I remember, much later when pads were available in shops, my mother whispering to the shopkeeper, asking him for a packet of pads. He would wrap it in a newspaper or a brown bag, and tie it with a string, and put it together with the rest of our groceries. With the arrival of supermarkets and pharmacies, the practice of wrapping pads in a brown bag has become less common, but it is still done in many places. In some cases, women specifically ask for it.
I can still very clearly recall my amazement when a relative of mine, having lived in Saudi Arabia her whole life, told me there was no such thing in the city she grew up in. This was particularly shocking because for me this idea of periods as something shameful and worthy of hiding was somehow intricately linked to not only the culture of our desi lives, but also to religion, and so to me the entire country of Saudi Arabia, where our holiest buildings are located, should have been the epitome of these religious injunctions.
“Women don’t pray on periods. Women don’t fast on periods,” it was said, as if to say, “You are disgusting when you are bleeding.” It was only later that I realized how much more convenient it was that I managed to catch a break from any form of physical activity during my periods, but all through my teen years the idea of the break was not presented as a gift to women, as a blessing, but rather as a punishment, for a crime they had absolutely no control over.
Since ancient times, the menstrual cycle has been viewed as impure and menstruating women were not welcomed in the inner sanctums of some designated temples. This was to maintain the hygiene and purity of the space. While some argue that this segregation is an extreme form of gender discrimination, I instead see it as an old custom, a prescribed and practised tradition. For instance, in some temples in northern Thailand, women have adopted self-imposed restrictions which prevent them from circumambulating religious monuments such as stupas (even though one cannot find such restrictions in the actual Buddhist texts).
But this idea of the shame around periods and the inability to talk about them is particularly funny since the Quran itself, ostensibly the religious book that all Muslims should be reading, mentions periods itself in pretty much as clear a manner as possible. Not only are there ayats in the book mentioning menstruating women, there are also hadiths which cover sexual relationships during a woman's menses. If our literal prophet, the most important man in our religion, could find it in himself to talk about periods, aren’t Muslim men supposed to follow his life, to live with him as an example?
Important to this discussion is the understanding that such menstrual taboos across cultures are aspects of a ritual of purity and contamination and play a role in cementing women’s subjugated position in society, forming a basis for control over their sexuality. An impact of these deeply ingrained cultural practices is that women are socialized from a young age to believe that they are impure and dirty during their menstrual cycles. Like all physical processes that have to do with sex and childbirth, menstruation is considered a private activity and a public acknowledgement of the same is stigmatized.
This inability to talk about sex and periods was such a problem that situations that would seem laughable are situations I have lived through. I still remember one particular day at work when I was sitting with a bunch of friends in the cafeteria and someone dropped the bomb about a recently-married woman who was unaware that female bodies possessed three holes instead of two. The specifics of the person themselves escape me: was it a friend’s sister, or her neighbor, or some far-off distant relative who had expressed this lack of knowledge? Who they were doesn’t matter; what was more important was the shocking revelation that a woman in her twenties could actually be that ignorant about her own body.
“So does she think women pee and have sex through the same hole?” I remember asking, still laughing in horror, and the affirmative reply nearly made me fall off my chair.
Was it possible to know this little about one’s own body?
‘I grew up never thinking much about my period. My mother had explained to me what to do, and I accepted it. We use old clothes, which we cut to make cloth pads. The men don’t interfere with the women’s business, so my husband never asks me about my period. My periods were irregular, but I didn’t care. Whether I bled or didn’t, I didn’t take notice. It was only after I got married that I was told that periods were related to getting pregnant. Before that, nobody had told me, and I didn’t know the two things were connected.
But is it fair to shame women for not knowing? On Facebook there’s this group where desi women come together to share problems, rant about issues, and in general talk about all kinds of things related to their personal lives. It’s a lovely little online community, if a tad bit unconventional, and it’s run by a woman who is intolerant of bullying and regressive behavior, of which there is quite a lot in the comments. This nastiness shines through particularly when women ask questions or share anecdotes related to their bodies, and what anecdotes they have! Horrible, traumatizing stories, of first nights when their husbands forced their attention on them, of bleeding and hospital visits, of an inability to understand the changes occurring in their own bodies and no guiding light to explain what was happening. And while some in the comments are sympathetic, others go into attack mode.
“It’s your fault for not knowing these basics!” the comments will say, as if girls don’t spend years being told not to talk about these things, not to ask questions, to shut up and stay quiet. “Google is at your fingertips! You can search for the latest clothes to buy but not for information about your own body!” the keyboard warriors will froth at the mouth, as if it’s really that simple.
In my own home in Bengal, unless I told her, my mother would never know whether I was menstruating. However, I found the Santali girls were very open with their peers and knew who among their friends, sisters or cousins were on their cycle. When I asked why their mothers were the last to know, one girl said, ‘We’re too shy; we’re told never to discuss it with anyone, so we don’t even tell our mothers.’
This idea that women, with the online world on their fingertips, will start googling issues about their bodies, is so laughable that it’s surprising to me that anyone can take it seriously. Even if you don’t take into account the lack of access to education/a steady internet connection, or a desire to use these to find out more about periods, you have to understand that so many of these women who grow up to be ignorant adults were once girls who were taught to never, ever, ever talk about periods, or about sex, or about anything at all related to their bodies. These dynamics at play require empathy and an attempt at course correction, not censure and haughtiness.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that shaming women about not knowing enough about their own bodies is ridiculous. You only have to try pitching the idea of a sex education class to absolutely any adult around you and watch their horrified faces to see how complicated the idea of any discussion about our own bodies is bound to be. There’s so much shy mortification at even the idea of sex that it’s a wonder anyone in our communities ever manage to have kids. I still vividly remember the moment in eighth grade math class when we first began studying geometric figure calculations and our teacher wrote the word Mensuration in capital letters on the board, causing all the girls in the class to give each other horrified, giggly looks. We genuinely believed the teacher might have gone slightly mad, and had to spend months — months! — twisting into paroxysms of laughter and disbelief every time he brought it up, until someone told us the difference between Mensuration and Menstruation.
Who could have known that such a simple difference in spellings could have caused so many of us such misery, all intertwined into this complicated mix of embarrassment and hilarity?
In those days, everything related to the body was considered to be mysterious. People were secretive and did not expose any part of it. This was especially true for girls. We were embarrassed to lift our dresses and expose our ankles, even to keep our clothes from getting wet or muddy, on rainy days. There was no such thing as sex education. Nobody told us how our bodies would change during puberty or what happened when girls began to menstruate or what to do.
This not knowing, this not talking, really doesn’t do anyone any good. It would make sense to me if not talking about it served a purpose, protected children from trauma, was covered up and hushed up for a reason. But by not talking about periods, we do ourselves such a disservice, because it’s hard to explain how absolutely mind-boggling their effect can be. Just the other day I was frying eggs as my husband made tea. Suffering slightly from cramps and a little distracted because of the ensuing pain, I calmly took out the sugar container for the tea and the salt container for the egg. And then, with absolutely no hesitation, sprinkled the sugar all over the egg. It was only two seconds before I was about to add the salt to the tea that I had to pause and think about what I was doing.
“Period brain,” I told my husband, who shrugged and ate the egg happily. “Tastes fine to me,” he said, making me almost cry at the realization that I had found such a good man.
Is he a great husband? Absolutely. But was that worth crying about on a random Saturday morning over sugary eggs? In retrospect I certainly don’t think so, but periods can do that to you. They mess with their body and they mess with your brain, and you’re lucky if you escape unscathed. While growing up, I had the worst cramps and resented an elder cousin who would suffer mood swings but physically sailed through the process unscathed. As a grown adult whose mood now very regularly plummets on the first day of her periods, I can’t believe I used to think I had the better end of the deal.
I explained it to my husband in the form of a dial. “Imagine that on a normal day I’m here,” I told him, holding a finger straight up. “Now imagine we’re having fun, we’re at a party, we’re going out. My energy is higher.” I moved my finger to the right. “And now it’s my first day of periods.” With a jerk, I wrenched my finger all the way to the other side, pointing downwards. “It’s not that I don’t have the energy for normal things on this day. I have the energy for absolutely anything. Forget laughing, I don’t even want to smile because that requires moving the muscles of my face, and I don’t want to put any effort into doing that.”
At what point is it alarming that you’re writhing in pain? There are multiple stories online about girls who were told that periods are painful, and so continued to suffer in pain, not realizing that the threshold they had crossed had gone into alarming territory. I was told the same thing, and lived the same way, spending a few days every month curled up in bed with hot water bottles and what felt like a screwdriver twisting through my lower body, unable and unwilling to do absolutely anything.
From a young age, women are enculturated to tolerate abnormal amounts of pain as though it were normal. A ‘good girl’ grits her teeth and gets through pain. Many of us are told right from the time of our first period cycle that it is going to hurt, and that we have to be strong enough to get through it. With such an initiation into menstruation, young girls’ ability to recognize unnaturally severe period pain is thwarted. In fact, enduring pain in silence is so commonplace that no one takes a woman’s complaints seriously. At what point is one supposed to stop tolerating it and consult a doctor, especially when everyone says we’re supposed to put up with it?
This idea that women can be suffering through the worst cramps and will just put on their game faces has always amazed me, given how all I want during that particular week of the month is for everyone to just go away and leave me alone. And still there are women out there, standing up in front of thousands to present or sing or make speeches, dancing on stages, playing in Olympic games and attending large sales conferences and doing a million other things while tolerating the sort of mental and physical exhaustion that makes you not want to leave the bed.
At the end of the day, sometimes it is only this, the act of the bleeding itself, that connects me to the girl on her first period, the transwoman dealing with sanitary products, the older woman hitting menopause, the poor woman with no access to pads, the frightened woman in a war zone, and on and on, all of us all over the world literally bleeding out every month as we go about our lives, pretending it’s not a thing we are forcing ourselves to push through.
There are over forty types of restrictions related to food, touch, mobility and participation in day-to-day activities which are imposed across the country regardless of the menstruator’s class, caste, education, geographical location and religion. The differences lie in the name, form and magnitude. Menstruators are not allowed to go out, attend cultural gatherings or even go to school for about five to seven days every month. Considered to be untouchable and impure during this period, they are also not permitted to participate in sacred rituals. Bathing is forbidden and the menstrual clothes are washed and dried privately and separately. They are also restricted from touching plants that bear fruits and vegetables for fear of contamination and kept out of the kitchen, temples and gardens. There are also dietary constraints, and sour foods and milk products are out of bounds during one’s menstrual cycle.
In conclusion, having not talked about this book AT ALL, I can only encourage people to read it. It’s so good, in so many different ways. It talks about menstruation but not just that: it talks about how we live through wars and changing constitutions, about the desperation that rules the lives of human beings and the ways in which we connect with each other. It talks, through stories and anecdotes and explanations of art, how there are things that bind all of us together. It mentions poverty and culture and the people working tirelessly to make the lives of others easier.
READ THIS BOOK. That’s my recommendation. Give it to your sisters, your cousins, your best friends, all the women you know, and if you dare, give it to the men in your lives. Talk about this thing that so few mention out loud, because it is a part of our lives, and when we don’t voice what we go through, we do ourselves a disservice. Honor yourself by reading books like these. Honor even the parts that feel drenched in secrecy and shadows, parts that shame you or that you have been taught to feel guilty about. Props to Farah Ahamed for this project, and to all the people who took part in it, and I only wish this book had a bigger reach, or that books talking about periods become more and more common as the days pass. With this beginning, we can only go in a better direction.
Disclaimer: I got a copy of this book from the editor in exchange for an honest review.