Catching Up: Menstrual Pads Can't Fix Prejudice (or Male Fear of Blood from a Woman's Womb)

From The New York Times Opinion Page

Menstrual Pads Can't Fix Prejudice

Chris Bobel*
March 31, 2018

The period is finally having its moment.

In the last decade, the difficulties women and girls across the globe face during menstruation have inspired a raft of grass-roots campaigns. “Period poverty” activists seek to make menstrual products more affordable and available. International agencies like Plan International, Water Aid, U.N. Women and Unicef are supporting menstrual hygiene programs in dozens of countries. Access to safe, accessible bathrooms and materials to manage menstruation is now recognized as a human rights issue that involves many other areas of development, like clean water, education and gender equality.

These shifts are certainly heartening. For centuries, around the world, menstruation has been treated as a source of shame, rather than as a normal, healthy part of women’s lives. Initiatives to “make menstruation matter” are both welcome and overdue.

Why, then, after years studying these efforts, do I feel ambivalent? Because too many of them have opted to focus on providing women with new products, failing to substantively fight the core problem surrounding menstruation: cultural stigma.

Consider the humble piece of cloth. Many Westerners are horrified to learn that repurposed cloth is commonly used by women in poor countries to manage their periods. Yet cloth is absorbent, readily available, cheap and sustainable. Folded or cut to size, changed as necessary and properly washed and dried, it can be sanitary and effective.

Still, many programs are hustling to replace this traditional method with commercial products. In addition to the nongovernmental organizations that make products their priority, start-ups are seeding microbusinesses in which, say, Rwandan, Indian and Ugandan women make and sell pads. Such an approach falls under the category of a “technological fix”: a seemingly simple solution to what is, in reality, a complex problem.

Such interventions can be helpful, and in some circumstances even necessary, but they fail to address the root issues. No menstrual product is effective for a schoolgirl who lacks access to a clean, secure toilet, as is the case in many poor countries. Stigma about menstruation often undermines proper use, and a woman’s fear of inadvertently revealing she is menstruating remains a distraction and a burden.

These fears and stigmas are prevalent in the rich world, too. As the historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has shown, in the United States at the turn of the century, menstruation became increasingly medicalized: Doctors, who were mostly men, and increasingly viewed as experts, coached mothers to socialize their daughters to keep tidy and discreet. Menarche, the first menstrual period, was effectively reduced from a sign of womanhood to a “hygienic crisis."

Even now, American girls are socialized to see menstruation, and more generally, their bodies, as problems to be solved through use of the “right” products. Today, we are exporting this view around the world.

Cave sculptures go on display for first time in 15,000 years

From The Independent online - By John Lichfield in Paris Friday, 21 March 2008 Prehistoric cave sculptures never seen by the public will be revealed today thanks to the most advanced, computerised techniques of laser-copying and visual display. A museum to open near Poitiers, in western France, will span one-a-half millenniums of human image-making, from stone chisels to computers. The star of the show, at Angles-sur-L'Anglin, in the département of Vienne, will be a 60ft-long frieze of bison, horses, cats, goats and erotic female figures, carved into the limestone of western France 15,000 years ago. The caverns containing the frieze were discovered by French and British archaeologists in 1950 but have never been opened to the public. The Roc-aux-Sorciers (witches' rock) caves are the only site of their kind in Europe: a two-dimensional, carved equivalent of the celebrated cave paintings at Lascaux in Dordogne, 120 miles farther south, which were created 1,000 years earlier. From today, the public will be able to visit a €2.7m (£2.1m) visitor centre where the original sculptures, and the contours of the cavern sides, have been precisely recreated to full size by computerised, laser-copying techniques. At intervals a half-hour son-et-lumière display will be projected on to the frieze, suggesting how the carvings may have been created and how they were discovered 58 years ago. Oscar Fuentes, the director of the centre, says the intention is to go beyond the full-size replica – Lascaux II – built in 1983 to preserve the Lascaux caves from exposure to human breath and body heat. "We want to make the frieze into a place of scientific discovery in which the visitors are doing their own discovering," he said. "We want them to reach their own conclusions and understand that their interpretation is as good as that of anyone else." The Roc-aux-Sorciers caves were first explored by a French archaeologist, Suzanne de Saint-Mathurin, and her British assistant, Dorothy Garrod. They found one cave in which the roof had collapsed, dislodging the sculpted animals and human figures from the cavern sides. Fifty of these images are now on display at the national archaeology museum at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris. In another cave, thought to have been occupied in the Magdalene period, 15,000 years ago, the archaeologists found a 20-metre frieze of beautifully finished, bas-relief, wall sculptures. They include human silhouettes, horses, bison, wild cats, goats and three explicit images of the lower part of the female anatomy. The cave was never opened to the public, to preserve the works of pre-historic art and to allow exploration to continue. The Lascaux caves, and other similar sites, are thought to have been sanctuaries, visited only for religious purposes. The Roc-aux-Sorciers cave seems to have been a dwelling place. Geneviève Pinçon, the chief archaeologist at the site, points out that the south-facing cavern was exposed to the sun for large parts of the day in pre-historic times. France had a Siberian climate 15,000 years ago. The cavern would have had a pleasant micro-climate, ideal to live in. "But what do all these carvings mean?" she asks. "What is the meaning of the human profile which seems to smile down on us? What is the symbolic significance of the three women, with realistically carved sexual parts, beside a sitting bison? Do they represent life and death?" ************************************************************************************ Why call the cave complex "The Witches' Rock?" As to what the carvings "represent," this is what I think. In other similar cave paintings and rock carvings discovered all around the world, as well as the persistence of such motifs from prehistory all the way into written history, the bison represents the male principle and the sexually explicit female figures represent - JUST THAT! The two symbols in close conjunction represent the power of creation and life. The bison also might represent a symbol of sacrifice and renewal. The bison's shed blood would be the male equivalent of the female's shed menstrual blood that flows with the waxing and waning of the Moon every month. The females bleed but they do not die - what a powerful magic that must have seemed to the first humans! The most ancient use of the symbol of crescent horns was lunar - not solar, tied to the feminine principle, not the masculine "sun god." Website (in French). Fascinating photos, but not always the clearest!