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Bloody Trump

Thanks to Donald Trump, the art of menses has returned. So if you’re feeling nostalgic about FemFest 86, the Woomers’ collective, later immortalized in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, and their It’s A Girl display’s blood-soaked maxi pads – or even if you’re not – now’s your time.

Using a mat board, the contents of her Diva Cup, a tampon and a brush, Portland video artist Sarah Levy created the now infamous Whatever. In Whatever, Levy depicts Trump – so red and abstracted in the piece, he appears to have been eaten by carnivorous ants – with one eye swollen to a slit, his mouth opening like a repugnant flower. 

Levy’s painting is one work by a significant though disconnected group of female artists that also includes Lani Beloso, Charon Luebbers, Jen Lewis and Vanessa Tiegs, all of whom have used their uterine lining to create beautiful artwork.

A copy of bloody Trump sells for $20 on Etsy, and the actual painting will be auctioned, the proceeds going to help Mexican immigrants. 

Levy made her painting after Trump’s disquieting exchange with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly during the August 7 Republican presidential debate. You’ll recall that in response to Kelly’s question concerning his past derogatory comments about women, Trump characterized the superhero-cool Kelly as being so angry that “you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her… wherever.”

Criticism of him raged, including within his own party. Did you ever think you’d admire Jeb Bush’s gallantry? Trump has since denied the fairly obvious meaning of his salvo, calling anyone who thought he was referring to menstrual blood a “deviant.” 

But he did mean it, like every man (how many billion?) who has ever blamed a woman’s anger or moodiness on her period. Yet as unhinged as we are said to get during that time of the month, we have yet to go on record saying to a notable colleague: “What’s the matter with the senator? Was his nubby penis chafing his thigh?” Ultimately, Trump’s unbelievably coarse remark has served as an enlightening cultural event. 

Girls and women are still embarrassed about our periods. Have you ever seen an advertisement in which 35 ml of blood was ladled onto a pristine white surface?

In the supposedly enlightened Western world, the Twilight series earned mega-millions, yet no one ever mentioned its shocking plot flaw: if the vampires go into agonies of lustmord around the scent of Bella’s blood in her veins, why did they never notice her period blood? 

Historically and globally, this shame continues to have far more serious repercussions, and Trump’s vulgar attack opened up a meaningful discourse for a while through Levy’s work, short online information shares about the stigma still surrounding menstruation, the Periods Are Not An Insult site and Twitter-bombing. (Trump received untold tweets about panty liners and flow.) 

His own meretricious reaction to the incident is ultimately meaningless: we are now used to this Rob Ford impersonator’s heart-attack-red face and tiny pie-hole bellowing pieties and obscenities, none of which mean anything. As Trump’s impropriety loses its news flavour, we must return to what Kelly started to ask the GOP candidate. Trump has called women things so terrible, her recitation of a mere few of them was a dreadful nauseant. 

This entire issue is not about manners, of which he has none, but the prospect of electing, out of fear and ignorance, a man who derogates women abusively and with impunity. 

Trump has denied his bias. “I’ll take care of women!” he has screamed, as though misogynistic lard-asses with tumbleweed upsweeps might be mistaken for knights-errant. 

Instead, he should continue to be grilled about his animus toward 53 per cent of the population, a people so powerful that we can bleed seven days and not die.

Lynn Crosbie is a Toronto writer whose new novel is Where Did You Sleep Last Night (Anansi).

news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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