Those bloody women!

I grew up in an India that seems so much like a different planet altogether.  In that old India, I grew up with women--young and middle-aged alike--practically disappearing for three days from the main areas of the home.  In grandmas' homes, they were cast away to the farthest end, far away from the street entrance.  As a kid, I got to see them only if I was tasked with taking food for them.

In the industrial town where we lived as a nuclear family, mother was exiled upstairs.  She used the bathroom there, slept there, and never came down for three days.  Even worse, not only was she not in the kitchen cooking those tasty foods, a neighbor woman brought us food or came over and cooked.  Sometimes, father cooked dinner--the only couple of dishes that he knew how to make.

The mystery deepened when my sister too started this routine.  What the hell was going on?

One day, like many times before, I was given a grocery list that I was supposed to take to the store.  As I always did, I scanned the list.  An item there was new: "Sanitary napkins."

Curious I have forever been.  I asked my mother what that was.  Even before mother could reply, my sister jumped in with "shut up!"

Later on, of course, the biology textbook and fellow students helped solve the puzzle.  I then understood why there was a raggedy piece of cloth in the upstairs bathroom that we kids were told to avoid--it served as reusable sanitary napkins.

It was a different world back then.  I have no idea why people refer to the past as "the good old days."  There could not have been anything good in women being treated as outcasts for three days a month, leave alone their second-class treatment the rest of the time!

Despite the changes that have happened, I doubt that there is open and educational talk about periods.  Not only with girls and women, but also with boys and men.  Instead, it is increasingly about the products that can be sold to "help" girls and women.  I am not confident by any means that the old cultural stigma about menstruation, and females, has gone away.

The outsize attention paid to products reduces menstruation to a hygiene issue when it should be much more. The monthly shedding of the uterine lining is part of a cycle that lasts, on average, for 40 years. It is a vital marker of health and a pivotal developmental milestone for half the world’s population.
Menarche [the first menstrual period] should be a prime opportunity to begin a girl’s lifelong authentic engagement with her body. Instead, we hand her a pad and teach her to put it up her sleeve when she goes to the bathroom.

It is a strange world!

America too, where mothers socialized "their daughters to keep tidy and discreet"!

Even now, American girls are socialized to see menstruation, and more generally, their bodies, as problems to be solved through use of the “right” products. Today, we are exporting this view around the world.

Yep!

Challenging the social stigma and disgust directed at the female body must be our main mission — in the developing world and everywhere else.

Amen, sister!