The menstruating body is “abject, dirty, unhygienic, and smelly." Challenging these stigmas will take more than just making period products accessible.
With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, menstruators and menstrual activists are reassessing and realizing the state of the menstrual rights movement. On one hand, states across the US are mandating legislation to implement free period products in schools for students who menstruate, with the focus on eradicating period poverty. Otherwise, there are no initiatives to prioritize menstrual health education in these same schools. If menstruators are not able to learn about the way their body functions, they won’t know why they may feel ashamed of their period, or why the need for period products is so urgent.
Despite the successes of menstrual products being made readily available and free, the lack of menstrual literacy among menstruators and non-menstruators alike is stark. In an online survey, 77% of high school students who menstruate indicated that they believe there should be more in-depth education about menstrual health, and 73% of participants expressed that menstrual health education should be part of core curriculums, just as math is.
“[Menstrual health education] needs to be institutionalized,'' asserts Chris Bobel, Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality studies at UMass Boston. “It needs to be a commitment from the Feds all the way down to the local school boards that this is important. It needs to be done in a variety of contexts, not just in health class,” Bobel shared, echoing the survey results.
Period product accessibility is the bare minimum for the strides the menstrual movement advocates for, according to Bobel and just about every nonprofit organization’s “About” page. “It's not sufficient, and I would never consider the movement a success if that's all we got,” said Bobel.
Bobel argues that the marketing strategies menstrual product companies employ never addresses the stigma, but in fact uses it to their advantage. “The best and most important thing you can do as a menstruator is to more efficiently and effectively hide the fact of your menstruation, right?” she posits.
According to Margaret L. Stubbs and Evelina W. Sterling’s Learning About What’s “Down There”: Body Image Below the Belt and Menstrual Education, menstruators “face a developmental dilemma—how to accept [menstruation] as normative in the context of persistent menstrual stigma.”
The stigmatization of menstruation is perpetuated even through the pathologization of menstrual symptoms by conflating “symptom” with “syndrome,” priming menstruators to associate their menses with illness or abnormality, according to Stubbs and Sterling.
Due to the lack of menstruation education and literacy, there is very little understanding among menstruators of all ages, but especially among youth. Without clear parameters for what to expect during the first occurrence of menstruation or throughout an individual’s menstrual years, there is a higher chance of clinicians failing to diagnose conditions like endometriosis.
Being unable to understand one’s health vital signs is linked to menstrual stigma and menstrual literacy according to Bobel. “[Menstruators] don't understand how much pain is normal. They don't understand what a cycle should be like, feel like, look like, smell like, and so on,” she explains. “So, we're socializing menstruators to just, you know, buck up and bear the pain.”
Bobel’s decades of menstrual research have signaled opportunity for menstrual activism, which is seen through the missions of nonprofit organizations such as Love Your Menses, a Boston-based nonprofit organization.
“To love your menses means to be in tune with your menstrual cycle, to advocate for equitable resources to support other people who men stray, and most importantly, to flow through life unapologetically,” explained Bria Gadsden, Co-Founder & Executive Director of Love Your Menses.
Love Your Menses works to center menstruation education and literacy, with programming that caters to under-resourced intergenerational menstruators. Gadsden explained that many households with parents and guardians who were never given the opportunity to learn about reproductive health in their own youth are more likely to be unable to or unwilling to teach their youth because they don't feel confident enough in educating their child or dependent.
“If [menstruators] aren’t learning it at home or at school, then they aren't learning it anywhere,” said Gadsden.
Despite the overturn of Roe v. Wade seemingly setting back the menstrual rights movement, Gadsden has seen hope as a result of Love Your Menses’s programming.
“We definitely have seen girls and young menstruators feel more confident. We had one student notice when her classmates got their period and she was able to help them through that first period experience,” she explained.
There have also been students who advocate for free menstrual products and their own schools, taking charge and making sure their schools put up a dispenser in bathrooms. Some have taken initiative to create period kits for menstruators in need. “It's been great to see the young people become more confident in themselves as well as become leaders within their local community,” Gadsden shared.
Nonprofits like Love Your Menses continue to break down barriers for menstrual education and period poverty. Love Your Menses is accepting volunteer applications and donations on a rolling basis. They also update their social media pages with announcements for period pop-ups in the Greater Boston area.
The menstruating body is neutral until social constructions morph it into something that’s “abject, dirty, unhygienic, and smelly,” according to Bobel. She argues that it compromises a menstruator’s access to civic society.
In order to challenge these stigmas that have been in place for a long time, improving access to menstrual health education and changing the fundamental narrative around menstruation must be a priority.
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