Blood

As the fluid of life, blood has abundant literal and metaphorical meanings that vary across cultures and genders. Women's blood and men's blood differ in both composition and cultural associations, and this distinction is most often linked to women's menstruation. In sexual practice, blood can be an erotic fluid comparable to other bodily fluids. Blood also designates family relations and racial distinctions, both based on genetic material in blood.

PHYSIOLOGY

The heart pumps blood throughout the body, where the blood delivers nutrients and oxygen to organs and tissues and removes waste products such as carbon dioxide and lactic acid. Physiologically, the blood of men and women differs in the amount of hemoglobin, which carries iron and oxygen to the body's cells. This difference is due largely to women's loss of blood through menstruation and to men's greater muscle mass. It also means that women are more likely to become anemic, and this illness is a particular danger to pregnant women. Babies born to anemic mothers are at high risk of being developmentally retarded. Leonard Shlain (2003) argues that women's need for iron, most readily available in red meat, encouraged the development of hunting in pre-modern society.

FEMININE AND MASCULINE BLEEDING

Cultural connotations of blood reveal its relation to gender stereotypes, so that women's blood is feminine and weak, whereas men's blood is masculine and virile. Women's blood is most often associated with their reproductive ability and is thus linked to menstruation, the loss of virginity, childbirth, and menopause.

Menstruation has disparate meanings in different cultures. It is considered variously as a simple act of elimination, a positive experience linked to fertility of women and of the earth, and an unclean process that is regulated by taboos. One euphemism used in the United States and elsewhere, "the curse of Eve," reflects sentiments that menstruation is an unwelcome experience for women and an uncomfortable topic of discussion for men. A symbol of the arrival of puberty, a woman's first menstruation is called the menarche. As a rite of initiation, some cultures celebrate this flowing of blood; in many Western cultures, this event goes largely unacknowledged. In tribal cultures such as the Loango of East Africa, menstruating women are isolated from the rest of the community in menstruation huts. The Bible, in Leviticus, warns against associating with or having sex with menstruating women for fear of contamination with the unclean fluid. Some feminist critics argue that the taboos on and fear of menstruation are a suppressive reaction to the implicit procreative power to which menstruation attests.

Many women bleed when they lose their virginity, since sexual intercourse can break the hymen, a membrane covering the vaginal opening. However, other activities, including the use of tampons and involvement in sports, may stretch or break the hymen before initial intercourse. Despite knowledge that the existence of the hymen is not an infallible indicator of virginity, many Mediterranean, African, and Islamic cultures require proof that a woman is a virgin on her wedding night, asking for evidence of the broken hymen by such means as a bloody sheet displayed to wedding guests. Other feminine bleeding occurs during and after childbirth due to straining and tearing of the genital area and the uterus. Women thus bleed both at regular intervals—through menstruation—and at significant moments in their reproductive lives. At menopause, with the cessation of menstruation, women's sexually associated bleeding ceases.

Men's blood is generally associated with wounds resulting from physical conflicts and war, and thus is a symbol of heightened masculinity, virility, or dominance. Representations of violence normally include blood, and film and television may be censored for extreme violence as demonstrated by excessive amounts of blood. Barbara Ehrenreich (1997) argues that the link between violence, blood, and masculinity, supported by the prevalence of phallic weapons, may have replaced previous mythical representations of vaginas as both bleeding wounds and predatory, bloody mouths.

Some tribal cultures have rituals for men that parallel menstruation, in which men make a small incision on their penises and allow a certain amount of blood to flow out before bandaging the wound. In Judaism, as Lawrence A. Hoffman (1996) points out, the circumcision of infants is a similar male initiation rite that involves the symbolic loss of blood from the genitals. Ehrenreich (1997, p. 106-107) lists many other cultural practices that compare women's vaginal bleeding with ritual acts of bloodletting for men:

In Papua New Guinea, the self-induced ritual nosebleeds are seen as parallel to menstruation; the Australian Aborigines who subincise their penises reopen the wounds regularly in order, they say, to simulate menstruation. In ancient Hawaii blood sacrifice was understood to be a "man's childbearing," just as childbearing was a "woman's sacrifice," and the Aztecs similarly equated men's death in war to women's death in childbirth. War as a kind of ritual bloodletting is linked to menstruation in the myths of the Ndembu people of Africa, and the Plains Indian mythology studied by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

SEXUAL PRACTICES AND BLOOD

Sexual fetishes involving blood are termed blood play or blood sports; these involve individuals licking or drinking the blood of their sexual partners after cutting or otherwise wounding them. This practice is related to bloodletting, vampirism, and self-mutilation. Such practices are grouped with other sexual activities based on sadomasochist tendencies or sexual dominance and submissiveness.

Vampires, mythic figures who drink the blood of the living to maintain their own lives after death, are highly sexualized in cultural representations. The act of drinking another person's blood involves seduction to attain physical proximity and a life-threatening "kiss" that transfers bodily fluid. While representations of female vampires exist, most are men, a stereotype that relies on the connection between violence, sexual aggression, and masculinity.

In Japanese anime and manga, male characters who are sexually aroused are shown to have nosebleeds. The exact reason for this connection is unclear, but one theory is that the rush of blood to the genitals is so intense that it floods the whole body and spills out through the nose. The depiction of blood and sex is common in Japanese culture, which is notable for its eroticization of violence, usually against women.

BLOOD-BORNE SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE

Many sexually transmitted diseases, such as herpes and AIDS, are carried in the blood as well as in other bodily fluids like semen. Beginning in the late twentieth century, AIDS became a major concern for citizens of all countries. Originally considered a gay male disease, due to its initial prevalence among gay men and the ease with which gay sex transmits the virus, AIDS was rarely spoken of nor were treatments readily available. After discovering this disease can be transmitted through heterosexual encounters and blood transfusions, the United States took a more active role in educating the public about the virus, including advocating safe sex with condoms. In Africa, AIDS is an epidemic due to a lack of knowledge about virus transmission and ineffective folk remedies. One such remedy, the belief that an infected man may cure himself by having sex with a virgin female, has led to the mass rape and infection of young women.

BLOOD RELATIONS: KINSHIP AND BLOODLINES

As the carrier of genetic material, blood is linked to family or clan identity and racial groups. Thus, kinship is often referred to as bloodlines, distinguishing bonds of blood relationship from friendship or marriage. People who are not related by blood but who want to symbolize their strong connection with each other may become blood brothers or blood sisters by partaking in various rituals that may involve sharing or commingling their blood.

Bloodlines establish taboos on marrying or having sex within one's immediate family, a practice known as incest, or within larger groups or relations such as clans, also defined as endogamy. Such taboos are practical for cultural and health reasons. Culturally, the ban on endogamous relations helps create connections among multiple clans or families, which can increase wealth or form protective alliances. In addition, bans on incest maintain harmony within smaller family units by both discouraging any natural sexual attraction to one's immediate relatives, such as the Oedipal desire of a son for his mother, or the Electra complex (in which a daughter is sexually attracted to her father), and reinforcing natural aversions to such sexuality. Physiologically, continued incestuous relations lead to problems such as a diminished gene pool and increased susceptibility to disease. One such disease is hemophilia, or the inability for blood to clot properly, which notoriously affected members of the royal families of Europe beginning with Queen Victoria of England (r. 1837–1901). It can also be traced back to the Talmud and other Jewish religious texts, dating from the second to fifth centuries ce, that regulate circumcision based on previous family members who bled to death following the act. Hemophilia is most often manifested in men, while women are almost always only carriers.

In Western society, bloodlines and kinship are marked by patrilineal naming, so that fathers pass their surnames on to their children and thus show the continuation of their bloodlines. Several anthropologists argue that patriliny has not always been the standard mode of determining kinship. In 1861, J. J. Bachofen published Das Mutterrecht (Mother right), in which he argued that matriliny, which figures the mother-child relation as the basic social unit, preceded patriarchy and patriliny. Patriliny and patriarchy followed to demonstrate and secure the father's role in reproduction, family, and society.

In the United States, the historical preoccupation with racial difference, particularly the distinction between white and black Americans, resulted in the "one drop of blood" rule, which holds that a single drop of blood from a non-white ancestor results in a non-white person. During slavery, this rule kept many mixed-race individuals in bondage, and often the white male slave owners had sex with or raped their female slaves to increase their property and wealth. Following slavery, racial discrimination continued to categorize mixed-race individuals as black and relegate them to an inferior social status. Due to increased mixed-race births, such emphasis on racial groups as categories of identity has waned. To account for this demographic and social change, the 2000 U.S. census was the first census to offer respondents the opportunity to classify themselves as belonging to more than one racial group.

see also Female Genital Mutilation; Incest; Menstruation; Miscegenation; Vagina; Vampirism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradburne, James M., ed. 2001. Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology. New York: Prestel.

Buckley, Thomas, and Alma Gottlieb, eds. 1988. Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1997. Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Hoffman, Lawrence A. 1996. Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pasternak, Burton; Carol R. Ember; and Melvin Ember. 1997. Sex, Gender, and Kinship: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Shlain, Leonard. 2003. Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution. New York: Viking.

Wolf, Arthur P., and William H. Durham, eds. 2004. Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo: The State of Knowledge at the Turn of the Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

                                        Michelle Veenstra