Bet on this: attitudes to periods haven’t evolved
Betting shops are often thought of as pretty sleazy places. What they aren’t particularly associated with is menstruation. A 2013 survey in the UK showed that patrons of these establishments are 88% male, so the majority of customers do not have to spend between two and seven days each month discharging uterine lining from their vaginas.
But the same doesn’t hold for the staff of these shops, as events at TopBet in Germiston, Gauteng, have handily illustrated.
EWN reported on Monday that in January women employees of this betting franchise were subjected to a vaginal inspection using surgical gloves to determine who was responsible for leaving a small amount of menstrual blood in the women’s toilet.
I guarantee that there is not a woman in South Africa who did not experience a frisson of vicarious horror and shame upon hearing this story. It is a female nightmare brought to life in ghastly technicolour. It is the schoolgirl terror of discovering you have bled through your uniform, writ large.
From the moment of a girl’s first period, we are taught that menstruation is something to be silently, secretly endured. Above all, its evidence must be concealed from boys and men: being confronted with the nauseating evidence of female biology is a burden they cannot be expected to shoulder. Show me a woman in a mixed-sex office who strides proudly to the toilet brandishing a sanitary pad, and I’ll still call you a liar.
Women’s shame, women’s curse: the old euphemisms for periods reveal a stigma that endures today. Judeo-Christian thinking teaches us that menstruation — together with painful childbirth — was Eve’s punishment for defying God. Menstruating women in Biblical times were ostracised from society as unclean, confined to tents to bleed together. The practice persists in parts of India to this day.
Elsewhere in 2018, ebullient tampon ads would have us believe that menstruation is something to be positively celebrated, but that reality does not extend beyond the frenzied imaginations of marketers. Witness the fact that it is still considered taboo to use red liquid in TV ads to demonstrate the absorbency of sanitary pads.
I know staunch feminists who still get embarrassed when buying tampons, particularly if there are no other grocery items to help conceal this shameful loot. I know countless women who have horror stories about their first periods and unhelpful parental reactions to the realisation that their baby girls were becoming dirty women. In one case, a friend’s mother sobbed: “Are you sure you didn’t sit on a pair of scissors?”
That’s a darkly comic incident, which brings me to the one context in which society does find it acceptable to mention periods: as the punchline to sexist jokes. Suggesting that a woman is emotional or angry because it is her time of the month is a tired weapon in every misogynist’s moth-eaten armoury. It was the reflexive retort of Donald Trump to a woman journalist challenging him: that she must have “blood coming out of her wherever”.
For a man who claims to be no stranger to the female form, it’s pretty lame that Trump can’t say “vagina”. Unless, of course, he genuinely is uncertain about the orifice involved in menstruation. In a world where periods are shrouded in secrecy, it’s just about possible.
If there is a silver lining to be detected in the utterly repugnant TopBet scenario, it is in the reminder it provided that South African women do in fact menstruate, which may help galvanise the endless foot-dragging over the government’s provision of free sanitary supplies.
For the rest of it, though, what happened at TopBet confirms what women already know to be true. That society sees menstruation as disgusting. That menstruating women deserve to be shamed. That women who do not succeed in hiding every trace of their monthly periods warrant extra humiliation.
With news like this, who needs The Handmaid’s Tale?
The TopBet scenario is a female nightmare brought to life in ghastly technicolour