Performer Gia Green Tells Us About Shooting Adult Cinema on Her Period

Please help me in welcoming Gia Green back onto the Lust Zine! While shooting for my latest Lust Cinema Original series, Three, Gia unexpectedly got her period. So what did she do? She asked me to capture it in her solo masturbation scene and it was one of the most beautiful and empowering moments I've ever shot.

Now, she's here to tell you about her experience performing in adult cinema whilst menstruating in all its bloody greatness! And, to discuss the representation of periods in the media and why we must fight to normalise them. Don't miss the series finale of this porn for women on Lust Cinema now!

How many mainstream movies have you watched where (biologically) female characters were dealing with their periods? I bet one hand is enough to count them all. Most probably, you can’t recall any. You probably watched movies where women were overly angry, emotional, even evil when on their periods, and no graphic representation of menstrual blood was included.

Menstruation is generally seen as embarrassing, distressing, traumatic, even offensive, laughable, just tragic. Pads and tampons ads use blue liquid in their demonstrations instead of a red one. And when Nuvenia decided to do things differently and launched her ‘Blood Normal’ ad campaign, people cried foul all around and claimed the need for “decency”. Like, “girl, you’re saying that what you expel every month is blood?! Get the hell out, you’re disgusting!” You know where this message started to make its way into our culture? In one of the greatest literary texts of all times: the Bible. It seems that our perception of periods hasn’t changed that much since then.

When I was a teenager in my hometown, I remember saying one day to my friends that I was on my period and one of the guys looked at me with a disgusted face saying, “do we actually need to talk about these things publicly?”. Dude, I thought we do since openly talking about your wanks seems to be absolutely normal and fun. How many times have you heard others (even women) sarcastically asking you, “are you on your period?!” whenever you show your disappointment or get nervous about something. Is it just a coincidence that these are the same kind of narratives that we are used to seeing through media and ads?

We see representations of blood and violence in mainstream media but almost no mainstream film shows a girl, a woman, or a trans man realistically dealing with their periods. This both reflects and encourages what we all experience in our everyday life. We are taught from a young age that our period is our secret, not something to be openly discussed, and we grow up believing that we have to hide our menstrual blood not only to others but even to ourselves. We soon learn to comply with a whole set of recurring tricks that are intended to pretend our periods just don’t exist.

As for many other things in society, representation in the media is crucial to make things visible in real life. When something is made out of sight, it will also disappear from discourse, and therefore from our reality. Periods accompany much of the life of half the global population, yet they are incredibly invisible in our culture. But all bleeding folks need to learn how to deal with menstrual blood somehow from the very first time it appears in our panties. It’s funny because when we claim our right to reject an unwanted pregnancy, for example, society tells us we can’t in the name of “nature”.

We’re more likely to accept as “natural” the fact that men can’t fully control their sexual desire because of their “nature” (which only strengthens rape culture) than the fact that bleeding folks have to deal with their periods and their consequences once a month for a significant part of their lives. Throughout my whole adolescence, I heard boys loudly talking to their mates about their fluids with fear of nothing, while other girls and I would whisper to each other the need for a pad and exchange it secretly; far from the gaze of everyone for fear of being judged or ridiculed.

Menstruating people tend to have negative and uneasy feelings about their periods. You may suffer from some chronic disease such as endometriosis, which can really make your life hell and reasonably make you hate your periods af (also given the frustration of being a condition for which neither a cause nor a cure has been found which is the real shame here) or your hemophobia makes you dizzy whenever you see blood. But hearing so many girls throughout my life telling how they were disgusted by their own periods always made me a bit sad.

From my own experience, learning how to build up a serene relationship with my period is one of the best things I could do for myself. You can choose to go through hormone treatment to get rid of your periods in your own right, but the point here is that the deep discomfort society feels about periods is honestly unjustified and a terrible lack of respect towards our existence that we should fight against, whether we want to keep our periods or not.

In the last 50 years, we managed to re-signify a word like ‘queer’ and reclaimed it proudly, which is great. But ‘pussy’ is still today mainly used as an insult. We silently soak up the trauma of being biologically females every time someone says, “come on, don’t be a pussy!” implying that having one makes us somehow weak and that there’s just no relevant space for our bodies in society.

Modern society always had a hostile relationship with female biology and sexuality in general, and this affects the lives of biologically female folks around the world on different levels and in different ways. We learn that periods are dirty, gross, or just inappropriate in every context. Society is scared to talk about periods in general so being intimate and having sex on your period is a whole other level of taboo.

I had my period on the first day of shooting ‘Three’, right after my sex scene with Bunnie Bennett. It seemed wild to me at first - how can you shoot a movie with explicit sex when you’re bleeding? Aren’t we supposed to not function properly or not function at all when we are on our periods? However, it turned out it wasn’t really a big deal, and all of that sex helped me to release my cramps ;) I soon started to enjoy the fact that my body was actually more open to having sex.

The production team equipped me with menstrual sponges but to be honest, those sponges weren’t making me feel that comfortable. Not only because taking them off was the hardest thing I did on that set, but also because I didn’t want to omit that I was bleeding at that moment. So the day before my solo scene I asked Erika: “What if I don’t wear the menstrual sponge this time but we show my period blood while I masturbate?” I mean, what better place to show that you can pleasure yourself while bleeding than a porn film? She told me that she would have to think about it and the day after she took me aside and told me, “Let’s do it! If you’re still OK with that”.

It’s incredible that the fact that I masturbated on my period in front of a camera is the absolutely astonishing news here. I felt empowered because I was feeling that I was doing something ultimately political. I felt like I was giving a chance to other bleeding folks who would watch this scene to empower themselves too through their periods. I’m here to remind you that menstruation is a vital and relevant part of being a menstruating person, and you can still engage in any activities you want, including sex, whether it’s with a partner or alone.

Period sex with a partner is great but I think that period (self) sex is even greater as it can lead you to a deeper connection with your sexuality. I don’t mean to say that you should do it, but I'd suggest giving it a try. Even if it’s not to actually masturbate and eventually reach an orgasm. Just take your time touching your menstrual blood, playing with it, checking its texture, its smell, and even its taste… This shows total acceptance of your body and bodily fluids, therefore, of your whole self, and in the unequal society we live in, it’s a political act indeed.

Saying out loud that you are menstruating, calling your menstruation by their name, and handling your pad, tampon, sponge, or menstrual cup publicly without embarrassment are all political acts. Because we are taking periods away from invisibility and shame. We are helping normalise something that’s already normal and inspiring others to be real about it too instead of using it solely as the subject of old-fashioned jokes and general mockery. We are made fun of for living our own biology freely, both offline and online. Our bodies and periods are censored on social media and in real life as they are deemed “inappropriate”.

Bleeding cis or queer girls deserve to be able to live comfortably with their periods. We deserve proper, realistic, and positive representations of what dealing with menstrual blood is about just as much as we deserve autonomy in safeguarding our menstrual health. The more we talk about and show menstruation in the news and the media, including porn, the less power the stigma will hold. Again, this is a political act as it represents yet another step forward in smashing gender inequality.

Don’t let society make you hate something that is part of yourself. And to be clear, menstrual blood is anything but dirty; it’s normally completely sterile and in no way unclean. I encourage you to embrace your period and to find your power through it however you feel is the best way to do so for yourself. To me, my period is a moment to stay with myself, to train independence, and rest if I can.

Come join this empowering moment with me by watching the first episode of ‘Three’. And if you already watched it, you still have a valid reason to go to Lust Cinema right now; you don’t want to miss the series finale, right? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go rest - I just got my period (no joke).