Period.. Emma Barnett

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СКАЧАТЬ because it’s believed that a bleeding woman in contact with people or animals will cause illness and is just wrong.

      Most Hindu temples also ban women from entering when they are bleeding. Some go further by banning women of menstruating age altogether. A particularly eye-opening case made headlines in India in 2018, when activists were successful in getting the country’s Supreme Court to overrule such a ban at one of Hinduism’s holiest temples. Historically, the Sabarimala temple has not allowed women between the ages of ten and fifty to attend because they could be menstruating and therefore will be unclean. Violent protests broke out at the temple after the ban was lifted, with many extremely angry men accusing the courts and politicians of trying to ‘destroy their culture and religion’ by allowing menstruating women access to what should be a peaceful place of prayer. Crowds tried to block any plucky female worshippers, female journalists were attacked and one of the women who tried to attend the temple ended up needing a police escort.

      The saddest part of the whole unnecessary debacle? The number of women who attended the protest in support of their own ban. That’s how deep these myths can run. Women can be so convinced by men of their own filth that they turn on other women.

      Devastatingly, Hindu girls and women also miss out on mourning their loved ones while menstruating because of this type of temple ban. Instead, they have to stay at home while the rest of the family pay their respects. Or, in the case of BBC journalist Megha Mohan, loiter outside the temple in Rameswaram (an island off the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu) as her family observed the final ritual for her grandmother.

      While waiting, she recalls in a piece for the BBC News website, texting a female cousin, who couldn’t make it to the final ritual, to tell her about her aunt stopping her from going to temple as she had asked for a sanitary towel:

      She sympathised with me and then she paused, typing for a few moments. ‘You shouldn’t have told them you were on your period,’ she wrote, finally. ‘They wouldn’t have known.’

      ‘Have you been to the temple on your period?’ I asked.

      ‘Most women our age have,’ she said casually and, contradicting my aunt’s earlier statement just half an hour earlier. She added, ‘It’s not that big a deal if no one knows.’

      So, she could have just lied. And probably should have done to get her way.

      Looking back further, Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote in AD 60 that having sex with a woman on her period during a solar eclipse could prove deadly.

      Sure, mate. But this example shows just how long we have lived with this ritualised shaming of women.

      Jump forward two millennia, back to London and my wedding lessons – it was so very odd to hear such backward advice still underpinning the way women are made to feel today. In the developed world, religion may not have the control it once had, but it’s still a huge cultural force that shapes norms and makes people feel a certain way about things.

      Often, as with so many other day-to-day battles that make us weary, we can zone out when a religious teacher says something we would normally question. But keeping this shaming, impure narrative around periods going within our oldest religious institutions, despite leaps in medical advancements, at the very least has the subliminal effect of making women feel dirty and wrong.

      And it reinforces the idea amongst men that our periods are something to fear and be sickened by.

      So, question the nonsense when you happen to hear it. By all means laugh at it. Make sure you ridicule anyone who tells you that you are impure for your body doing something so natural that the entire human race depends on it. It isn’t easy. I failed to do so out of a mixture of shock and a fear of offending the kind people trying to prepare me for my wedding. And I still regret it.

      You are a warrior – who bleeds and goes to work every day. Not some dirty hermit who deserves to be quarantined and needs male approval to be reintegrated into mainstream society after your monthly bleed.

      Religion has no borders. It was viral before the internet. That is why a privileged educated woman like myself can be told, while living in one of the most advanced societies on earth, not to hand my husband a piece a steak I’ve made for him while menstruating. I am about as far away as you could get from a girl in Nepal banished to menstrual huts away from her home while she bleeds. And yet, we ended up getting a similar memo. Except I have the tools, power and voice to push back.

      You see, without us realising it, these myths permeate, settle and erode confidences. Keep your antennae up and tuned. And have the confidence to belly laugh and challenge the shaming beliefs in religion.

      Our periods hold the key to bringing the next generation of society into being. The least we can do is make sure we have the right attitudes towards them and diagnose any lingering bullshit from the days when only men had the power to tell the stories that narrated and controlled our destinies, regardless of whether they understood us or not.

      Today, women control our bodies and our narrative.

      We must not lose control of that hard-won right – especially over our periods – at a time when our voices are louder than ever before.

      You can choose your reaction. That’s a power which must not be forgotten. Don’t internalise any of the shame these myths propagate. And remember to actively call out nonsense when you hear it.

       CHAPTER THREE

      

       ‘What if I forget to flush the toilet and there’s a tampon in there? And not like a cute, oh, it’s a tampon, it’s the last day. I’m talking like a crime scene tampon. Like Red Wedding, Game of Thrones, like a Quentin Tarantino Django, like, a real motherfucker of a tampon.’

       Amy Schumer, Trainwreck

      It’s time to focus on the group of people who are nearly as good as the men at period shaming.

      Women.

      It definitely isn’t our fault the way society is set up to be only horrified or titillated by women’s bodies. Nor is it our fault that we are the ones tasked with physically producing the next generation (the very reason for periods in the first place) – a role which tests our bodies and minds in all sorts of unacknowledged and undervalued ways.

      But when you live and breathe in the bubble which normalises such attitudes, you internalise them and make them your own. Which means women end up feeling ashamed of a perfectly natural bodily process, often ignoring their bodies’ cries for help and, in turn, shaming other women too.

      Remember the confession booth we built СКАЧАТЬ