I see red
Notes on Amsterdam from a person who menstruates
Day 1 I thought I had a pretty solid idea of all the places I didn’t want to be when I get my period. A Deutsche Bahn train on a 7-hour journey from Berlin to Amsterdam with its swaying toilet seat and forever insufficient toilet paper supplies used to be pretty high up there, for example. That was until said train brought me to my colleague’s beautiful flat on the edge of Amsterdam-West where my boyfriend and I would be staying for the rest of August. Her place is cosy and light-flooded and airy. And a nightmare in white for any messy menstruator. As I could feel blood gushing into my sanitary pad, my eyes zeroed in on white towels, white bed sheets, a white sofa - the fact that I might be soiling stuff other than my own adding an unnecessary rush of adrenaline to this particular monthly episode.
Day 2 The great thing about working from home is that you can sport adult diaper-esque sanitary contraptions as you get used to your colleague’s wedding cake of a flat without giving it a second thought.
Day 3 Venturing out beyond the street I would get to call home for the next four weeks, I began to suspect, that people here didn’t get periods. The outside world was a stream of slender pedalers in white and beige cotton pyjama style trousers, whizzing past low-rise buildings, across canals and underneath lush foliage without as much as a tampon string in sight. The only kind of cycle I was able to intuit: the two-wheeled kind.
Day 4 While the period visibility or lack thereof seemed distinctly Dutch, the period-shaming certainly wasn’t. Walking into the Albert Heijn local supermarket to explore the sanitary product range, I encountered the same hateful categorisation I get worked up about everywhere else I go. Of all the products that come in different sizes, sanitary ones seem to be the only ones that include the classification ‘normal’, plunging anyone who needs a more absorbent product into an abnormal abyss of insecurity. This denormalising extends to period provisions. How is it that toilet paper, hand soap and paper towels are provided in most toilets, but sanitary products aren’t? With 800 million people menstruating at any one time on this Earth, having your period is about as normal as taking a dump. Yet, sanitary products are still treated differently. And this doesn’t even begin to address the topic of taxation. In the Netherlands, there are 3 VAT tax rates, 21%, 9%, and 0%. While sports betting of all things enjoys 0% VAT tax, I would be asked to shell out 9% of VAT tax at check-out for the pleasure of being alive and in good reproductive health for my age.
Luckily for any poor Albert Heijn member of staff who could have become the target of my wrath, I needed to change my pad. So, I defiantly grabbed an ‘ultra normal’ pack of sanitary towels and left.
Day 5 A reunion dinner with colleagues who happened to be in Amsterdam too, had me experience another period-complicating feature of this city. Its narrowness. On the way to the restaurant, I walked past slim buildings, down slender steps and finally ended up in our restaurant’s tiny toilets, almost doing my nose in as I crouched over the toilet seat trying to renew my sanitary pad without leaving the cubicle looking like Hannibal Lecter came to town (I later learned that the houses in Amsterdam tend to be narrow because they used to be taxed according to how wide of a stretch on the canal they occupied. Given the above rant, they should really know how I feel!)
Day 6 On my sixth day in Amsterdam, I finally got to indulge in the city’s redeeming menstrual feature i.e. a plethora of period supporting foods. Amsterdam is a riot of cookies and waffles and chocolate. After numerous experiments I am glad to report that no matter how hard you’re bleeding, sitting outside a chocolaterie sampling their latest goods will usually have an immediate calming effect.
Day 7 Spurred on by my exploits of Amsterdam’s chocolate shops, I headed out again, this time to explore Amsterdam’s second-hand clothing shops. I would guess that Amsterdam has the highest density of vintage shops per capita of any European capital. Handy should you ever need to affordably replace blood-stained clothes! In the corner of a shop beyond the busy canal ring, I heard the angels sing. There in the dark, I spotted a dark-grey, high-waist, floor-length velvet skirt with a French hand-sown label that closed like a safety turret around my legs lest any period disaster should befall me in future.
Amsterdam, you’ll be glad to hear, I’m ready to stay for my next cycle, whether on a bike or off.
I felt somehow strange to write about my period. But getting periods, no matter how messily, is not shameful. Anything weird about naming it, is owed to the (mostly) non-menstruating people in this word making it so. Looking again at Rupi Kaur’s image series on menstrual bleeding that got BANNED on social media a few years ago gave me the final resolve. Check it out if you haven’t seen it.