Menstruation meets Antisemitism
Where ideas of 'corrupt' blood meet racialized notions of impurity IN MEN
Many false beliefs about menstruation persist, including that it is the release of a ‘corrupt’ kind of blood. This supposed corruption has been (and in some cases, still is) considered to be linked with not only biological impurity1 but also moral impurity. The process of menstruation, as a mythologized means of removing all manner of impurities, has in the past been both adopted by and conversely, assigned to certain men. I have written previously (in a journal article currently in press) about what I’ve learned of the cultural practice of ‘artificial’ menstruation by Wageva men, from a well-aged book titled, The Island of Menstruating Men: Religion in Wogeo, New Guinea by ethnologist, Ian Hogbin.2 Below is an excerpt of some of what I synthesized of Hogbin’s research, with regards to its relevance to my own technofeminist witchcraft practices (but to know the full relationship, you’ll have to wait to read my article):
For Wageva men, artificial menstruation is instigated by cutting their own penises in a ritual known as sara (Hogbin 1970, p. 88). Sara is preceded by fasting, after which an individual will enter the ocean, induce an erection, and gash the glans of the penis on both sides using a crab claw. The blood produced during this ritual is treated as taboo as any other menstrual blood and must not touch the individual but drip directly into the sea water until cessation. After the ritual, sexual and food restrictions must be observed coincident with lunar cycles. Yet, as Hogbin explains, men are not required to menstruate monthly—only, ‘regularly’—when some illness has occurred where heterosexual contact is deemed the cause:
For this illness, there is but one remedy, an immediate sara operation to remove [female impurities]… The salutary effects of penile surgery are said to be immediately observable. The man’s body loses its tiredness, his muscles harden, his step quickens, his eyes grow bright, and his skin and hair develop a luster. He therefore feels lighthearted, strong, and confident. This belief provides a means whereby the success of all perilous or doubtful undertakings can be guaranteed.
(Hogbin 1970, p. 91)
The Wageva employ this cultural technique which, as Hogbin discusses, exhibits the near universal understanding of magic/ritual as a framework for control—in this case, regarding the wider underlying premise of blood, especially menstrual blood, as powerful or dangerous (and thus requiring control) (Hogbin 1970, p. 172). By harnessing the phenomenological power of menstruation via ritualized simulation, Wogeo men find an avenue to assert some socio-physiological agency where women are seen to have innate power.
In this instance, the act of menstruation is believed to relieve cisgender women of sexual impurities, which as Hogbin explains further, are not necessarily seen as innate to their own bodies but occur as a result of (hetero)sex acts in general. Artificial menstruation rituals, then, provided an avenue for Wageva cis men to emulate a similar process in order to also relieve themselves of sexual impurities, with fortifying results. In this sense, all forms of menstruation are a biospiritual safeguard, wherein ‘health’ is conflated with the negotiation of the power of blood through ritual. This ritual has not been scientifically demonstrated as effective treatment for sexually transmitted infections,3 but it might have served to fortify a broad sense of ‘purity,’ as in a restorative function against sexual contact as spiritual destabilization that causes illness. Such conflations are not historically nor culturally unique but rather, almost universal in patriarchal religions across the world.
I discovered a recent journal publication that discusses another cultural instance of male ‘menstruation’: that of Jewish men.4 In this case, menstruation is not an act adopted by Jewish men for their own wellbeing, but rather is projected onto them as a set of deeply rooted misogynist and antisemitic mythologies.
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