If a man had a uterus, his bloodshed would be holier than the Ganges. But my blood is clearly something to be ashamed of, just because sometimes it comes out of my vagina.
The stigma is reinforced when girls lend each other sanitary products in more secrecy than a drug dealer selling cocaine to a client, and by our inability to say the words “tampon” or “pad,” or to even describe our blood flow without inviting cries of, “Ew, gross,” from those surrounding us. It seems rather ridiculous to be afraid of something that comprises almost seven per cent of your body weight.
That said, the movement to sanitize the stained falsehoods around menstruation has gone too far. I strongly disagree with the demand for free sanitary products for everyone. Along with this aggressive demand for free products are entangled multiple narratives of privilege, including the end of globalization.
Menstrual sanitary products should not be free for everyone. This is not to say that they can’t be free for anyone. They should be free for some, not for all. It is a matter of privilege.
In 2016, only 10 per cent of Indian women could afford sanitary pads in India, and that was only four years ago. The number likely hasn’t improved much, even after Arunachalam Muruganantham’s invention of affordable pads for rural towns in south India.
Recently, women in Kerala protested to be permitted to pray during their menstrual cycle in the Sabarimala temple. Here, worship was banned to menstruating women for decades because the God inside the temple is said to have been celibate. This is one of the many reasons which falls under the umbrella of “impurity” which shades menstruation. What is so impure about blood?
Somewhere in that timeline from centuries ago when the belief favoured women, a patriarch, probably an old, fair Brahmin, entered the temple and shut its doors with such a loud ideological bang that blood became a political weapon to ostracize women and limit the physical boundaries of their faith to “prove” them inferior.
But, the women in Sabarimala did not let this happen. They raised their voices so much, they drowned the patriarchal drums. They took back their agency to practice their faith and they wiped their blood off the floors of the political colosseum of shame and impurity.
The movement for the liberation of menstruation from cages of oppressive diplomacy was successful in urban communities, but pads continue to be sold in black polythenes, lest people become greedy and steal your pads whilst you are walking back home by yourself. Yes, you, don’t forget to wrap your packet of pads with an opaque wrapper!
A pack of pads in Mozambique costs more than a low income family’s daily wages. Pads are a luxury. So for those who can afford to pay for pads, tampons, menstrual cups or whatever else, they should. The menstrual experience is not monolithic. Most people to whom sanitary products are inaccessible live in the global South, while those in the global North lobby for free products, despite being able to afford them.
Scotland is going forward with providing free sanitary products at a cost of $31 million. If we think of nations as individual entities, then countries of the global North that can afford these products should make them accessible to those who cannot afford them, in southern locations where free products are a necessity.
Why? Because if a government doesn’t take on the cost of those free products, then workers in factories suffer. Free provisions for everyone only enables the privilege of those who aren’t on the harmful end of globalization.
So, for countries where that $31 million cost for a population of 5.35 million people (Scotland), affordable, free sanitary products are a want and not a need.
This is a dilemma of the moral economy. People working in Johnson & Johnson factories which manufacture pads are mostly women of colour in developing countries, just as the manufacturing industry in the United States is designed to be. If period products were to become free in privileged countries, their average wage of $8.50 per day would be reduced even further.
The privileged should not claim to need something they merely want. For those who cannot afford these products, they should be free. The paradox is their governments can’t afford free products. Even though menstruation deserves more social acknowledgement and privilege than it receives, having the ability to control your bleeding in a sanitary way which safeguards your health is a privilege.
So, respect that privilege and focus on needs, instead of wants. It’s basic economics.
File photo.
