I’m not especially prone to national pride, but I finally had my own Yes Sir, I Can Boogie moment when it was announced last week that Scotland had become the first country in the world – I repeat: the first country in the world – to provide free period products to anyone who needs them.
The Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Bill is a groundbreaking piece of legislation introduced into parliament by MSP Monica Lennon which should hopefully help to end period poverty in this country. Yet in spite of its significance, the story passed without much fanfare compared to, say, the death of Maradona, or Princess Diana’s prescient choice of trainers in the 1980s, or anything that doesn’t call to mind a bleeding uterus.
After partaking in my own celebratory bop to AC/DC’s If You Want Blood (You Got It), I thought about the scandal of how it’s taken until 2020 for just one country to consider period poverty important enough to be tackled in this way. There are millions of people around the world who cannot afford or access period products – a problem that, as reported by children’s charity Plan International UK, has been exacerbated by Covid-19. Many resort to using toilet paper, which is like stemming a nosebleed with gossamer, or else they simply don’t go out while bleeding. For some that means missing school, work and seeing friends.
Meanwhile, those of us in the UK able to purchase tampons and pads still have to pay 5 percent VAT on them because for decades they’ve been classified as luxury, non-essential items; a tax not even caviar is subject to. It’s expected this tampon tax will be abolished at the end of the year. Where do we apply for our rebate, Rishi? Please sir, it’s the only way I can afford my fish eggs!
I’m glad the accessibility of these products is finally being addressed, but this isn’t the only yardstick by which we should measure period progress. Menstruation still carries a great stigma, as evidenced by numerous studies that show many children and adults are too embarrassed to talk about it. It’s a subject we as a society try to sanitise; it took until 2017 for Bodyform to change the colour of blood in its adverts from blue to red, and shops still direct us to the period product aisle with terms such as ‘feminine hygiene’, inherently implying periods are dirty as opposed to a natural bodily function.
I’ve met men who will happily send pals pictures of their freshly curled-out faeces, but shut me down with a brusque “too much information” if I say I have premenstrual syndrome (PMS). Sorry Graham, didn’t realise my increased propensity to cry at First Dates was more disgusting than your bowel movements.
If we don’t chat about periods, the shame surrounding them persists. For some people who menstruate, this feeling isn’t rooted in the biological process but in believing yourself to be a failure for struggling to cope with the symptoms. I’m in agony, but nobody else is talking about their pain, ergo I’m the only one. There’s also a pressure to keep schtum about it in the workplace, lest you be perceived as unreliable.
It doesn’t help when medical professionals aren’t on your side. An estimated 75 percent of menstruating people have experienced PMS: a delightful cocktail of symptoms ranging from migraines to mood swings. But the cause of it is still unknown. Some 10 percent of those people have premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a very serious depressive condition which is often misdiagnosed. Then there’s endometriosis, affecting one in 10 women, where a tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows elsewhere in the body, resulting in debilitating pain. The average sufferer takes eight years to be diagnosed because their physical symptoms are downplayed or dismissed by GPs.
A doctor once told me, during a scan of my stomach, it “looked like” I “may have” endometriosis lesions, but she didn’t follow that up by organising a laparoscopy (keyhole surgery), which is the only way it can be definitively diagnosed. I mentioned this to a GP a few months ago when I called up to discuss the often unmanageable pain I encounter every three weeks. They said they couldn’t arrange a laparoscopy, but had I tried taking Vitamin B6?
Sometimes we don’t want vitamins and flower oils to cure our ills. Sometimes we need drugs. You know, drugs, like the ones men are given when they can’t get an erection. (Fun fact: clinical trials of Viagra showed it could effectively relieve menstrual pain, but researchers were denied funding to investigate further because it wasn’t considered a public health priority.)
Anyway, apologies for my rant. It’s my time of the month.
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