Stop Calling It Your “Period.” It Has a Name.
By Jenny Martin, PsyD
Why is it called a period? Let’s get into it. There is something worth sitting with here: we named the most generative biological process in human history after a punctuation mark. Cue my massive eye roll.
Also, a period? A period of what exactly? Untouchableness? Dirtiness?
The word period — as applied to menstruation — entered common American usage sometime in the 20th century, likely as a softening of “menstrual period,” itself a clinical distancing from the Latin menses, rooted in mensis (month) and tied etymologically to the moon, to cycles, to time itself. Somewhere along the way, we kept shortening it, distancing it. Until we arrived at a word so stripped of meaning it tells you nothing about what it is.
And that, I think, is the point.
Language shapes experience. We know this. We teach it to children now — we say vulva, penis, uterus — because we understand that euphemism creates shame, and shame creates silence, and silence is where harm grows. We’ve done the work to restore anatomical language to young people because we recognize their right to name their own bodies. But somehow, menstruation got left out of that reclamation.
We still whisper. We still use code. Aunt Flo. The red tide. That time of the month. Or, clinically, period — which sounds neutral until you notice how thoroughly it removes the body from the conversation.
Consider what we call the products: sanitary napkins. Sanitary — as though what’s happening without them is unsanitary. As though the body in its natural state is a contamination problem to be managed. The language isn’t accidental. It builds a structure in which menstruation is a problem, a mess, an inconvenience to be contained and concealed.
The history here isn’t subtle. Menstrual blood has been coded as dangerous, polluting, and taboo across cultures for millennia — Pliny the Elder claimed it could curdle wine and kill crops; Leviticus outlined ritual impurity; Victorian medicine warned that intellectual exertion during menstruation could damage the uterus. The mechanisms differ, but the conclusion is always the same: this is something to be afraid of. And the most effective way to manage fear is to rename the thing until it becomes small.
When you call it a period, you don’t have to think about what it actually is: the uterine lining shedding after a cycle of hormonal orchestration so complex it took us centuries to begin to understand it. You don’t have to think about the fact that human life — every single one — depends on a body that menstruates. You don’t have to hold the weight of that.
You can just call it a period and move on.
But here’s what gets lost in that efficiency: connection to power.
Menses is not a malfunction. It is not a wound. It is evidence of a body doing exactly what it was designed to do — cycling, preparing, releasing, beginning again. There is something almost cosmological about it. The 28-day rhythm. The relationship to the lunar cycle that researchers are only now beginning to take seriously again. The way it marks time differently than a clock does — not linearly, but in return.
When we use sterile, diminishing language for something this elemental, we participate in a longer project of disconnecting women from their own bodies. Of making them strangers to themselves. The word menses — even menstruation, even menstrual cycle — keeps the speaker inside the experience. It refuses the distance that period provides so conveniently.
For some people, this isn’t just cultural noise sitting in the background. It gets absorbed early, often before there’s language to name it, and it can calcify into something heavier than discomfort.
When shame around menstruation is reinforced by family, by community, by religious teaching that frames the body as unclean or something to be hidden, it doesn’t just shape vocabulary. It shapes a person’s entire relationship to their own body, one built on secrecy, self-monitoring, and a low hum of dread that outlasts adolescence by decades.
That kind of early, repeated shaming is a form of relational trauma, and it rarely looks like what people expect trauma to look like. It can show up as anxiety that spikes around the body, health, or intimacy. It can look like depression with no clear trigger, just a persistent sense of being fundamentally wrong somehow. Some people notice hypervigilance around their own bodily functions, or a discomfort they can’t quite name even when saying basic anatomy out loud.
If any of that feels familiar, therapy can genuinely help. Not to relitigate every message your family, church, or community handed you, but to help you separate what you were taught from what is actually true, and build a relationship with your body that isn’t governed by inherited shame.
I’m not making a prescriptive argument here about what any individual should say in private. Language is personal, and for many people, period is just a word they’ve always used — no shame loaded into it, no thought behind it. That’s fine. That’s real.
But at the cultural level, the clinical level, the educational level? We should be paying attention to what we’re choosing. We should be asking why we gravitated toward the one word that most thoroughly evacuates meaning.
For me, it’s my menses. It deserves its name.
