The profane and the sacred

More than a month ago, I wrote to the author of this piece--in the context of the controversy over women entering the temple at Sabarimalai.  The god at Sabarimalai apparently cannot deal with "unclean" women--the menstruating kind.  So, the god banned all females between 10 and 50 from coming to his home.

In my email to the author, I used quite a bit of material from my blog, especially this post of mine.  I suppose there are many topics for which I can easily copy/paste from my blog.  But then that has always been one of the reasons for my blogging.

I then forwarded my email to a few women in the extended family.  I am sure a man talking about menstruation is not the easiest topic for women in the old country!

Men ought to talk more about this topic.  Talk as in to understand, to learn, and to empathize with those whose lives get complicated--unnecessarily--only because they are women who menstruate.

Three years ago, in a post in which I argued that taxing feminine hygiene products is asinine, I embedded a Ted talk by a man, Arunachalam Muruganantham.  He did all that and more--he went about designing a machine that would help women make inexpensive sanitary napkins.

The story of this "Pad man" has been told in popular culture.  How his entrepreneurship has helped out girls is the subject of a documentary that has been nominated for an Oscar.

For [the director] Zehtabchi, the most revealing moment of the project was when she went unannounced into a coed classroom in Kathikhera and asked the teacher to have the students define a period. The teacher called on a teen-age girl and asked her to stand. For two and a half excruciating minutes, the girl writhed, unable to answer. “We discovered that, yes, there was a lesson in the textbook about menstruation and the female body, but that the teacher had actually skipped the lesson because she was uncomfortable,” Zehtabchi said.

For a land of talkers who are highly argumentative even when in agreement, people in the old country avoid all the important topics altogether.  Like menstruation.  I hope they will talk more openly, honestly, and with science and evidence.  If they do, then they will also start treating women like how they ought to be treated as equals, and not as second-rate humans.

But then I live in a country where the current president, when he was a candidate, was upset with the questioning from a female journalist and decided that her questions were because "There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever."  Some day, the sooner the better, men will realize their mistaken ways.  Until then, we need many more Arunachalam Murugananthams.