Today is Menstrual Hygiene Day. If you are an American, images and narratives of period poverty in the global south are probably coming to mind. We have been conditioned to believe that girls in Africa and Asia are the real victims of period poverty and require western intervention to improve their living conditions.
While these thoughts may feel harmless, it is important to contextualize this day and its efforts outside of your first-world feminism. Missions to the global south under the guise of human rights have a long history of perpetuating western imperialism at the expense of the communities that need the supposed help. Furthermore, the West, but specifically the U.S, has zero grounds to play savior when period poverty is inextricably woven through the American experience.
The image of thin white women doing flips in Tampax commercials perpetuates the narrative that women in the U.S can afford to be empowered by their periods. On the contrary, nearly 23% of students are struggling to access period products, 16% have chosen period products over food or clothes due to the pandemic, and 51% have worn period products for longer than recommended. Menstrual hygiene and period poverty are our problems too.
Period poverty seeps through our institutions, from schools to prisons to detention centers, where menstruators are denied both the dignity and access to maintain their menstrual hygiene. These institutions are the hidden truth of America, where those who are not white or thin or rich suffer every month at the hands of the state. Period poverty, which impedes menstrual hygiene, results from an infrastructure that relies on keeping communities vulnerable on the minimal resources provided by the state. This is a form of gaslighting in which menstruators are led to feel grateful by these minor interventions, even though the state created the situation in which they had to choose between a pad or food in their stomach.
In 2019, it was revealed that migrant children in detention camps were being forced to bleed through their underwear because they were denied adequate sanitary products. One girl shared that she was never offered a shower during her 10-day detention and was only given one sanitary pad per day. This experience is not the result of a few bad apples. Detention centers were created to separate families at the most vulnerable times in their lives, detain them, humiliate them, and scare them. Denying menstruators the supplies to maintain their period is just another tool to deny migrants the human rights they deserve.
It was also 2019 when ideas of free bleeding became popularized again in western media. Feminist media outlets encouraged the idea to willingly bleed through your clothes to combat period stigma and shame. This was followed by many spiritual interventions that suggested bleeding in your garden, having period ceremonies, and taking natural supplements while on your period. Suddenly, our ability to bleed was a superpower.
Free bleeding is all about choice, the choice to resist a culture that believes that period blood should not be seen. But what are the implications of this choice when contextualized in the same country where menstruators are forced to bleed on themselves? How useful are practices like free bleeding into your garden when women in prisons face highly inflated prices for tampons that most cannot afford? Can we free bleed when menstruators are experiencing period poverty as carceral punishment?
Ultimately, as long as periods are still used as grounds and material to humiliate, degrade, and dehumanize menstruators, no menstruators can bleed freely. So on this Menstrual Hygiene Day, I encourage us to continue fighting for menstrual hygiene around the globe and challenge how the United States is an active agent that forces period poverty and poor menstrual hygiene onto the most vulnerable menstruators. To eradicate period poverty and poor menstrual hygiene, we need to confront the institutions that thrive on its existence. And as an American, that starts with looking in the mirror.
