Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

162 Forbidden Words
was inscribed; hundreds of such tablets have been discovered. 53 In our
culture, the taboos on SMD organs and their effluvia no longer derive from
fear of witchcraft. Reticence is motivated by distaste and concerns about
pollution. We seem to find the bodily effluvia of almost anyone, especially
any non-intimate, revolting. A stranger’s dirty underwear, socks, cast-off
condoms and the like are so much more revolting than our own: a sentiment
captured in the German proverb Eigener Dreck stinkt nicht ‘your own shit
doesn’t stink’. Of course, there are sound health reasons for keeping human
waste at a distance. Yet, we know that it is not an instinctive repulsion that
these substances arouse in us. Children and animals do not find them odious;
the repulsion is something we learn.
In a questionnaire we distributed among staff and students at universities in
Melbourne, Australia, in 1989, 54 subjects were asked to rank the bodily
effluvia produced by an adult stranger on a five-point scale of decreasing
revoltingness as RRR, RR, R, ½R, Not-R, in which R is the revolting median,
the RRR-rating is worse than RR, and so on. Our summary findings are
reproduced in Table 7.1. It is notable that other people’s shit and vomit top
the list of revoltingness, while 94 per cent of our subjects ranked tears not
revolting. Tears hold this position because they are not waste produces; and
unlike blood from a wound, tears do not stain and their flow cannot lead to
death. The most interesting, yet hardly surprising, finding was the sexual
dichotomy in attitudes to menstrual blood: 80% of men rate it either RR or
RRR, whereas only 47% of women did so; moreover, whereas 17% of women
found menstrual blood not-revolting (Not-R), not a single man did so. The
comparative figures for blood from a wound are much closer to parity
between the sexes: women 11% > R and 63% Not-R; men 11% > R and
47% Not-R.
The menstruation taboo
In most societies, menstruating women are or have been taboo. This may be in
part because of the magical coincidence between a woman’s ovulatory cycle
and the lunar month.
In an amazing coincidence, if it is that, 29.5 days, a woman’s optimal fertility cycle
length, is the moon’s periodicity too – the time it takes the moon to shift from new to full
and back again. Even more curiously, women tend to bleed in concert with the full moon
and ovulate with the new when enjoying the company of men. In contrast, celibacy,
or being predominantly in the company of women, leaves menstruation tending to
coincide with the new moon, and ovulation, if it occurs at all, with the full . . . Curiously,
in gardening lore, the advice over centuries has been to sow seed when the moon is new.
(Blackledge 2003: 242f)