatekeep/
Excerpted from “How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it” by Nancy Fraser for The Guardian. Read the full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal
I’m certainly aware of the carbon footprint of flying between five countries in one month—though it does seem negligible compared to the year-long industrialized military decimation of parts of the Middle East and the relentless consumption of billionaires. Regardless, I am committed to cycling everywhere, whenever possible.
See more of Marisa and her medical art practice here: https://www.instagram.com/medartcabinet/
The talk received national coverage leading up to the event, including an article in Philenews, the most widely read newspaper in Cyprus. It’s in Greek, here: https://www.philenews.com/events/i-protoporos-whitefeather-hunter-analii-praktikes-tis-viologikis-technis-se-omilia-stin-kipro/
Read more about NeMe here: https://www.neme.org/about/neme-arts-centre
Read more here by a film reporter who was into it as it was portrayed, along with some film stills that show exactly what I’m talking about: https://decider.com/2025/01/24/nosferatu-sex-scene-lily-rose-depp-bill-skarsgard-gross/
See the post for yourself:
More information on HPV-caused throat cancer here: https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/hpv/oropharyngeal-cancer.html
You can see that video with a more cautionary, measured take here:
Super-interesting, this cell-releasing property/agent/enzyme in menstrual blood.
Enterpreneural pseudo-feminist vampyrism and influencer culture. What a whirlwind.
Super fascinating post! I could go on and on about the ways endometriosis research is always presented as "groundbreaking" but rarely is. I need to pick your brain more about the stickiness of menstrual cells.