Abolish the shame and the secrecy, this woman’s work is never done
COLUMNIST
PERIODS are a bloody nuisance. God, what were you thinking? What a design fault. Surely evolution could have come up with a better system of informing women they’re not pregnant than bleeding, cramps and a foul mood every single month for the best part of 40 years.
Then there’s the cost. We shell out an estimated £20,000 each on sanitary protection over a lifetime’s menstruation. Tampons and pads could be cheaper if they were taxed as “non-essential luxury items”.
But that status is only given to such vital elements of daily life as bingo, crocodile meat and Jaffa Cakes. (Though granted, when you’re in the grip of a pre-menstrual carb crave Jaffa Cakes do feel like an essential item.)
But perhaps the most infuriating thing about periods is not the pain, nor the price, but the perception of them.
On any given day, it’s that time of the month for more than 800 million women across the world.
It’s a normal, fundamental bodily function affecting half the population for half their lives, and yet menstruation is still a taboo subject regarded by some with an almost medieval fear and loathing.
And shrouding a natural process in mortified silence breeds ignorance and shame.
A disturbing report released a few weeks ago found that 44% of girls surveyed did not know what was happening to them the first time they had a period; 60% felt scared; 58% felt embarrassed, and half did not feel confident enough to tell anyone else they had started their periods. The research also revealed women feel embarrassment and a lack of confidence talking about their periods even in later life.
These are sad statistics that show how little progress we have made. It’s not as if we live in a coy and repressed society. It’s clear popular culture is happy to sexualise the female body but not normalise it.
Embarrassment and puberty, of course, have always gone hand in hand. For my generation of preteens an element of myth and halftruths were also thrown into the mix. A cousin who was a year my senior was my main source of misinformation. After telling me that women had babies when men gave them Spam – a revelation that put me off tinned meat for life – she said we would soon be “bleeding from our bums every month”.
Thankfully my mother – a former nurse and human biology lecturer – stepped in swiftly to correct my cousin’s wilder theories and give me The Talk. Yet even with all the facts the first period – which arrived with maximum inconvenience on a family camping holiday in the Alps – still felt alarming, so I can’t imagine how those poor girls who have not been prepared by their mums or teachers cope.
I returned to school that September and didn’t tell my best friends. They hadn’t started and I didn’t want to be the odd one out. That was more than 30 years ago, but even today young girls have anxieties about having their period while in school. Chella Quint, the founder of #periodpositive, a campaign aiming to tackle the cycle of “secrecy, fear and misinformation about menstruation” told a newspaper recently: “Kids I spoke to complained that school toilets were inaccessible during lessons, and worried about not being able to take their bags to the toilet during exams.”
This resurrected the horror of my geography O-level and an unfortunate leakage incident which could only be dealt with by remaining in my seat until practically the entire school had gone home. Again, an experience that almost every female will recognise but not one we’d talk about.
Advertising culture didn’t help the conversation flow about flow because, well, flow was never really flow on the telly, was it? Not that we stayed to find out. If your father or brother was in the room you’d be out the door on the first Whooooaaaaah of the Bodyform Anthem.
But even today you could be a young girl watching a sanitary pad advert and never know There Will Be Blood.
The red stuff is perfectly acceptable in slasher films and Silent Witness, but in the alternative universe of san-pro marketing we ladies apparently only leak Listerine.
Then there’s the curious advertising myth that menstruation turns us into Olympic athletes, soccer professionals or roller-skating champions once a month when frankly all we want is a quiet night in with a hot water bottle, Netflix and a packet of Cinnamon Grahams.
And don’t get me started on white jeans.
You may be offering sufficient absorbency to soak up the Red Sea but no-one in their right mind is going to risk the san-pro ad’s ridicu-