Women's Mysteries

"This is also from a time when women had 'women's things.' You would go to some social gathering, a woman wasn't there. You'd inquire after her, 'Where is Jeanie?', and be told 'Oh Jeanie? She has women's things.' and you respected that! Nobody knew what they were, she could be squirting jam into envelopes, polishing an onion with her feet, it was none of your fucking business! Knitting a ceiling-cosy? Let her get on with it!"

— Dylan Moran

Women's Mysteries are stories, rituals, secrets, etc. which, for reasons of either magic or tradition, only women are permitted to know. Often, they are said to be passed down from mother to daughter, and may be associated with some sort of puberty initiation rite.

Prevalent in literature that has a mystical or mythological theme, as well as in mythology itself. This trope is thoroughly Older Than Dirt.

Very rarely gender reversed—or, rather, male versions (involving hunting and warfare, circumcision or any other traditional male Rite of Passage, etc.) are treated very differently. The most notable difference is that Women's Mysteries almost always remain mysterious to the audience. This Double Standard probably results from their being mysterious to the author as well since Most Writers Are Male. Related to the idea (apparently held by many men) that women are somehow inherently mysterious. Also, secret societies with exclusively male initiates tend to be treated as a Brotherhood of Funny Hats, while the female version is much, much less likely to receive this treatment.

In Real Life cultures, this sort of thing is mostly just details about female biology (pregnancy, childbirth, birth control, menstruation, etc.) that men simply don't need (or want) to know and women don't care to discuss in mixed company. (Occasionally, it does include a Rite of Passage, usually surrounding a girl's first period.) But it's a rare work of epic fantasy that's willing to admit its "Women's Mysteries" are little more than a Fantasy Counterpart Culture equivalent of that special sixth grade health class for girls.

If you want to look at a humorous modern descendant, peek into the Wondrous Ladies Room. See also Men Are Generic, Women Are Special. Not to be confused, except comically, with These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Can be paired with Psychosexual Horror.

---

Examples

Comic Books

• The Sandman (1989):
  • The "Tales in the Sand" plot arc in which the character Nada is introduced is framed as an oral tradition passed down from father to son as part of a puberty rite. We hear the male version, which has a downer ending, but it is hinted that the women of the tribe tell it differently when they pass the tale down to their daughters. The women's version is never revealed.
  • The Sandman also has "A Game Of You," where the women who are being tormented by the Cuckoo are the only ones allowed to go on the journey into the Dreaming. Apparently, moon magic specifically cares about whether you have two X chromosomes - which pisses off Wanda, a trans woman, to no end. It's turned on its ear at the end of the story, when Death remarks that a) the moon really does not have an opinion either way, and b) Wanda is a woman, chromosomes be damned. The only roadblock had been Thessaly's prejudice. Further subverted when the Hecate Sisters Big Damn Heroes approach fails to accomplish very much. Wanda actually contributes more towards saving the day.
• In Alan Moore's Tom Strong, the young Tom does manage to see the women's mysteries, and so does the reader. Then he's caught, and since he saw the woman's mysteries, he's declared a honorary woman until the next moon. Hilarity Ensues. (Presumably, the author of Promethea reckons there's nothing mysterious about women being inherently mysterious.)
• The Invisibles has Lord Fanny, a transvestite shaman in the Aztec tradition. Her back story reveals that she was the only son in a line where only women learned the secrets of shamanism; after a failed attempt at a daughter resulted in a miscarriage, her mother and grandmother raised her as a girl.
• Atalanta, a French comic, has the eponymous heroine raised by her grandfather in the middle of nowhere. Then one day he notices she's bleeding, even though she hasn't been wounded. So he takes her to an old woman in a cave to learn of Womens Mysteries, the old woman lampshading the fact that the men of the tribe get rid of these incomprehensible-to-them matters as soon as they arrive.
• Parodied in The Cartoon History of the Universe. In a sequence depicting the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution (which women are widely thought to have initiated), an exhausted woman farmer tells a man the women could use some help and asks if he'd like a job. He covers his ears and says, "Silence! These mysteries are not for the ears of men."
• One Bloom County strip features a conversation between Hodgepodge saying, "I tell ya, there's a conspiratorial air about females! Like those suspiciously vague commercials that never say just what they're about. What exactly is 'feminine protection' anyway? A chartreuse flamethrower?"

Fan Works

• In Shards of a Memory, matters of poisons and antidotes are secrets kunoichi share from mother to daughter. Since Shard's only daughter Miwa hates her and wants to kill her, she instead instructs Raphael in making an antidote to Gentle Mercy when she is poisoned.

Film — Live Action

• Inverted with the secret book of sex tips from American Pie, passed down from brother to brother.
• In Back to the Future Part II, Doc mentions this while musing that he won't get to visit The Wild West.
  Doc: Better that I devote myself to study the other great mystery of the universe - women...
• La Captive: Simon is a weird Control Freak with his girlfriend Ariane; he follows her around constantly and wishes to know her every thought. Simon is so obsessed by the things women do with each other, the feelings they have for each other, and the thoughts that they have during sex, that he quizzes a lesbian couple about what they feel during lovemaking and whether or not Ariane may think about other people when she and Simon are having sex.
• Some teenage males, upon seeing Flashdance back in the 80s, were astounded by the fact that the heroine could take off her bra while still wearing a baggy sleeveless sweatshirt. Yes, guys, it's doable, although it's not recommended as it weakens the shoulder straps' elastic. In fact it can even be done while wearing a fitted, long sleeved shirt - but that is even worse for the elastic.
• The book and film Harvest Home (a variant where by the end EVERYONE knows what the mysteries are, though they are things man is not meant to SEE. Or talk about). This is an example where they are revealed to the audience.
• Mean Girls: The principal attempts to get the girls talking about any "ladies' problems" they might have (referring to disagreements with each other). When the first one he singles out predictably starts going into Too Much Information territory he swiftly subs in Miss Norbury, saying "OK, I can't do this."
• Invoked in Rat Race where a character hijacks a bus by saying he needs the bus driver's uniform to help out a woman about to give birth, essentially naming all sorts of feminine issues and organs in ways that don't make sense, counting on the driver not knowing what he's talking about because of this trope.
• The movie The Red Tent 2014 lives on this trope. Set in Old Testament days, the movie focuses on significant Biblical events, as told from the women's perspective. The aforementioned Red Tent is where women go when they have their period and they perform sacred fertility rituals to the pagan goddess Inana (which is strictly forbidden by the Old Testament men).

Folklore

• In parts of Scotland there are stories of women sharing cooking utensils with The Fair Folk and told to keep it silent from their husbands. In these stories the husband always ends up finding out and ruining the deal.

Literature

• Ciaphas Cain: During a conversation with a female techpriest, Ciaphas learns she's able to do think about several things at once, a process she attributes to her cerebral implants and calls "multitasking". Which, as Amberley Vail notes in the footnotes, is something nearly all women can do, cyberbrain or no.
  Something most women have been perfectly able to do since the dawn of history, to the bemusement of men.
• Inverted in Jean M. Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear, when the heroine secretly follows some male shamans into a deep cave and witnesses their secret rituals.
  • Women do have some secrets in the Clan of the Cave Bear series - the most notable being a form of birth control that only medicine women may know about and which, it is said, men would forbid if they knew of it.
    • Also played straight in Clan of the Cave Bear with the women staying within their family hearth during their moon time.
    • In the sequels, the various Cro-Magnon tribes have shamans of both genders, but there are rites that are sacred to women.
• Nanny Ogg's grandmother (in Discworld) spied upon "secret male rituals what no woman ever saw." Turns out they just got drunk, peed in corners and danced around with horns on. She thought it was a bit sissy.
  • Nanny herself, along with Granny Weatherwax and Magrat, may have originated a Women's Mystery in Witches Abroad, when they disrupted the hypermacho Thing With The Bulls. It's stated that in the years to follow, nobody ever talked about how the witches' unwitting actions had humiliated all the competitors ... or at least, they didn't talk about it in front of the men.
  • In Monstrous Regiment, one of the girls mentions to the invading officers that she's going to have a baby. Instantly the men look panicked and ask "What, here?" and then "retreat to the masculine safety of the corridor".
    • Discworld males in general tend to get very uncomfortable and leave the room when the merest suggestion of childbirth is in progress. Vimes, who normally investigates and questions everything, can barely bring himself to discuss it when Sybil reveals she is pregnant, and we know Doctor Mossy Lawn is a good doctor because he's an exception.
  • Played more traditionally in the Tiffany Aching novels, with the secret rites practiced by female Nac Mac Feegle, passed down exclusively from kelda to daughter.
• Inversion: Jorge Luis Borges' story The Sect of the Phoenix involves a secret known only to men, and told only by older men to younger, in every culture and society in history. In typical Borges fashion, the piece is an elaborate literary joke: it's clear that the secret is sexual intercourse, confirmed by Word of God.
• In Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy books, D'Angeline women can only become pregnant if they pray to their goddess of healing, Eisheth. (See No Periods, Period.) The second trilogy of books are narrated from a man's perspective, and he mentions that men are not allowed to watch these rites, although earlier hints in the book implied that it's as simple as lighting a candle and saying/thinking a few words. There is a similar occurrence when Phedre visits a shrine of Naamah, the goddess of love, which Joscelin and Imriel are not allowed to enter; however, in this case it's because only Servants of Naamah (ie, courtesans, which can include men) are permitted.
• The Wheel of Time series:
  • The very nature of magic is split into separate male and female halves, saidar and saidin, making every female channeler's weave (i.e. spell she casts) a complete, utter mystery to men, and vice versa.
  • The Aiel (a Proud Warrior Race) have female-specific societies such as Maidens of the Spear, who never even allow men into their tents, except for the Dragon Reborn. Any man who needs to relay a message must do so to a woman who will pass the message along.
• Jack Chalker's Soul Rider series:
  • A teenage boy is punished for spying on Women's Mysteries with "honorary woman" status through Crippling Castration followed by an involuntary Gender Bender. Hilarity definitely does not ensue.
  • On the other hand when something similar happens to another character in the same series (castrated then given a woman's vulva as a replacement) he decides to use his officially female status to gain access to the corridors of power. Unfortunately he dies in battle before he can put this plan into action.
• The Bene Gesserit in the Dune series are composed of only females, as all the males die in the initiation, and harbor tons of mysteries, some of which are tantamount to secret superpowers. Their breeding program is dedicated to producing a male, the Kwisatz Haderach, who can do all the stuff women can do, plus what the Bene Gesserits can't: access all of his Genetic Memory, since Reverend Mothers only have access to the maternal line. Be Careful What You Wish For.
  • There's also the Fish Speakers of God-Emperor of Dune which share secret rituals with their God-Emperor that only women (and Duncan Idaho) can participate in. Also repeated again in the Honored Matres of Heretics and Chapterhouse: Dune.
• Exists in full mystical wonder in P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath where the "Women's World" is a deliberate mystery that the Highborn women have constructed in part to prevent themselves from being used as brood mares by the males and in part so that they can secretly guide the genetic lines by deciding who will marry who and whether there will be children.
• The novel Conjure Wife (originally appeared in Unknown Worlds, April 1943) by Fritz Leiber relates a college professor's discovery that his wife (and all other women) are regularly using magic against one another and their husbands. Interesting story as it is set in the real world around the idea that women practice magic but not only keep it secret from all men but almost from themselves, as they just act as if it really isn't anything important but just superstitious meaningless acts, like not walking under a ladder. It was filmed three times:
  • Weird Woman (1944)
  • Burn, Witch, Burn! (aka Night of the Eagle) (1962)
  • Witches' Brew (aka Which Witch is Which?) (1980)
• In Dream Park, the gamers visit a New Guinea native village in their Show Within a Show adventure. The male and female gamers are separated, and each group attends a meeting of tribal elders of their own gender. Only the male meeting is shown on camera, but the idea that each gathering is strictly forbidden to the other gender's eyes is implicit.
• In Chuck Palahniuk's Rant, the title character gets outraged that girls can excuse themselves from class by claiming to have "cramps". He later fights for boys to get a similar treatment by having a "situation" (=boners!).
• In The High King this trope is invoked a couple of times on Eilonwy's behalf, notably at the end when Eilonwy must lose her magic powers so that she can stay in Prydain with Taran. When she wishes them away, Dallben comments that she "will have that mystery and magic all women share, and that Taran, like all men, shall often be baffled by it."
• Played with in Stickfigure. When the narrator is with her mom getting dressed for her brother's graduation, her mother, very seriously, says to her that there's something she needs to tell and it's very important and because she loves her. The narrator listens carefully, expecting some coming-of-age advice, but instead is told that she looks like a stick figure in the dress she wants to wear and should use a different one.
• In Terry Pratchett's Nation, the Women's Place is a giant mystery (and taboo) for men, who aren't allowed in under any circumstances. And the women in there have the secret... of beer. The Men's Place is equally taboo for women, and mostly revolves around their rituals of ancestor worship. The Women's mysteries sound like a lot more fun don't they?
• The Red Tent. Unlike most versions, they're spelled out in detail to the readers, but you might wish they hadn't been.
• In Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, the main character Lily, her friend Snow Flower, and several other female characters communicate through nu shu, a special type of women's writing written on fans and handkerchiefs.
  • Based on an actual tradition of such writing and exchanges, which the author exhaustively researched along with other Chinese women's traditions that were fading with the advent of the modern era.
• In the Falco novels (set in 1st century Rome), the protagonist's mother-in-law is involved with the cult of the Bona Dea. Falco notes that Roman men do wonder what these respectable matrons get up to during their meetings, but concludes that they're probably better off not knowing.
• There's a semi-example the Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Adventuress of Henrietta Street: our intrepid heroes are staying in a brothel, where there's a lot of general tantric-sex feminine-mysteries type stuff going on. Business at the brothel shuts down once a month because somehow all the women and girls who live there are on the exact same menstrual cycle, so they take that week off to drink hot cocoa and avoid staining the sheets. The Doctor's companion Anji (female) somehow hops onto the same cycle they're all on with biologically improbable alacrity, but prefers not to socialize as much; fellow companion Fitz (male) hangs out while they're doing ghost stories around the fire. Well, he's a pretty chill dude;^note thirteen-year-old prostitute-in-training Juliette describes him as "very sweet" in her diary you'd probably invite him to your period party too, if you felt like doing a thing like that.
• Ciaphas Cain: when talking to a female techpriest, Cain learns she has several cybernetic augments that allow her to think of several different things at the same time, which she refers to as "multitasking". Amberley's comment is that this is an ability shared by women since time began, to the utter befuddlement of the average male.
• A key theme in The Virgin Suicides, as the boys struggle to solve the mystery of the Lisbon girls—which has as much to do with their femininity as with their suicidal impulses. Literally the closest we get to an explanation from the Lisbon sisters is one of them telling her therapist "you never were a fourteen-year-old girl."
  We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
• The Imperium series features the rituals of the "Good Goddess" (Bona Dea), which are female-only, to the extent that Terentia wears a cloak buttoned up to her neck to prevent Cicero from seeing her robe. A great scandal occurs when Clodius sneaks into the ceremony Disguised in Drag and is caught. See Real Life below.
• Discussed but not actually seen in Of Men and Monsters by William Tenn. The protagonist, who is just coming of age himself, wonders what the girl he's attracted to will learn when she becomes an initiate of the the Female Society of his tribe, but knows he'll never be allowed to find out.
• In The Caves of Steel, Earth women converse freely while making use of Personal, the public washroom. Men, in contrast, don't even look at or acknowledge one another there, which leaves them Locked Out of the Loop of a major source of rumor and gossip.

Live-Action TV

• Played with in Strangers with Candy, in that the mystery is only a mystery to gay history teacher Chuck Noblet (played by Stephen Colbert). When he is asked to teach a phys ed class while the regular teacher is absent, he discovers that the class topic is 'the vagina'. He asks a girl to draw a diagram on the board for the class, is disgusted, erases it and picks another girl, saying she looks cleaner.
• CSI:
  • In one episode, Hodges is trying to determine how much alcohol a tampon can absorb. He's stumped, as each time he sinks the absorbent cotton part in a beaker of booze, it expands too much to be used afterward. Wendy comes to his rescue and demonstrates the cardboard applicators' mechanics. Hodges remarks that he'd always wondered how that worked, and she smugly replies: "All men do".
  • In "To Halve And To Hold", as part of her interrogation of three female murder suspects, one of whom says she was raped by the victim, Sara frankly beings explaining how forensics can determine the difference between rape and consensual sex by drawing a diagram of a vagina on a chalkboard and pointing out where major v. minor injuries would respectively occur. Very shortly into her talk, the male officer who'd brought the women in for questioning awkwardly excuses himself saying, "Uh, Sidle, I'm just gonna be right outside the door here."

• Community: In the episode Cooperative Calligraphy this is the response of the women after finding Abed's charts of their menstrual cycles. He had noticed that the girls were slightly angrier on certain days, so he started keeping track in order to know to be more careful around them on those days. By the time he realized what he was doing, it had such a positive effect that he didn't think it was a good idea to stop.
  Britta: Are you charting our menstrual cycles?
  Annie: What?! Gross!
  Shirley: Abed, this is so personal! And so accurate.
  Pierce: Abed just became my hero.
  Annie: [tearing up] Abed, this is so creepy.
  Abed: [handing her a tissue and chocolate] Chocolate?
  Annie: Thank y— [aghast] GET AWAY FROM ME!
• An inversion in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "You Are Cordially Invited", where we are introduced to Klingon Men's mysteries. Which include a Vision Quest by Worf and three groomsmen just before he marries Jadzia. As this is a Klingon ritual, it of course includes lots of Macho Masochism.
• Call the Midwife
  • Since the show is primarily about women’s healthcare and the changes brought to it by the late fifties and early sixties, it features the beginnings of the introduction of (gasp! shock!) men to the delivery room. Opinions from both both the midwife and Panicky Expectant Father populations vary wildly.
  • There’s also an amusing scene where the nurses are preparing for a night out. One nurse’s date, waiting downstairs, wonders what they’re up to. The other replies, “Mysterious, fragrant things.” (The reality involves drinking, snacking, and some token touching up of hair.)

Stand-Up Comedy

• Eddie Izzard has a bit about boys in the playground regarding Hopscotch as the age group's equivalent of Womens Mysteries. "What, what do they do??"

Tabletop Games

• The Black Furies from Werewolf: The Apocalypse have several gifts and rites that are exclusive to them, although there are technically some male Metis (offspring of two werewolves) in the tribe. The trope is fully invoked with Maiden and Mother gifts/rites, which can only be used by Furies who have yet to give birth and those that have (neither of which any Metis could do, being sterile). Also played straight with a camp of Get of Fenris who are exclusively female.
• In Traveller the Kenningsboken is a partial example. It is a book few Sword Worlder males read all the way through and while it contains lore on child care and farm management it is rumored to be a psionic exercise manual.

Theatre

• Euripides' play Bacchae hinges on a depiction of a women's cult in mythological Greece. Of course in Classical Greece there were many religious activities that were sex segregated; the Olympics for example were forbidden to women (although unmarried maidens could watch) and women participated in their own religious rites, but the way they are depicted in the play is basically just made up. It involves absolute craziness women nursing lion and wolf cubs from their teats; women chasing, catching and ripping apart a live deer and then eating it raw; women scratching the ground causing milk and blood to flow from the earth... etc.

Video Games

• King of Dragon Pass has a Multiple-Choice Past that allows your clan to have this as one of their formative features.

Web Comics

• That Which Man Was Not Meant To Know in the webcomic Nodwick. If a man is exposed to it, it makes his head explode. If a woman is exposed to it... she starts laughing that this would make men's heads explode.
• The inversion appears in Questionable Content, in the form of the "Secret Booty Dance" (which gets revealed not long after).
  • And man-code.
• Parodied in this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip.
• Head Trip parodies the general reaction of guys to being informed about this. Complete with bleeding ears upon hearing the words "cervical mucus".
• Played With, parodied, played straight and mocked frequently in Misfile, where Ash is forced to learn things he never thought he didn't want to know about his new form. Finding out about 'bra pockets' after an argument about women's clothing not having enough pockets is one of the mildest examples.

Western Animation

• South Park often uses this trope to depict the schism between boys and girls at the South Park Elementary, playing it in their classical satrical manner:
  • For example in "Marjorine", Butters is dressed up as girl so he can infiltrate a girl's slumber party to steal a Secret future-predicting Artifact (meaning the paper and felt pen 'fortune tellers' elementary school girls love).
  • "The List" has the boys discover the girls' making the titular list, a secret ranking of the boys based on attraction and steal it, which kicks off the plot. Namely that Clyde is the cutest and Kyle the least. Kyle ends up depressed while Stan tries to find answers by asking Wendy. It's discovered that the list was rigged and they let the boys purposely steal the rigged one. Why they did this? For free shoes. (Clyde's father owns a shoe store and thus by feeding his ego, they could easier date him and get shoes.)

Real Life

• This is where the myth of the Maenads came from. Women in the cult of Dionysus would go off to perform their sacred rites, and since the men didn't know what they were doing, they made up stories about mad women having wild orgies in the woods. "Orgy" here refers to any sort of excessive activity; it could be sexual, but it could just as easily be a frenzy of eating, violence, or just religious fervor. The Maenads gained a reputation for all of the above.
• Publius Clodius, an ancestor of Claudius and Caligula became notorious for dressing up as a woman and sneaking into the Festival of the Great Goddess.
• In Norse tradition, prophetic magic (seiðr) was considered female territory, associated with sexual submissiveness and the goddess Freyja. (In contrast, rune magic was considered male territory, presided over by the god Odin. In the myths, though, Odin actually mastered both schools of magic; he learned seiðr through obvious means.) Although male practitioners (seiðmenn) existed and were solicited for services, they were generally considered outcasts. According to Norse beliefs, a "real man" would confront his enemy face to face, using strength instead of seiðr (although rune magic was still okay).
• Inversion: In a museum display for native Australian items, a portion of the display was covered by shutters, concealing the contents from sight. They were there to ensure that these contents (tools for male subcision, an ancient puberty-rite) are kept out of view from any aboriginal woman who might drop by the exhibit and not wish to see these Men's Mystery items.
• Some rituals performed by females in Aborigines cultures are rumored to strike men dead if they see them. One such ritual requires a male singer, so he is blindfolded as a safety precaution.
• The Hindmarsh Island Controversy involving Aboriginal beliefs about "secret women's business".
• Inversion: In the Olympic Games of Ancient Greece, married women were not allowed to be in the audience, much less participate in any way. May have had something to do with the fact that male athletes competed naked. There was an actual law stating that the penalty for any woman attending was the death sentence, though they never had to enforce it because it deterred the women from coming. However, one year a woman snuck in by cross-dressing and passed herself off as one of the athlete's coaches. When the ruse was revealed, there was a great commotion about what to do, given that they'd never actually killed a woman just for coming to the Olympics before and were uneasy about making this the first (especially given her highborn status). The solution they ultimately settled upon was to give the woman who had snuck in a one-time pardon, since she was also the young champion's mother... while at the same time declaring a new law, that from now on all coaches, as well as athletes, would have to enter the arena naked...

---