I was fobbed off. So I built something else.
Bloody Marvellous exists because I could not get a straight answer about my own body. Not as a teenager, not in my thirties, not heading into perimenopause. Three different decades and the same fob-off.
So we built the thing nobody handed me: one place that tells girls and women what is happening to them, from a bloody beginning at eleven to ninety and beyond, in language that does not talk down or dress it up.
It was not just me
Turns out the fob-off has a pattern to it. Ask a room full of women and you hear the same five things back: told it is normal when it is not, bleeding through the day and handed a leaflet instead of a diagnosis, losing the version of yourself that used to show up before a bad week each month, no one at school with an answer and paying private money just to finally be believed by someone in a white coat.
You are not making it up. You are not the only one.
Five separate women could tell you five separate versions of the same story and none of them would be exaggerating.
Everything Nobody Told You
So Bloody Marvellous became the answer I never had. One curriculum that runs the whole way through a woman’s life instead of stopping the day she turns sixteen, split into six age groups that match what her body is doing.
- Bloody Beginning · 11–15 First periods, changing bodies and everything school skipped.
- Bloody Bold · 16–24 Periods, contraception, sex and knowing what is normal.
- Bloody Blooming · 25–44 Cycles, fertility, pregnancy and the pain you were told to put up with.
- Bloody Balance · 45–49 Perimenopause, before anyone warned you it had started.
- Bloody Brilliant · 50–69 Menopause, bones, pelvic floor and the second half.
- Bloody Ballsy · 70+ Dryness, bladders, sex after seventy and being taken seriously.
We say the parts most people whisper, out loud, in language a fifteen-year-old and a fifty-five-year-old can both use without either one feeling talked down to.
Where we are now
None of this is finished. New chapters get written every time a teenager messages a helpline asking something no one else will answer, every time a fifty-year-old gets told her flooding is just stress. The job is not done until every stage of a woman’s life has an honest answer waiting for her instead of a pamphlet.
If you are reading this because you got fobbed off too, hear this straight from me.
You are not making it up. You are not the only one. Go and be Bloody Marvellous.
Julie Daly
Founder, Bloody Marvellous