tamponsandporn353

It never ends.

I recently heard a man say to his girlfriend that he felt the same way about tampons as she did pornography. "We both know what they're for but we don't want to hear about the details," he said.

"That is a ridiculous comparison," she replied. "Tampons help deal with a natural bodily function and pornography ... " She halted, annoyed.

"Helps deal with a natural bodily function!" he cackled. "They both concern blood flow!"

"You're an idiot," she replied.

There are a few taboo subjects, and men take their lives into their hands discussing them with anything but complete sympathy and reverence.

I'd humbly submit these include women's fat, abortion, the "best" way to give birth, funding for breast cancer research and, finally, menstruation.

"That time of the month", "Aunt Flo", "having the painters in" - the slang terms for a woman's period are probably second only to masturbation (see, there's that link again) for their originality and ability to induce a cringe.

The thing is, there's absolutely nothing cringe-worthy about menstruation.

Writer Erica Jong called it the "good red rain", Camille Paglia the "red flood", while Australia's favourite shit-stirrer, Germaine Greer, famously suggested in her book The Female Eunuch: "If you think you are emancipated, you might consider ... tasting your menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've a long way to go, baby."

Blood is blood if you ask me, so I have no problem with surgery, action movies or menstruation. However, many people do. In the mainstream media, menstruation is universally held to be a "yucky" topic, which is why we get such phrases as "feminine hygiene."

There's an amusing exchange in the Ben Elton World War I novel The First Casualty in which a nurse and suffragette named Kitty Murray invites a military police officer into her billet.

"Above a small basin hung a clothesline on which were pegged out three or four stained, rust-coloured rags. Kingsley saw Murray's eyes flit towards them and for a moment an expression of extreme embarrassment passed across her face; however, he was not surprised to see it followed by one of indignant resolve," writes Elton.

"'Boring being a woman sometimes,' she said. 'Menstruation definitely not the Almighty's best bit of design. The only thing that makes me doubt Darwin - I'd have thought such a palpably awful arrangement would have been deselected centuries ago. I suppose it's just one more of nature's clever little ways of keeping women in their place.'"

We've all heard the arguments that if men menstruated, tampons would be supplied free by the government and blokes would brag about how much they bled: "Maaaaaaaate, having the heaviest month, eh?" But I wonder if that's true.

Men don't boast about wanking. And while you may scoff at the suggested link between porn and tampons, between menstruation and masturbation, I'd argue both are a brush with the infinite.

Paglia writes that it's not "menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imagination ... but rather the albumen in the blood, the uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea.

"We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself."

An orgasm - whether with a partner, or bent over a laptop watching porn - is much the same: it's a peek at immortality, a tear in time, a glimpse at that same abyss from which we ... ahem ... came, and to which we'll return.

Or I maybe I'm just be an idiot?

Sam de Brito's latest novel Hello Darkness is in bookstores now. You can follow him on Twitter here. His email address is here.