I Asked Amy Schumer About Her Period for 9 Glorious Minutes

At any given time, anyone around you who has a vagina may be quietly excreting blood and mucosal tissue while going about their day. 

Isn’t that miraculous, nauseating, confounding, and frankly, very funny? 

It’s 2020, and I don’t care what a celebrity does to lose weight or why she broke up with her ex. I want to know if she gets those thick, terrifying period chunks. I want to know if she’s ever hid a tampon up a puffed milkmaid sleeve on the way to the bathroom. I want to know how she manages her pain.

Precious few celebrities would agree to answer these questions during a Zoom meeting. Amy Schumer is the exception. 

The 39-year-old comedian is partnering with Tampax to talk about periods—a phenomenon that has affected about half of all people throughout their lives for all of human history but is still misunderstood, stigmatized, and under-addressed. People who get their periods are essentially punished for it: kept ignorant about their own reproductive systems in schools (only 22 states require medically accurate reproductive health education), then taxed for buying products to manage it (33 U.S. states tax tampons as luxury items, instead of as necessities, like food or medicine), and then shamed for having their periods. Homeless and low-income people face extra hurdles in accessing period supplies, and incarcerated women are often forced to beg for them. 

In March, Tampax did a survey of over 2,000 American adults and found that 41% of women asked were not confident they know how to correctly insert a tampon, more than half of the women could not point to the vagina on a diagram, and 7% of people asked thought a tampon could “take” a woman’s virginity. 

As Amy tells me, this is “fucking bullshit.” 

Ahead of the release of her pregnancy docuseries Expecting Amy, which hits HBO Max on July 9, I asked Amy Schumer about all the sticky, gross, oddly fascinating things that we normally only talk about with our best friends. 

Enough of tampon ads featuring crisp white tennis shorts and mysterious blue liquid. Enough of men adjusting their balls in public while the Supreme Court rules that employers can limit their employees’ access to birth control, which regulates periods, lessens chronic pain, treats certain diseases, and saves lives. (Not to mention: Medical care that prevents pregnancy is a human right.) 

Enough of quietly shouldering pain and discomfort. Let’s talk about bloody discharge, babeeee. 

Glamour: I’m going to ask you rapid-fire questions about your period. 

Amy Schumer: I love that.

If it’s offensive, just let me know and we’ll do something else.

I hope I get offended! I haven’t felt offended in so long.

So. What's your period like?

Heavy.

Are there…bits? Like, chunks?

Like pieces of period? Oh, hell yeah. Especially after having a baby. There’s like full palm-sized pieces of protein.

Do you remember your first period?

Yes, I do. I was in Baltimore. I was 11. I actually got trapped in an elevator the same day—it was a pretty good metaphor. I got my period, and then I got trapped in an elevator! My brother was doing something called the Maccabee Games, which is like the Jewish Olympics.

Ah, yes.

He was playing basketball, and I was there with my family supporting him, and I got my period. And then I think I probably got in the elevator and pressed all the buttons seeing what would happen, and I got stuck. I was alone on the elevator, with my period for the first time, and the firemen had to come. It was a traumatic day for many reasons.

Did you start out using pads? Tampons?

Pads. My mom thrust them at me and was like, “Here’s your only choice.” And then a cool older friend was like, “Wear Tampax, bitch.” And I was like, “Mom, I know about these other things. Go get them for me and stop it.”

What was the learning process of using tampons like for you?

It’s still a learning process! Like, I’ve probably only known for the last 10 years that you’re supposed to push the tampon in until you can’t feel it. I would just be like, “Ugh, this doesn’t feel right.” And I didn’t know that I just wasn’t pushing it in far enough, which I think happens to a lot of women.

Do you have feelings about period sex?

Yeah, I am totally down for period sex, and I don’t respect a guy who isn’t comfortable with it. That guy, to me in my dating years, was dead. Good as dead.

Would you inform the person before? Or just be like, “Surprise!” 

I would tell the person. I mean…have I ever been like, “Oh, I thought it was over!” and lied about it? Of course. But for the most part I think I’ve been pretty honest about where I was in my cycle.

What do you think you’re going to teach your son about periods?

That they’re really hard, that they’re really painful, they’re really natural, and that you should be extremely kind to women before, during, and after their periods.

How does your period manifest for you, other than the physical part?

Other than the pain of it? Because I do have endometriosis, PMS is very major for me, emotionally and physically. I’m in pain a full week and a half before I get it and crazy sensitive. That’s my chemistry. That’s my body.

Between endo, regular period cramps, and things like, in your case, experiencing hyperemis gravadarum during pregnancy, women and people with uteruses experience so much pain. Do you think it matters that men will never understand what that pain is like?

I think it totally matters. I think it’s one of the many reasons that it’s hard for us to always connect and communicate, because there are just things that they will never understand. And there’s stuff we’ll never understand. But I will still for the rest of my life do everything to try to make my husband understand how awful it is and the discomfort I’m in. “I promise to complain about my period.” That should have been in my wedding vows.

Have you ever tried to casually take a tampon into a bathroom when you don't have a purse or a pocket?

Yes! I made a sketch about it on my show, where the premise was that you pretend to learn how to play saxophone so you can sneak a tampon into your saxophone and take that into the bathroom. I’ve definitely done the whole up-the-sleeve whatever, but the last 10 years I hold it out very visibly and I announce it to the room: “I am going to change my tampon.” Or sometimes I go, “I’m going to put this in my body.”

Have you learned anything about your vagina lately?

I learned how much we as women don’t know. I learned about all the myths. I looked at the actual statistic for Toxic Shock Syndrome. [Editor’s note: Despite the near constant clickbait about TSS in the 2000s, the admittedly dangerous disease is exceedingly rare.] And I learned about the lack of sex education—it’s so upsetting, it’s so not right. I want to help women take all the shame out. Because it’s fucking bullshit. 

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.                  

Originally Appeared on Glamour