I don’t know who it was who first decided that our genitalia were inherently taboo, but they managed to cause a lot of problems for people over the course of literal millennia.
Of course, we understand that the average person doesn’t want to see us walking around nude in public or urinating wherever we happen to be standing. Still, that doesn’t mean we have to treat these parts of ourselves as though they’re Voldermort and shudder at even the thought of speaking their names.
Indeed, if we hadn’t spend so long as a society doing this, it’s unlikely that those of us who menstruate would have had to roll the dice as soon as they hit puberty. Will they find some reasonable help as they enter what can be a jarring chapter of their lives or will that help simply be replaced by shame?
After all the time that half the world’s population has had to spend addressing their periods throughout history, you’d think this wouldn’t be a question we’d still have to ask.
But while we’re definitely seeing some great strides in destigmatizing periods, it still comes up more than you might expect.
The less willing we are to talk about periods, the easier it is for ignorant ideas about them to enter our heads.
And those ideas can result in some serious personal consequences.
For instance, one story saw a teacher refuse to excuse his student to the bathroom when she got her period.
Apparently, he was under the impression that she could just hold it in like urine. And when he wrote her up after she went anyway, he became in danger of losing his job because he had already had multiple complaints about his behavior.
Imagine how many situations like this we could avoid if so many people’s understanding of basic biology didn’t stop at the waist.
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And the more squeamish people are about periods and the less they understand, the less helpful they become when someone gets one for the first time.
Take for instance the dad who flat-out refused to pick up any period products for his daughter because he felt it was inappropriate for him to deal with “sexual things.”
He also got mad when her brother helped her out for the same reason.
So not only was he apparently under the impression that she should just bleed until her mother could deal with it, but he somehow convinced himself that periods have anything whatsoever to do with sex.
Not the kind of person you want in your corner when you’re not entirely sure what’s happening to you either.
By a similar token, it doesn’t make sense to treat tampons or pads as something we’re not supposed to see either.
We’ve seen a couple of stories like this where parents and teachers have chastised others for putting them out in the open as if they’re something to be ashamed of.
It was particularly bizarre in the latter case as this teacher was complaining about a colleague who put these items in a basket so his students could grab them as needed, which they loved.
To me, this seems akin to wanting to keep tissues and hand sanitizer hidden because they also help us deal with the messier and less pleasant parts of our lives.
Should we not want people to know where they are when they need them?
And the strangest part about some people’s continued efforts to stigmatize periods is that it’s not even some radical new revelation that they’re wrong.
The most extreme version of what we’re talking about came from a woman who accused her sister of taking her daughter’s virginity when she gave her tampons.
This attitude towards dealing with periods bears a striking resemblance to how Carrie’s mom reacted when she got her first period as she also made a completely nonsensical connection to intercourse.
And it was obvious to audiences even back in 1976 that they were supposed to consider this character — to put it mildly — unreasonable, so why are we still seeing similar attitudes 45 years later?
I don’t know but there is one thing I’m sure of: We don’t have to and shouldn’t have had to for a very long time.
