I was in my mid-30s when I heard "My Red Self," and I felt giddy and energized by the young band's refusal to treat this traditionally delicate subject with preciousness or embarrassment. Not that the onset of menstruation isn't commonly dealt with in literature; it's a popular topic in bad fiction and good. (The beginning of womanhood is often "announced" by a "red banner" discovered in the unwitting protagonist's underwear. Huzzah! Huzzah!) But "My Red Self" was something else altogether. "Never wear white, or your shame will creep right through," the singer warns. "Is this the flag you use to humiliate me/'Cause I was born, I was born a girl?" Most of all, though, she's enraged that she should be made to feel embarrassed by what she is. "So you make me hide the truth from you/So you make me hide my red self from you," she declares in a lioness roar. Any woman who's ever caught herself nudging a tampon box toward the back of the bathroom shelf before a first date can relate.

The fact that the bluntness of "My Red Self" shocked me (and thrilled me) is probably proof enough that it's high time for a book like "The Curse." Journalist Karen Houppert made her initial foray into the subject of menstruation in 1995, with a Village Voice article called "Embarrassed to Death: The Hidden Dangers of the Tampon Industry," and "The Curse" is the result of her further research. Some three years after that article, she "emerged with this profound analogy: Blood is kinda like snot. How come it's not treated that way?"

Well, it is and it isn't like snot: There's no doubt that, as Houppert explains, people's squeamishness about menstruation is the result of deep cultural conditioning, further compounded by all that soft-focus flora and talk about "feminine protection" served up by the menstrual-products industry, as if menstruation really were something to be embarrassed about. Yet the single most annoying thing about "The Curse" is Houppert's dogged insistence that women shouldn't be shy about the subject -- that we shouldn't hesitate to openly tote our Tampax down the office hallway on our way to the ladies' room. She almost makes it seem as if women should be ashamed of their reticence about advertising their monthlies, as if feeling that way were proof that they're hopelessly tangled in leftover Victorian mores, when it may be simply that, like many men, most women don't feel the need to share their more intimate bodily functions with the world.

But individuals' sense of privacy aside, there is something unsettling about the mantle of secrecy and fussy delicacy that cloaks the subject of menstruation, and Houppert's indignation about it -- which never descends into carping -- is the fuel that so effectively drives "The Curse." Most of us can recall seeing feminine-hygiene products advertised on television or in magazines when we were kids and puzzling over exactly what it was that women needed to be "protected" from and what it was that would give a young woman license to wear her tightest (and whitest) jeans while trotting her friend Flicka around a flower-strewn field. Far from preserving the "dignity" of menstruation, those ads (and they haven't changed much over the years) merely made it seem ludicrous, dippy. You'd have to be a real dork to let it happen to you.

While Houppert decries the lunacy of cultural attitudes toward menstruation, she doesn’t insist that it's all the media's fault. But she rightly calls the advertising industry on the carpet for subtly reinforcing, even today, the idea that menstruation is somehow dirty. In the early days of tampons -- they were first introduced by Tampax in the mid-'30s -- manufacturers focused on freedom and comfort in their ads, but they also reminded women, as Houppert points out, that "menstruation was naughty; as irrepressible evidence of sexuality, news of its arrival, departure, and duration always had to be kept under wraps. A journey through the coded history of sanitary protection makes for a fascinating crash course in American sexuality -- and its repression."

Houppert is even more concerned that the shroud of secrecy surrounding menstruation could easily be used to hide certain crucial facts from women, and her argument is leakproof. "The Curse" is both solidly researched and provocative, once you get past Houppert's somewhat strained efforts to be an on-the-rag revolutionary, and the first section, covering the vagaries of the menstrual-products industry, is downright scary.

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