Period Blood

Blood coming out of a vagina doesn’t seem very fun to talk about, but it needs to be done. I just listened to this podcast called Stuff Your Mom Never Told You, from howstuffworks.com and it inspired me. It made me realize that for women to truly be equal in any society BOTH sexes have to be comfortable with the idea and experience of the everyday period. Even though we live in the year 2009 menstruation is still taboo. Why is that?

Well to find out we must travel to the beginning…..
From the beginning, when we were just hunters and gatherers, women only had their periods around 160 in their lifetime because they lived shorter and were normally pregnant or breastfeeding. This automatically made menstruation a bad thing because if a women was not pregnant it meant that she was not nurturing a child in her womb and did not have a male partner.

In most cultures, even today, periods are viewed as bad because it is believed that it is a time when women release evil spirits. The Persians actually gave women 4 days of isolation to get rid of these “evil spirits” and if they were not gone by then, the women would get 4 lashes to get rid of the “spirits” faster.

So it makes sense that people would not be positive towards periods because bleeding isn’t seen as natural and they didn’t really know what the hell was going on. People didn’t really know what periods were all about until the microscope was invented IN FREAKING 1905!!!!

1921- Kotex came out with maxipads
1936-Tampax came out with tampons

And if you notice today in our culture, menstruation isn’t really talked about in a positive way. It’s still a normal everyday thing to say, “Just ignore her, she’s on her period.”
When you think about it, this is a really bad thing for our society because it makes menstruation this big elephant in the room. AND WOMEN GET IT ONCE A MONTH. Even the commercials advertising maxi-pads and tampons are useless and really confusing; if your a little girl and are trying to figure out what is happening to your body, a woman dressed as a fairy telling you aunt flow came to town isn’t going to explain anything. Being comfortable with yourself and others requires you to embrace everything about yourself because when you come down to it bleeding out of your vagina once a month is all natural.

Not only that but this taboo is plain unsafe. There is no government oversight when it comes to the making and distributing of femanine products.  This means that pads and tampons have chemicals that are not good for the body, but companies can get away with selling them because they have all the freedom in the world.

Not that things are not getting better. But things need to get a lot better before we can truly all be equal.