THERE'S SOMETHING different about Kiwi girls, something that can't be suppressed by good looks and a slinky silk designer gown in midnight blue, with draped bodice and train; something that bursts out with, "I must be pre-menstrual!" on TV, out of sheer elation.

Rebecca Gibney, born in Levin, won a Silver Logie last week for being Australia's most popular television actress. It was one of those black-tie events when women in the industry glam up madly, but a Kiwi girl is never going to be entirely comfortable with that. No matter how good she looks, no matter how much the dress cost her, no matter that this is yet another triumph in her career, she'll somehow have to mention that she just farted, fall over drunk, or use the f-word. But in Gibney's case, mentioning menstruation really raised the ante.

"It probably wasn't the smartest thing to say," she admitted afterwards, but out the words slipped, like egg white down a plughole. And now nobody will ever forget – like Prince Charles with that tampon.

Menstruation has been the last rickety frontier outpost of things it's not polite to mention, swathed as it is in embarrassment and discomfort, stains, and the disposal of things nobody wants to look at. No matter how advertising agencies try to dress it up, it isn't a regular experience that brightens the lives of fanatical squash players, nor is it in any way associated with string quartets and flowers. If God were a woman, as women often say, it would not exist – unless she'd given it to men out of spite.

As if the days of bleeding aren't unpleasant enough, there's also – as Gibney indicated – the days immediately beforehand, of being ratty and emotional, but having to try to hide it. We have to joke about it because it's so real, so infuriating, and it so reduces us to mere biology. It's so levelling, so yucky, so undercutting of all glamour – and that, I guess, is why a Kiwi girl just has to blurt it out. We don't do glamour. We do girl-next-door, booze mate, workmate and shag buddy, none of which needs a decent dress, or even lipstick.

Yet there's one final frontier remaining, and of all things the March copy of British Vogue dealt with it, calling it The Last Taboo.

I've been a regular buyer of Vogue forever, not because I can afford its $10,000 dresses, or because I look like the kids who model them, but because I've had a lifelong interest in fashion, and in the unattainable perfection of style that it consistently promotes.

Vogue presents a fantasy of the perfect life in which all women have flat chests and adolescent boys' bodies, moody eye shadow, and vacant faces that seem to plead for a real, transforming experience any day now – like reading a book, or actually speaking. I relish the way its teenage models sprawl in suggestive abandon with young gay boys of impossible beauty, advertising colognes, handbags, underwear. I enjoy the advice given on such matters as how to keep wearing top labels in a recession. Here's an example: dare to wear last year's frock with different accessories. And I marvel at the way these girls can actually stand, even stride, in heels as high as a school ruler.

Where do these people live? Do they eat, think, breathe like other people, or do they emerge cellophane-wrapped from designers' imaginations? I don't care. I buy Vogue for fantasy. And this is why the March issue of British Vogue – still on news stands here – gave me the same jolt as Gibney's blurt at the Logies.

Amid the endless pages of perfume and jewellery ads, the posing, immaculate girls frozen in blank perfection, the $3000 blouses, the $6000 silk mini dresses, and the PVC leggings for $1000 – Vogue brought us down with an article on what in plain language is called shit.

We learn that there's a perfect designer poo, experts to consult on how to make it, and that we should strive to produce it. The writer is impressed by people who gladly poo in front of their lovers, or choose to have no dunny door in their homes. It's about having no boundaries, hang-ups or taboos – and it makes sense, I guess, if you're the kind of elegant waif who really exists in the pages of Vogue. Not being a person who ate as such, you wouldn't produce poo as other people know it, but tiny pellets in this season's colours, smelling faintly floral. And I can accept that. Reality would never burst out of such elegant pages, their glossy paper so hopelessly slippery, and so much too non-absorbent for practical use.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/opinion/
3673243/A-bloody-pain-but-the-girl-can-t-help-it