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 a Utrecht 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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A MUM visitor kindly e-mailed more information
(Sept. 2009):
I inter library loaned this book [below].
Amazon listing [and see Google books on line] with more
info:
<http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Pots-Eroticism-Paul-Mathieu/dp/0713658045/ref=sr_1_2?ie
=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252301706&sr=8-2>
The picture [a photo, which I was not
allowed to take in the museum] is on page 38 and on page 39 it reads
"The Museo de la Nacion in Lima holds an exquisite, small Nazca
bowl with curved sides, painted all around with graphic vaginas, and another
powerfully graphic Nazca bowl, with folded sides like vaginal lips, has
in its interior space moulded in relief in the raised shape of the 'Venus
mount,' inscribed with stylised pubic hair and showing the mentrual flow
in red, oozing toward the lip of the bowl, possibly implying, here again,
some pouring or even drinking ritual."
It is referring back to the previous page where the author refutes
the interpretations of these sculptures as purely humorous and states a
belief that they involved some sort of inebriation rituals, since many
of the sculptures were also vessels and that their pour/spout was always
the urethra, vagina or anus, so that the user was ritualistically taking
in the fluids and/or vicariously engaging in some form of oral sex.
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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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