As it is Mothers’ Day, let’s talk about menstrual rights, often mistaken for the right to remain silent. It simply isn’t polite conversation, but then ‘women’s issues’ seldom are. Feminists — men and women — have successfully dragged a gamut of ‘awkward’ issues like sexual and genetic diseases, abortion, and maternal mortality into public discourse despite conservatives dragging their heels. They’ve reframed development in more ‘human’ terms, but society is rife with problems brought on by our parochial attitude towards periods. Did you know the word ‘taboo’ comes from the Polynesian word ‘tapua’, which means menstruation? More wholesomely, its cognate ‘tapu’ means a preponderant and powerful phenomenon that is to be treated with reverence and trepidation, as it is both potentially dangerous and unavoidable. This is why the ancients, awestruck by natural forces of creation and destruction, evolved rules and rituals to help navigate these critical cycles. Many still unquestioningly follow these customs that have been codified into our culture by history and pre-science. Instead of our lifestyles being augmented by a modern understanding, having lost our capacity for awe, we have relocated menstruation from its position of respect before the scientific revolution into a realm where it is ironically re-interpreted as an impure and inconvenient interval that women have to shroud in secrecy and shame to “be respectful and thereby respected by their community.” A common fact of life for half our population is considered a period too vulgar to discuss outside the private confines of home. This culture of silence and shame is responsible for less favourable outcomes for our mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, rendering our development less equal, and somehow more ‘gendered’. Consequently, ‘period feminism’ is on the rise. Like the broad church of feminism to which it belongs, it encapsulates a spectrum from weird to wonderful. Since period feminists are here to stay until women are made stakeholders in sustainable development, Politweak this week demystifies their range of grievances and responses to deep societal malaise towards matters of menstruation. Every little girl has a story to tell about the first time she got her period. These narratives help us reflect upon the link between mindset and the hurdles inadvertently placed before our daughters. Mine started at 11. As Mother was away, it was my maid Salita who kindly initiated me into the process of wearing a sanitary napkin. As a melodramatic tween, I thought I was dying, and it wasn’t helped by the look of panic and embarrassment in Salita’s eyes. Neither of us knew how to wear a pad, this 40-something woman and me, so she promptly fetched the kitchen scissors and cut it open to retrieve the cotton strip to spare me the inconvenience of the very uncomfortable looking synthetic covering and adhesive strip. I was utterly confused by her mumbling about not being able to find some cloth to bandage me up with. This story has come to be more than just an inside joke between mother and me. Economically disadvantaged women like Salita and her daughter have to make do with cloth and string, which they wash and reuse. Often living in the same small room with their menfolk, these rags are dried, “away from the male gaze,” in damp and dirty places. This increases exposure to ailments as preventable as urinary tract and bacterial infections. Unable to afford more effective sanitary-ware and attending government schools with inadequate toilets and privacy punctuates school attendance. It is a significant contributor to 40 perecnt of Pakistani and Nepalese girls dropping out of school according to the UNICEF, and the six remaining South Asian countries do not fare much better. On average South Asian girls receive four and a half years less formal schooling than their peers in developed countries. Making menstruation a key consideration in education provision directly contributes to economic wellbeing. UNESCO estimates every year of schooling increases a woman’s income by 10 percent. Innovation in sanitary-ware is slow due to social stigmas. Indian Padma Shri winner Arunachalam Muruganantham, who invented a machine that produces pads at one third of the cost, was branded as a pervert in his village and suffered a long separation from his wife because he improvised ways to test his product himself as no woman he approached was willing to participate. Tampons are often frowned upon as unchaste, permitting fewer young women from conservative backgrounds to become professional runners and swimmers. For those who use them anyway, self-censorship means there is little awareness of Toxic Shock Syndrome and the number of suppliers of organic tampons can be counted on one hand. Even in the West, Thynx (wearable period underwear) was only invented in 2010 by Indian-American Miki Agrawal. Agarwal fought to advertise her intimates in the NYC Subway as they considered it comparatively more “obscene” than the breast enlargement advertisements running alongside it. Globally committing to the Sustainable Development Goals makes it vital to invest in the creation and proliferation of menstruation-related technologies as the average woman uses 17,000 pads and tampons over her lifetime. India alone discards 9,000 tonnes of used sanitary napkins every month. Waste disposal also tends to be gendered as many people surreptitiously throw potentially ‘shame-inviting’ pads and condoms out of their windows instead of in their dustbins, even in posh localities, endangering public health and putting ragpickers at risk. Governments puritanically abstain from making policies to regulate the use of slow-generating materials like crude oil plastic and to prevent choking landfills to our ecological peril. When menstruation is spoken about, the language used encourages abuse in the worst cases, and systematic exclusion and ridicule in others. Upon ‘becoming women’ the most vulnerable girl children in South Asia are married off by their families who dread the ‘dishonour’ of their daughters having premarital sex. Puberty signals a traumatic transaction of virginity for what will forever be intangible to these underaged brides: family standing, dowries and debt settling. World religions are riddled with primeval preoccupations with period-related purity. My own faith apportions of second-class status to nuns, who unlike priests can never hope to be Pope — not because of irrefutable theology but patriarchal power dynamics permeating every organisation. While women everywhere fight for the right to worship every day of the month or to enter their sanctum sanctorum, not every dogmatic discrimination is easy or safe to dismantle. Since period-prejudice is learned behaviour, we need to resist, reform and reject it as individuals. Popular culture disempowers women by ridiculing their anger, no matter how legitimate, as irrational outbursts brought on by Premenstrual syndrome (PMS). Less serotonin does, in fact, get released during menstruation, but the men in our lives need to acknowledge that though our responses may perhaps be more acute, the stimuli do exist. Periods affect different women differently, so give those who suffer a sympathetic hearing. Nevertheless, women need to be less militant and learn to laugh at these jibes because deigning to board this banter-wagon gradually helps men talk about menstruation. If I were you, girls, I’d use it as an opportunity to usher in ‘gender glasnost’ and ‘period perestroika’, even if our pals and partners plead TMI. If any of us go too far in our commentary and comic relief, we ask their forbearance as shock therapy may sometimes drive social change. I write in the run-up to Menstruation Hygiene Day on 28th May, despite well-intentioned warnings of labelling and harassment, because readers today are not misogynistic Murlocks. Menstrual rights have long been on the agenda. Thanks to a new generation of enlightened men and women, it has now become a discussion for daily newspapers worldwide, not only for women-centric magazines, where writers once found a place to publish, long before they came to be remembered as the pioneers of period feminism. Politweak reimagines paths to peace in South Asia The writer is a politics and governance professional, integrated media strategist and Gross National Happiness researcher. She can be reached on Twitter @LatoyaFerns