A period for periods

Vaginas are quite the controversial topic. Half of the population has one and thus half of the population holds the secret understanding of this mystical body part. The other half that doesn’t have one says they “know their way around one.” Except, in reality, men aren’t even willing to discuss a regular occurrence of the vagina: the period. Even worse, men believe they have the right to exert control over its existence. This quizzical relationship between man and the vagina is where the core problems of basic vagina rights emerge.

The period. It is a monthly occurrence that scares most people. It’s bloody. Some call it gory; some call it a battlefield. Teenagers rue the day it arrives. Most people don’t think about the fact that menstruation is an essential part of creating human life. Many people dismiss it as “gross” and an untouchable subject—something that can and should be hidden. Women tend to be ashamed of it and cover any evidence of it; we quickly whisper to a friend and execute the very strategic public hand-off of a tampon, or choose to stay home.

Duke’s club Progress Period advertised an event about discussing the stigmatization of periods with a question: “What if you had to miss class every time you had your period?” They didn’t pose this question merely as a way to grab people’s attention. They meant to stir up a real and meaningful social dialogue.

Missing school due to menstruation is an issue the spans the entire world, including right here in the United States. Impoverished women struggle to purchase sanitary products and thus are forced to stay home or risk exposing their menstrual blood in front of their classmates. The first of the two options is the more attractive one due to the stigma behind periods. In rural places like Kenya or Malawi, this stigma leads far too many middle and high-schoolers to bypass their education, missing one-fourth of their schooling while staying home on their periods.

It is imperative to provide girls with menstrual products so they are able to get an education and a job and hopefully leave their familial loops of poverty within the villages in which they grew up. Apart from the practical advantages of using sanitary products, women feel empowered and have an equal stake in society with access to sanitary products.

Progress Period brought two women to campus in order to discuss issues surrounding the association of menstruation with shame and lack of accessibility to products. One of the speakers was the sole American employee of ZanaAfrica, an organization that provides schools across Kenya with sanitary napkins and sex education. The other guest was a lawyer working in New York to create federal and state policies that elevate access to menstruation products from the status of solely a reproductive right to a basic human right.

Thanks to the universal shame surrounding this necessary bodily function, many areas of the United States put a tax on tampons and pads. Yes, as of 2015, 40 states imposed a luxury tax on the already steep price of sanitary products under the pretense that the products fall under health care costs. The men that hold the majority of political office in this country have chosen to demand a surtax on a product that every single woman who gets her period needs, while allowing Viagra—a drug that I’m sure a large portion of the old white men in the new presidential administration use but most don’t necessarily need—to be sold with no tax at all.

There is a necessity to provide girls and women with the products that enable them to go to school. We must continue to fight in order to shift the mindset about periods from a gross anomaly to the body’s incredible signal that it is capable of giving life. Some men want to keep the period stigmatized. They fear women’s power to create life; they are intimidated by it. They feel the need to control every aspect of the vagina in the political and health care world. But they shouldn’t be the people dictating how women care for their bodies. The ones with the vaginas should.

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