Wednesday, September 1, 2010

I've always had a pet peeve with the term 'lai sa sam', loosely translated as 'dirty discharge' from Hokkien. In many cultures and religions, the female menstruation is regarded as unclean, dirty, et cete-fucking-ra. Okay, it's blood. It's just blood. It's not like we're excreting shit from our vaginas. Now that's dirty. Shit's dirty. You die from eating shit. I've yet to hear of anyone dying from consuming menstrual blood.

I wonder where this idea of lai la sam came from. Was it because men didn't fancy the idea of having sex with a woman who was bleeding from her vagina, and were so frustrated that they had to abstain from sex for a few days every month that they decided to term this very natural phenomenon of the female body as dirty? Or did women have worse PMS back then? Suffer the men.

Granted, a pad full of blood is not exactly a sight to behold, but neither is an underwear with skid marks, or a toilet bowl full of shit. Personally, I'd prefer looking at blood to shit.