The Bear and the Maiden Fair

In GoT, Brienne of Tarth insists on multiple occasions that though she is highborn, she is certainly not a lady. She does not live the cushy lifestyle of ladies nor does she dress like them. Instead, she lives as a knight fighting for chivalry, honor, and glory. Though her large physique allows her to fight against male knights, she faces many social challenges due to her gender. Strict gender roles of the day labeled Brienne as a sort of gender bender stuck uncomfortably between the male and female world.

Brienne first proved that she was a good fighter when she defeated the charming and talented Sir Loris in a sword fight. As a prize, King Renly Borathean grants Brienne a favor and she requests a place in his King’s Guard. Though Brienne is clearly fit for the position, the crowd is shocked when the King decides to give her the prestigious position. Though the position greatly increases Brienne’s agency and power, she is not given the same amount of respect as the male knights of equal rank.  

While escorting Jamie Lannister to King’s Landing, their first conversation revolves entirely around her appearance and fighting abilities. After learning her family name, the next thing Jamie asks is, “Have you know many men? Of course not. Women? Horses?” He goes on to mention how ugly she is and that she could never possibly beat him in a fight. Comments about both her sexual past and her womanly disadvantage continue throughout the journey.

Later, when Brienne and Jamie are captured by Locke under the orders of House Bolton, she is not given the same respect as her fellow male prisoner. The first thing the men do when they set up camp is attempt to gang rape Brienne. The men only stop because Jamie points out that Brienne is highborn and could bring a large ransom. Later, when they arrive at Harranhal to be delivered to Lord Roose Bolton who insists that his men find something “appropriate” for Brienne to wear. She is uncomfortably stuffed into a pink dress and is encouraged to behave like a “lady.”

After Jamie leaves Harranhal along with Lord Bolton, Brienne is left in Locke’s care yet again. He decides that she is worth no more than entertainment, and throws her in a bear pit with nothing for protection but a wooden sword. While she is down there the men sing a song called The Bear and the Maiden Fair which goes something like this:

Oh, I'm a maid, and I'm pure and fair!
I'll never dance with a hairy bear!
I called a knight, but you're a bear!
All black and brown and covered in hair!

He lifted her high in the air!
He sniffed and roared and he smelled her there!
She kicked and wailed, the maid so fair!
He licked the honey all up in her hair!

She sighed and she squealed and she kicked the air!
Then she sang: My bear! My bear so fair!
And off they went into the summer air!
The bear, the bear,
And the maiden fair!

            This is not the entire song, but you get the picture. Yet again, Brienne’s accomplishments are ignored and she is seen as a regular women, less respected than other highborn ladies because she does not fit the norm. At the same time, all the men can concentrate on is her sexuality and whether or not she is a virgin or not. Even when they throw her to her death, the men of Harranhal joyously sing of a “bear” stealing her virginity. 

Personhood and the Mechanics of Masculine Menstruation

    In its application as a symbol, blood is one of the most varied of all icons. Some associate the flow of blood with death, others with signs of life while even others associate blood with resurrection implications or healing properties. In some readings, it's seen as pure, while in others blood is a putrefying substance. Blood is completely universal in its appearance in both literature and mythic traditions, but its meaning is interpreted on a spectrum which touches all ranges of societal implications from class, gender, race, religiosity, and humanity. With all of this taken into consideration, it is fascinating to note that societal implications as to how one bleeds factors with equal importance to the nature of the blood itself. In fact, assertions have been made throughout history concerning the nature of bleeding, both conscious and otherwise, especially in distinguishing a kind of otherness in a group of people. For example, numerous early to late Medieval tracts declare that Jews possess an otherness of blood, going so far as to say that Jews require blood for ritualistic practices and that Jewish men have a similar flow of blood to that of women, hexed eternally with "cursu menstruo sanguinis" (Katz 441). However, in total there were numerous instances of overlapping bodily mechanics which blurred the lines between the masculine and feminine body and the demonstrable traits they possessed.

     The understanding of what menstruation was helped shape the conceptions of male menstruation in medieval literature. The thought behind menstruation in the first place according to Galen was that women used their monthly cycle as a kind of run off for excess blood building up in the body and thereby disrupting the humors (Kats 442). Pubescent boys were also noted to have a similar release valve reminiscent of their female counterparts, noted by Seperto. He is quoted as stating that the seemingly notable increase in nosebleeds in pubescent boys was a mechanical synonym for girls of the same age who first achieved menses (Katz 446). In all of these respects, however, the feminizing of monthly bleeding still dominates ideas surrounding the mechanics, and in this Jewish men found themselves as targets for effeminate as well as unclean suppositions. There are other recorded instances of masculine lactation, or stand-ins for menstruation present in males such as hemorrhoids or bloodletting through various orifices. 

     All told, medieval medicine tried in many ways to note the corresponding aspects of both the feminine and masculine bodies and demonstrate similarities between gendered bodily mechanics. This overlap continues to demonstrate the medieval ideas of gender and defining characteristics by means of the observable. As medical understanding grew, the corresponding attributes waned, but the assertions and assumptions surrounding these mechanics stayed present in both culture and literature.


Works Cited:

Katz, David S.. “Shylock's Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in Early Modern England”. The Review of English Studies 50.200 (1999): 440–462. JSTOR

Youthful Obsessions

In “Only Women Bleed,” Peggy McCracken discusses the value virginal women’s blood had over non-virginal women’s blood in the medieval period. She states “the intact virgin’s body incarnates a unique purity and the virtue of the body guarantees the virtue of the blood,” thus implying that once a woman has lost her only virtue-purity, she is no longer of value. Interesting enough, a girl becomes a commodity to men when she starts her period, and after she is sold off/bargained for/what have you, she sheds blood once again on her wedding night, she sheds also her purity and virtue, thus rendering her blood tainted. This idea can be observed with Daenerys, once she gets her period she can now has obtaining exchange value that her brother can abuse for his own in creating a bond with the Dothraki people, which is valuable to him.

Her value is lowered, yet she remains as one other source of profit, her fertility. She grants men the promise of promoting their bloodline, and once she has successfully produced children and raised them to the appropriate age (with the aid of her tainted breast milk!), she has proven of value and can now expire.

This concept is reiterated by Cersei’s constant fear of the younger and prettier queen that will one day come to replace her. She is plagued (pun intended) with nightmares involving her uncontrolled bleeding and shamefulness she feels towards her own body. She becomes winded more easily, and cannot fit in her older dresses, constant reminder that her body is aging. She is resentful of Margaery’s youthful beauty, as she reminisces and clings to a younger, more beautiful image of herself. Cersei also mentions a Maiden’s Day, which was a celebration that only virgin maids could attend, further revealing the praise of the virgin female.

If we associate virginity with youth, and if virginity measured a woman’s value, then in order to put this in a more current context, we could relate this concept to the pedophilic nature of our society. Young girls are taught that “daddy” is the only man you need, and similar ceremonies are still present in our society today such as ‘Purity Balls’ and the ‘Silver Ring Thing,’ which are eerily similar to the Maiden’s Day celebration Cersei spoke of.

Likewise, society has created an unobtainable set standard of physical perfection that is associated with youthfulness. Women are still only a commodity based on the agreeableness of their appearance. Men show off their ‘trophy wives’ and replace her with a new one when they are no longer to their likings. Anorexia, and other eating disorders determinant the youth of our nation, while plastic surgery keeps its economy afloat.

Don't Be a Girl if You Want To Play Games- Advice from a cis gendered (half) white male.

       I’ve had my share of experiences with tabletop games and MMORPGs, and I can honestly say that they’re some of the most enjoyable and rewarding game experiences that I’ve ever had. Dungeons and Dragons especially is fun as shit and rewarding. However, I’ve noticed that there are some inherently misogynistic ideas and characters in games like this, as well as the converse.

For example, to start off on a good note, a D&D campaign that I know about from a friend because I was totally, definitely not a part of it took place in the Underdark, a vast system of caves below the surface which is home to many evil or otherwise unsavory characters. Many of these denizens are drow elves, who are essentially the dominant race in the Underdark. The drow society is divided into houses, which are essentially bloodlines who hold power. The leaders of these houses are always women, making the drow society matriarchal. In fact, there was one instance where a character named Kokswob, a serial murderer and public masturbator, attempted to kidnap a drow woman for whatever twisted purpose, but was unable to due to getting his ass whooped.

Before I go into this next part, I should mention that I have less experience with MMO’s but, enough to know a bit about what I’m talking about.

In the 8^th grade, I made a female character in Runescape. Not for any particular reason, except because I thought the name GingerHumps was funny as shit. I noticed immediately the number of desperate dudes who I assume were my age and younger willing to shower me in free shit. There were also some who would ask me to be their “gf,” and when I’d refuse I’d receive barrages of “sloot,” or “hore,” a couple of “bitxh” here and there, and even a couple “kunt,” but perhaps my favorite was “****.”

I also played this one poorly made MMO called Defiance, which was free on Xbox, I named my obviously male character, “Dairy Queen,” mostly due to the fact that I had recently eaten a delicious and satisfying meal at Dairy Queen and felt it appropriate to give them free advertising space in my username.

People assumed I was a female and anytime I did anything wrong, or said anything mildly irritating, I would receive an assload of people who would call me a “bitch” or an “attention whore” because they thought I was a woman. I honestly found it hilarious, but it makes me feel a little sorry for any woman who dares to get into a verbal altercation with anybody in a free, poorly made MMO like Defiance. It’s clear that games like that aren’t tailored toward women, but they are not accepting of them either, which is sad.     

The P Word

In Peggy McCracken’s “Only Women Bleed”, she makes a point to say there are multifaceted views of menstruation in medieval literature.  “… the exploration of the value of menstrual blood in medieval culture allows us to perceive that menstrual blood can be seen as both polluting and healing, as a sign of fertility and as a sign of death, or as a curse and as an ingredient in a love potion…” (6). However, the negative connotations of menstruation seem to outweigh the positive, especially, when men and women’s bodies or blood are compared: “semen was seen as a pure form of blood that demonstrates the superiority of the hot, dry male body over the humid, cold female body” (4). This view proposed by Aristotle, influenced many medieval writers, thus resulting in the idea that women’s bodies and blood are to be perceived as inferior. Menstruation making them more vulnerable, and more unlike to their male counterparts: “Menstrual blood, like other bodily wastes (urine or feces), is anomalous, ‘out of place’” (5). Many medieval discourses refer to menstruation as “a polluting blood, a feature of the imperfect female body whose imperfections mirror the perfections of the male body”, ultimately, “men’s blood is more valorized and women’s blood more marginalized” (20) in majority of medieval literature and therefore, creates a negative stigma of menstruation while adhering to the continuation of misogynistic views.

                While reading this article I decided to find modern day examples of the menstruation/period stigma. This menstrual taboo is very much alive in today’s society.

These pictures above are just recent examples that reiterate the stigma of periods. On the left is a picture of a student, Rupi Kaur, who decided to make the ‘menstruation taboo’ as a theme in her college photo project.  When she posted it on the social network, Instagram, it created a lot of controversy. At first it was deleted by the network because it did not fit the “community guide lines”.

The picture on the right is called “The Bride”, a chandelier made out of 25,000 tampons done by Joana Vasconcelos. She tried to include her work at the Palace of Versailles, but it was banned because it was referred to as a “sexual work.”

Even in the political realm, Hillary Clinton was negatively associated with menstruation:

The attitudes against women and their bodies in medieval literature can be applied to contemporary times. Periods and menstruation is still a subject that alienates women. 

So, one question remains: how different would the views on menstrual bleeding be if men had periods?

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/if-men-had-periods/

Dude Periods?

Women suffer, we all know this, women have suffered from a multitude of things over time and there is one thing that continues to plague every single woman every single month. Menstruation. Not only do we have the blissful gift of birthing children but the ability to give birth to those children comes from a painful sometimes week long ordeal starting around our teenage years until we hit menopause (another gift from God to women). Thankfully the women of today have many options for dealing with our monthly gift, unlike the women from the medieval period. Medieval women had the awesome choice between a cotton scrap of fabric somehow attached to their lady bits to absorb the blood or they could “also wind cotton fabric around a twig and use it as a proto-tampon” (Source One). So while medieval women were walking around with cramps and twig tampons inside of them the medieval men composed stories and myths about the effects of menstrual blood. It was believed that it was poisonous, dirty, and acid-like, it could defy nature and create trenches, etc. All around menstruation was a pretty negative thing to have and talk about in the medieval era, yet it was not reserved solely for women but it also was believed that Jewish men menstruated as well. What’s worse than a menstruating woman? A menstruating Jewish man. 

People believed that Jewish men bled from their bottoms just like women because their bodies were not fully formed like Christian male bodies (same was believed about female bodies), their body temperature did not reach that of Christian males therefore they bled just like women. This butt bleeding was apparently believed to be karmic retribution for crucifying Jesus, which makes you wonder what exactly did women do to deserve periods (according to medieval men)? There even was circumcision ceremonies held for boys to replicate the coming of age period ceremonies for young girls so that it seemed that men too could possibly have children. It’s comical nowadays to look back on the crazy medieval people who thought that menstrual blood was like acid or that Jewish men bled from their bottoms but have we really come that far ourselves? Periods today are still an almost taboo thing to talk about, at least around men and kids. The commercials use blue liquid to “test” the absorption of pads and for some reason they always show women doing things like tennis in all white clothing, which is not something I think any woman wants to do while on her period. One of the articles I read mentioned that the brand Kotex is “running a campaign to explain that no, you won't get eaten by sharks if you wear a tampon in the sea during that time of the month” (Source Two).

Over the course of a woman’s lifetime she might spend around $18, 171 on things she needs for her period (pads, tampons, pain relievers, etc.) (Source 3). So yeah maybe society as whole does not believe that women’s periods can cause leprosy anymore and that Jewish men aren’t defying biology by also having butt periods but we’re still at a point where it’s shameful to see period blood and where women are spending almost twenty grand on something they can’t control. 

Source One:  http://onthetudortrail.com/Blog/2015/02/10/the-lady-in-red-medieval-menstruation/

Source Two: http://www.bustle.com/articles/80289-7-crazy-period-myths-from-history-because-people-once-thought-menstrual-blood-could-kill-crops

Source Three: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/18/period-cost-lifetime_n_7258780.html

Seeds in Game of Thrones

     It is very apparent that women have always been inferior in the eyes of men, even in our current present day. Tracing back to Medieval times, women's bodies were considered deformed, polluted, and especially, disgusting. In an article titled, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, Alcuin Blamires discusses two specific theories. These theories are called the one and two seed theory. Blamires details the one seed theory, stated by Aristotle, as men giving the vast majority of uniqueness to their children. Mothers are known as the vessels for children, while fathers contribute the children's overall being. As opposed to the one seed theory, the two seed theory, described by Galen, states that a child receives two seeds, but one is stronger than the other. Both theories degrade women to the bottom of the gender totem pole, but how do these theories pertain to certain instances like incest, heirs, and power, which all connect to a simple character from the Game of Thrones, Cersei Lannister.

Cersei is the widowed wife of Robert Baratheon, the Queen regent of the Seven Kingdoms, mother of Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen, and shares a incestuous relationship with her twin Jaime Lannister. Cersei’s role as Queen Regent to guide her sons as they take the throne and be a mother queen as the new queen steps in line. Cersei demands power in the Seven kingdoms because she has suffered throughout her life and has pushed her way to get to the top and does everything she can to remain there. Cersei considers herself Tywin’s best son due to the fact that she is the only child who takes her father’s advice and does what she’s told. Although Cersei is the only female child of Tywin, she stands as the most masculine in the sense that she uses her knowledge and gender role to get her to the throne. Another spin to Cersei’s character is that she not only has an incestuous relationship with her twin brother Jaime, Cersei’s children are also fathered by Jaime.

Pertaining this back to the seed theories, how does Cersei relate to both or one of the theories and how can that reflect on women from Medieval times? Looking at the one seed theory, our present day Biology tells us that men determine the sex of children. Comparing this to the one seed theory, since men give the vast majority of uniqueness to their children, that would mean that when females are born, the mother’s seed was stronger than the father’s. This can relate back to Cersei being Tywin’s best son because her seed was able to beat out Jaime’s seed. But if you look at the two seed theory, Myrcella would be considered a deformed, mutilated man and Cersei’s seed was stronger in the sense that it deformed one of her children. So which theory would Cersei follow? Cersei shared a womb with her twin brother, so why would her blood be different than Jaime’s? Just because her body is different to her brother’s does not mean she did not contribute the same characteristics to her children. Cersei is a great example to test the contradictions within these theories because it allows the readers to look at the one sided views on women and how those views can’t follow that men create the children and women are just the vessel.   

"Men have scars, women mysteries": Blood magic in ASOIAF as a reproduction of Aristotle's blood hierarchy

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle wrote about blood hierarchies. He believed that all bodily fluids were the same, just more or less purified versions of blood. He named semen as the top of this hierarchy, calling it "the final form of nourishment," the pinnacle of purification. Of course, he placed menstrual blood at the bottom of the hierarchy:

Now the weaker creature [woman] too must of necessity produce a residue greater in amount and less thoroughly concocted, and this, if such is its character, be of necessity a volume of bloodlike fluid... the secretion in females which answers to semen is the menstrual fluid.

This idea that men's bodily secretions were somehow cleaner and more refined than women's (shockingly) prevailed in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. This resulted in a lot of, let's just say, interesting tall tales—my personal favorite being the myth that women with irregular or no periods could shoot acidic menstrual blood out of their eyes like lasers.

I dunno, watching election news kinda makes me think that myth didn't go away.

Interestingly, in George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, women's menstrual blood isn't construed as acidic or bile-like, or really even (all that) disgusting. It's another form of blood, and the only time men concern themselves with female blood at all seems to be when they're concerned with whether a girl is old enough to marry, and as proof of her virginity on her wedding night.

But George doesn't get off the hook that easily. See, in his world, women's blood may not create deep trenches in the earth or poison babies, but it is the only blood explicitly used in magic and prophecy. And, in a series comprised of 5 books and roughly 1,770,000 words (so far), that connection isn't to be ignored.

Blood magic starts off in the first book of the series, A Game of Thrones, when the maegi Mirri Maaz Duur uses both horse's blood to force a miscarriage onto Daenerys—a bloody affair in and of itself—to keep Khal Drogo alive, in a vegetative state. The magic Dany had begged the witch to do involved her own blood and her child's to do, and it gave her only a husk of her husband. 

The next interaction with blood magic isn't much better: A Feast for Crows opens with a young Cersei going to Maggy the Frog (also a maegi—white people just can't pronounce foreign words) for her fortune. The witch requires Cersei's blood to tell her, and the future she reads is dark, haunting Cersei to the present day.

Even in sheer prophecy, not even blood magic, women's blood is key. In the third book, A Storm of Swords, Patchface (the court fool of Stannis Baratheon) sings a lunatic song that later turns out to prophesy the Red Wedding, one of the biggest turning points of the series' main military conflict, the War of the Five Kings. He sings:

Fool's blood
King's blood
Blood on the maiden's thigh
But chains for the guests
And chains for the bridegroom
Aye, aye, aye 

Thus, the Red Wedding, at which the war loses its best contender at his uncle's wedding, it is still of some fundamental importance to mention that a woman, and a maiden nonetheless, will bleed. Even in the magic of prophecy, far removed from blood magic, blood is vital, and the blood of women is essential.

So George doesn't write about women's blood being disgusting, or lesser, in any such terms, but he instead writes another iteration of the same perspective: women's blood is the only blood imbued with magic, and women's blood should be feared for it. There is as much a blood hierarchy in ASOIAF as there is in medieval literature and thought—when men are wounded in battle, it's honorable, but when women bleed, it's often sorcery.

In A Clash of Kings, Cersei Lannister tells Sansa Stark, "A woman's life is nine parts mess to one part magic, you'll learn that soon enough... and the parts that look like magic turn out to be the messiest of all." Little does Sansa—or most readers—know just how right she is.

A Human Nugget: The Potentiality of Women's Bodies in Medieval Times through The King of Tars and Two-Egg Theory

In the tale of The King of Tars, a Christian woman and a Pagan sultan are wed and produce a monstrous child: limbless, a round of flesh with no blood or bone, no eyes or nose or other facial features, and stone cold dead. While the tale goes on (spoiler alert: converting to Christianity fixes everything), viewing the scene of the child's birth and existence alongside classical and medieval thought on the potentiality of women's bodies can, in a way, explain everything. A major feature in Aristotle's thinking of conception and women's bodies is that a child's creation required man's sperm, the uniqueness and provider of a soul, with the mother acting as a passive vessel. A woman's body in this Aristotelian concept is additionally the provider of a physical potentiality of a child -- which is a logical jump because a period is a (failed) potentiality to create life. Because this potentiality alone cannot produce a life, a period exists; but add semen to the mix, and poof! Automagically a baby is born (or so says medieval thought). However, Aristotle is not the only philosopher whose contributions make it into The King of Tars -- this is where Galen and his Two-Seed Theory comes into play. Two-Seed Theory is essentially assuming that a man's seed (sperm) and a woman's seed (ovum) fight a battle of epic proportions, and whichever emerges victorious is the parent whom the child shares its appearance. With a combination of Aristotle's view that woman is simply a physical matter-producing vessel, representing only the potential for life, and Galen's idea of the Two-Seed process wherein either parent's appearance could become the child's basic structural pattern, one option is that because a woman is incapable of producing a body with a soul or any unique features they are blessed with a human version of a chicken nugget. Granted, this not only would support Aristotle's idea of woman being unable to create life, but also follow many other medieval beliefs about where the blame of an imperfect baby stems from: the mother. In our previous text on the Man of Law's Tale we discussed that the state of an imperfect child is considered entirely the fault of the mother in medieval thought, due to either the moisture level of the womb, the temperature, the (im)purity of the mother's thoughts, or any number of reasons. One argument that could be made is that because the mother is naturally flawed, even if she has the correct moisture, temperature, and pure thoughts, she still produces offspring with a major deformity because her "seed" was victorious in Galen's understanding, but was unable to produce a normal infant because such a seed is only a potentiality without the aid of a man's sperm in Aristotle's understanding.

Of course, as the main character is a Christian woman, everyone else needs to just convert to Christianity and everyone will live in a magic fairytale land, happily ever after. Jesus will shed tears of rainbows and bless the nugget as the king of all nuggets, dubbed Nugget McDonald, ruler of McDonald Land.
                        

Nugget army of King Nugget McDonald

Periods Suck, but They Give You Powers

         The articles we browsed in class, particularly "The Seeds of Rotting Fruit," spent a large deal of time focusing on the utter disgust of womanly fluids. Medieval menstruation was categorized under an overwhelming labeling of pollution and disgust. The mere association of the divine Jesus Christ with a human woman's womb was a concept of revulsion, for women's bodies and fluids were tantamount with excrement. Yet, in modern Western culture, the topic of menstruation is broached as a positive, if not merely necessary, attribute of entrance into womanhood. Though menstruation is an uncomfortable topic of discussion for most young preteens/early teenagers, I have never heard an adult openly criticize or degrade menstruation (unless they were bitching about their own period problems). I was therefore interested in seeing if there were any other positive views on menstruation in other cultures.

         The website http://www.maximhy.com/blog/2012/05/30/perspectives-on-menstruation-from-different-cultures/ relates that some cultures and healers actually believed that their were health benefits to periods and placenta, though a lot of the information seemed to confirm the ancient deleterious views on womanly fluids that we discussed in class. A patriarchal tribe in Papua New Guinea, dubbed the Sambia, paralleled Aristotle's thoughts (from "Woman Defamed and Woman Defended") on body fluids. Like Aristotle, they believed that semen was a source of masculine power—but they even went so far as engaging in "ritualized homosexuality," "semen ingestion practices," and blaming women for trying to steal their semen (and therefore power) throughout intercourse. We discussed in class how others throughout history, like the Jews, isolated menstruating women—with Hasidic Jews still engaging in this practice today—and the site states that traditional Muslims and Hindus also classified menstruating women as impure, thusly banning them from holy places.

         But finally, someone actually has something different to say about periods! The Cherokee cited menstrual blood as a source of "feminine strength" according to the website, and the Cherokee actually believed that menstrual blood contained the power to destroy enemies. (So basically if you were on your period, grab a weapon, and get to the front line.) Additionally, Pliny the Elder of Ancient Roman times wrote that when a menstruating woman uncovered her body, she had the ability to stave off lighting, whirlwinds, and hailstorms, and rid the crops of irritating pests. So though there are certainly more negative cultural conceptualizations of periods than positive ones, at least some cultures were able to counter the popular ideology of the time by citing examples of female—rather than masculine—strength in relation to the production of body fluids.

         Therefore though I have managed to find some traditionally positive views on female body fluids, the customary rhetoric on female body fluids is still overwhelmingly negative. This really causes me to reflect for a moment on how far society—at least Western society—has come since these Medieval times. [Urban Dictionary “red badge of courage” if you don’t believe me... men are surprisingly down for this, more than woman even, at least based on my humble experience J]. We still have a lot of strides to make in terms of gender equality, but I think it’s pretty remarkable that in Medieval times the fact the Jesus was birthed from a human woman’s womb was a source of much woe and anguish, yet in 2016, celebrities—such as Gwyneth Paltrow—openly champion the concept of ingesting their infant’s placenta in the name of health and science. What a time to be alive!

Out for Blood: Reactions to Women Bleeding

In the show and books, Game of Thrones treats blood as a symbol of a women’s ability to have children, and therefore ability to be married. In the show, Sansa Stark is horrified to wake up to find that she has started her period. She wakes from a nightmare where she is being harassed to find blood all over her sheets. In this scene the focus is on her blood that has stained her sheets instead of the blood on her. She rushes to get a knife to cut out the stain and Shae walks in and immediately starts helping her hide the blood, which they are eventually unsuccessful in doing. Sansa’s blood was the focus of this scene. After, Sansa confesses to Cersei that she did not expect it so messy and Cersei tells her that childbirth is worse. The obsession with Sansa’s “flowering” is connected to her ability now to have children, specifically Joffery’s children, so they can now marry. In this example, a medieval woman bleeds to show her ability to have children. She is scared of her own blood while everyone else was anticipating it. As Sansa is now scared of the king, the thought of having his children is something is desperately avoiding. The same acceptance and usefulness of women’s blood is seen with Dany as she prepares to marry Khal Drogo. She is described as being ready for marriage because “she has had her blood” (34). Again women’s blood is connected to their ability to have children and therefore, in this scenario, their individual worth.

Another example of blood from the show is in the scene between Ygritte and Jon Snow in which Ygritte assures Jon that “girls see more blood than boys.” Here is another reverse to women’s menstruation and childbirth but this time it is in a superior tone. Ygritte portrays women’s almost indifference to blood as a strength they have over men.

From the book A Feast for Crows, Cersei does not talk of blood in menstruation; instead it is something that is showing her weakness. Curse has a dream that she is sitting on the Iron Throne but it is almost attacking her as the sharp edges cut into her skin. The description of the dream is vivid: “blood ran red down her legs, as still teeth gnawed at her buttocks…The more she struggled the more the throne engulfed her, tearing chunks of flesh from her breasts and belly, slicing at her arms and legs until they were slick and red, glistening” (Martin 65-66). Here blood seems to be Cersei’s punishment for wanting to hold a man’s position and gain power. Cersei imitating a man has caused her to bleed and her blood is not praised for what it brings or a sign of strength but rather a sign of her weakness and shortcoming.

For these female characters, the presence of blood takes on several different meanings and can either be an unwelcome sentence or a symbol of their power.