A new documentary addresses the stigma of menstruation in India
economist.com
economist.com
The virginity issue doesn't make any sense, but it's a big part of the culture here. It's good to see posts like these showing the way people think about menstruation in places like India.
He's pretty much a hero
I look forward to watching this.
An older reference: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26260978
What I find disturbing is that school peers humiliate each other over menstruation. Nearly all girls get it during puberty, so why are they shaming each other? And for the boys who shame their classmates, why aren't their teachers holding them accountable?!
This is kind of like asking why water is wet. Many children (likely due to their parents) are insecure savages with under-developed empathy. Humiliating each other is simply what they do. Hence why we force them to undergo decades of education outside the home to learn how to relate to each other in a civilized, healthy way by adulthood.
Kids really don't learn empathy innately. It has to be taught, and its not something to just lecture, it needs to be learned through experience.
I agree its disturbing, but it's not surprising. School-age people can be very cruel. For a US (in the 1990s) perspective on menstruation-related shaming, check out the lyrics to "My red self" by Heavens to Betsy, for example. They were school-aged when they wrote that.
Edit: s/Heavents/Heavens/
>why aren't their teachers holding them accountable?!
The teachers grew up with and participated in the same practices.
I guess it's partly because menstruation is typically accompanied by mood swings which render the person concerned more vulnerable to bullying.
The stigma around menstruation is entirely cultural. It's about someone being unclean/icky. The mood swings feel like a complete red herring.
Source?
Give these women cups and they're settled for life.
> Nielsen, a research firm, estimates that around 70% of women in the country cannot afford sanitary products: 300m use unhygienic alternatives like newspapers, dry leaves and cotton rags.
There's a push for pads - not tampons due to conservative reasons.
Comparing to sterile-packaged pads/tampons, cups need access for the wearer to a sterilization source - be it a microwave, clean (!) hot water, or chemical agents.
Cups are something for Western populations where reliable access is given, but not for unsanitary conditions in developing countries.
Also, you don't need everything to be sterile anyways, and pads and tampons certainly are not. Clean is enough, with sterilization from time to time.
Germs which are not even that big of a problem anyways, considering vaginas are supposed to be in contact with dirty stuff : fingers or penises are not known for their cleaniness. It mostly self maintains.
And yes, vaginas are great but any membrane suffers when in prolonged contact with foreign material. And again, access to antibiotics and antifungals is a worthwhile consideration when using small-but-still-higher risk sanitary products.
The general economic problem behind this is common for people living from paycheck to paycheck. For example, a good pair of shoes will last over a decade but cost 100€ (=> less than 10€/year), while cheap shoes for 10€ last a year. Now the cost over 10 years is equal, and for any year the shoe lasts longer, the person saves money. But without access to non-predatory loans (such as payday lending, pawn shops, mafia loans or CCs >5% APR) the person can never realize the saving.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
And that predator lending has now made the next purchase decision even more difficult than the last.
Some people can't comfortably fit on an airplane seat; this doesn't mean we should subsidy car travel for the whole country.
There's a lot of stigma there. Some women can't find comfortable cups, some have flows too heavy to use a cup, and some don't like the idea of washing out a bloody, clot covered menstrual cup in a public washroom's sink.
I suppose that is one step.
Second, stealing is not OK. And if they put pads and/or tampons in toilets they'll disappear in a matter of minutes. If you think only a dirt poor woman would steal them, you are wrong.
I have no experience with pads and tampons and I don't know if they belong in this category, but when I buy bread, I leave it in my bike while I buy other groceries. If someone were to steal my bread (hasn't happened yet), I'd assume they probably need it more than I do.
Okay. I am not. We could have a national referendum, "are you okay with people stealing your stuff?". Let's see what happens.
The day the bread disappears from your bike, I can assure the chances that someone is going to eat it are slim. He'll probably just throw it away for laughs.
It's not "OK" to steal anything, but you risk toilet paper being stolen by having it in a public place. The loss of a roll (or 2) of toilet papers is very low compared to the convenience of not having to bring your own toilet roll everywhere.
We live in a society and that involves a certain level of (policed) trust, if the cost of having a great convenience is that it sometimes gets stolen then if the cost is low enough and the convenience is high enough it's worth it.
If you wanted to be slightly more "evil" you could easily make it so removal of the pads would pull away part of the plastic seal; making them impossible to sell and harder to hoard.
https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/H-1018/Bathroom-Supplie...
The problem with allowing a "certain amount of crime" is that it's inherently a bright-line issue. What level is acceptable? What dollar amount? Bread is okay but a laptop is wrong; where in between those does the line fall?
It's pretty obvious what was being said. I don't think nit picking technical objections based on exaggerations and then extending from minor tampon pilferage to robbery with violence is constructive.
And I'm not the only one who thinks this way. A Dutch bishop has said something similar a decade or so ago. To some controversy, because condoning crime, but if your life is at stake, you've got to do what you've got to do. Of course society has some responsibility to ensure nobody ever gets that desperate, and seems to be doing a reasonable job at that, since nobody has stolen my bread yet. But if they did, I'd be fine with it.
To get back to the original topic: I don't think sanitary pads and tampons are quite on the same level of bread, but I still don't see theft from public toilets as a serious source of concern.
> The day the bread disappears from your bike, I can assure the chances that someone
> is going to eat it are slim. He'll probably just throw it away for laughs.
If you think destroying someone's property is funny, then throwing the entire bike into the canal, or destroying a car, is probably far more laughs. And indeed there are people who do that, sadly. But it's fairly rare, and nobody seems to care much about bread.
What does happen is people using the crate on my bike as a trash can. I hate that. That's not something I'm okay with.
If you are OK with someone taking something then by definition it cannot be stolen. The kids on Halloween aren't stealing candy. Another example would be if we were best friends and I borrowed your lawnmower without asking: it would be stealing if you didn't want me to do that but if I knew you were fine with it that would be just fine.
If you want to put something in public bathrooms and if you want it to be fine for people to take it out with them, what you're proposing is not even slightly comparable to "legalized stealing," you're just proposing that we should give away free stuff. (Hey, it works fine with water.)
The issue is easy when both sides agree on what it is, but there's grey area in between.
In Germany they aren't. Tampons are "luxury articles" here, which was questioned a lot in the past, yet nothing happened.
Why? If every single bathroom everywhere had them why would you bother to steal them? They are free.
2. People steal toilet paper all the time. It's not considered a big deal, probably because every loo has toilet paper - I'm sure you see the point here. If someone steals it from a cafe for their house (which happens, if you've worked in the service industry) nobody really cares.
For a similar comparison, imagine if toilet paper costed $20 a roll in the US. Suddenly, it's being stolen everywhere from public places. Businesses can't afford to stock it in their toilets, as they can easily lose hundreds of dollars a day from theft. People also have trouble affording it at home, so it's not common in households. People are stealing entire rolls or filling their pockets with sheets because they can't afford to buy it. There's also suddenly a market for stolen toilet paper. People start stealing it from public toilets, and selling it for half price, $10 a roll on the street. Now we're in a situation like developing countries. This is why toilet paper is never provided, or you pay for a few sheets.
For the same reason, you can't stock pads and tampons in these countries. You said it yourself, stock them like toilet paper. Well, free toilet paper doesn't work in these places.
I don't know the solution. I would assume you need to give people ID numbers or stamps, and they can freely pickup N pads or tampons per month from a secure building.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/6657416/period-poverty-uk-tax...
> Then-Chancellor George Osborne said he was not allowed to lower the VAT rate because of EU rules that class sanitary products as "luxury" or "non-essential".
> Equalities minister Victoria Atkins also said VAT would be scrapped as soon as Britain leaves the EU.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35834142
If the Government haven't addressed it, it's entirely down to their own instransigence, no?
That was only 3 months prior to the vote to leave.
> If the Government haven't addressed it, it's entirely down to their own instransigence, no?
I suspect the UK government has been, you know, busy since then.
Unfortunately I don't remember the name. But it would have an interesting product for a startup.
This was due to obvious reason that if she moves then it'll make everything bloody. The issue is, people don't understand the reason behind such traditions.
Funny anecdote.
A guru had 4 students. They used to meditate together by lighting a small bonfire. Now the guru had a cat so he asked his students to bring a rope so he could tie the cat.
50yrs later guru passed away and now their tradition is 'have meditation near bonfire' but bring a cat and a rope and tie it outside the room.
Failure to understand the reason behind traditions makes ppl think women r impure. They used to be impure during periods when there weren't sanitary napkins. But now its not the case.
First of all, that's not how menstruation works. Like, at all. Educate yourself.[1] I also don't know what the hell you're referring to when you say "utensil" but women throughout history had a lot of substitutes for the modern menstrual pad.[2] Contrary to you're very ignorant beliefs, they didn't just walk around bleeding all over the place until tampons were invented.
[1] https://ecofemme.org/menstruation-much-bleed/
[2] https://www.medicaldaily.com/menstrual-period-time-month-his...
Did you not read the rest of the post? Or are you the kind of person who reads only one sentence and then goes on a lecture spree?
I have read what I have said about the "utensil" in books written in my mother tongue.
You won't be able to read them unless you learn the language but I will be happy to provide the name and even the book if you are interested.
Don't assume I am an idiot who doesn't know what I am talking. But in India women used a utensil in a special room which they did not leave until their periods ended. That's the reality and that's why women weren't allowed tomove around in the house those days
I have literally seen grandmothers restricting their daughter in law to a corner during the girls period. This happened in 2017.
They don't understand the reason behind the tradition. Just follow blindly
Are you saying women used to be impure before pads? Are you serious?
This blind retarded logic is used by religious retards now
> They used to be impure during periods when there weren't sanitary napkins. But now its not the case.
The same logic is being peddled by retards in this century to say women r imoure during periods.
Learn to read objectively and if you can't then keep your ignorant thoughts with yourself otherwise you go around announcing your ignorance.
Also: NOBODY thought that was a pun. Ew.
>>Nielsen, a research firm, estimates that around 70% of women in the country cannot afford sanitary products: 300m use unhygienic alternatives like newspapers, dry leaves and cotton rags.
From the article. I don't agree with your assessment that these "traditional alternatives" are working "wonderfully".