Last month, on Teej, my mother answered her phone to a neighbor asking her if she was on her period. When she replied in the negative, she heard a relieved sigh on the other end, and was subsequently invited to a pooja. Last month, I asked my grandmother where she'd kept my sanitary pads. The response I got? "Nana ke saamne kaise pooch sakti ho!"
As a part of the research for this article, I asked people around me what they know and think of menstruation. You guessed it — I was greeted by nervous laughs and 'aisi kaisi baatein pooch rahi ho?' If this is the response something which is as natural as facial hair gets from educated youth, then really, it shouldn't come as a surprise that this social stigma almost each one of us is contributing is actually killing young girls in the Indian subcontinent itself. Dozens of teenage girls in rural Nepal are banished to menstrual huts where they are completely isolated while they 'are having that time of the month'. This banishment from society leads to fatalities more often than not.
There’s an organ called a uterus in a female body — and every twenty-eight days or so, it sheds blood out through the vagina. What exactly is it about this process that causes embarrassment? Why are sanitary pad brands called whisper and secret? Why is it that you would go great lengths to hide your tampons in scented, flowery boxes when you wouldn’t mind leaving your toilet paper out in the open?
And then there’s PMS, which is the go to ‘legitimate medical excuse’ for being moody. Sarah Romans, MB, MD, of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand says, “The problem is often how a woman's depressed, anxious, or irritable mood is assumed to be caused by hormones rather than real life problems. Her concerns are viewed as not valid because they are ‘caused by her hormones and thus irrational’, resulting in complaints about not being taken seriously by her social group or herself.
Instead of hushing your voice the next time you borrow a sanitary napkin from somebody or giggling and pointing when you see a blood stain on somebody's jeans, or labeling women’s feelings and concerns as PMS induced overreactions, stop and think for a moment. Do you really want to be a part of building up a taboo that harms half of our population?
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