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Don’t Let Them See You Bleed
Don’t Let Them See You Bleed: PERIOD examines the feminist movement through the lens of period activism. We will look at aspects of women’s health and social justice that are often overlooked – From period stigma to the unfair tax on feminine hygiene products and the fight to regulate and disclose ingredients in tampons and maxi pads. We’ll hear from activists, researchers, and intellectuals who are challenging the attitudes and policies that negatively impact women on a daily basis.
Special thanks to KUFM Missoula, Montana and Beth Anne, Austein for recording assistance.
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Credits:
Music:
- Brentin Davis, song is Chasin Dem Bucks
- Marco Castelli – Martina & The Air Plan
- Audiobanger – The Garden State
- Borretex – Over Again
More Information:
Episode Transcript
Anita:
I’m Anita Johnson, this week on Making Contact, we’ll examine the feminist movement through the lens of period activism. We will look at aspects of women’s health and social justice that are often overlooked – From period stigma to the unfair tax on feminine hygiene products and the fight to regulate and disclose ingredients in tampons and maxi pads.
Introduction to Period Stigma feature:
Since the beginning of time, approximately half of the world’s population has menstruated at some point of their lives. Why, then, are girls and women still shamed into silence and secrecy about their periods?
Anita:
Tampons, pads, menstrual cups. All used to collect a menstrautors’s vaginal blood flow while on their period. Wait, did that just repulse you? Well, if it did…get over it. Women bleed on average about 40 to 60 days out of the year. The menstrual cycle is part of what makes pregnancy and life possible in the first place. So why are women around the world made to feel dirty, cursed, or unworthy because of their monthly periods? Many women resist these unflattering and socially irresponsible norms, by pointing to patriarchy and reclaiming the narrative around menstruation and feminine health in the media.
Aida Salazar:
With the book, I wanted to reclaim not only our ancestry and our traditions but I wanted to reframe the conversation around menstruation.
Anita:
That’s Aida Salazar. She wrote the book, The Moon Within, a coming-of-age story that explores the themes of new love, gender identity, and first periods. The book offers readers a refreshing, radical perspective of menstruation that is centered in a woman’s power rather than shame.
Aida Salazar:
We’ve lost the relationship that it’s a powerful thing to most menstruate and patriarchy robbed us of that and give us a narrative that said that our ministrations are dirty to be feared to be ignored or silenced and or shamed of. And so I wanted this book to be not only a book that readers would really gravitate to because they’re curious about their changing lives at the moment but one where they would understand the deeper significance of what it means to reclaim that power.
It really is an act of resistance to be able to speak about your period without shame to know that you menstruate for seven days and lose blood and you don’t die. And that in that same process is what brought every single human being into this world. Every person came from a menstruator. And yet it has been silenced and relegated to shame and secrecy.
Anita:
Women from all walks of life are shunned and stigmatized while on their periods. Whether it is something subtle, like feeling undesirable, or something blatant, like being barred from a place of worship or forced to sleep in a menstrual shed – this approach of pushing women away for simply experiencing a normal bodily process, can have seriously harmful impacts on women’s self-esteem. Nolwen Cifuentes, a self-taught portrait photographer based in Los Angeles, believes that negative associations with menstruation can even undermine self-care and healthy engagement with one’s body.
Nolwen Cifuentes:
Period stigma and feeling ashamed about your period. It doesn’t allow you to. To talk about your body in a healthy way. I mean if you’re ashamed of your body and something very natural and actually something very beautiful and powerful that your body does and you feel you know bad about it and ashamed about it and you don’t want to talk about it and you even like disconnect with your body you know you’re like this is a good thing that happens to me. That’s gross. You’re not going to feel good about yourself.
Anita:
Aside from the emotional changes that menstruation can bring on, periods can cause a range of physical challenges including cramps, polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis, and migraines. All painful side-effects of menstruation. But it can be difficult to talk about …and the silence is harming the long-term mental and physical health of women. Aida Salazar.
Aida Salazar:
And you know there hasn’t been any conversation around people menstruation and how painful it is. Some with like endometriosis or multiples cysts and whatnot. You know there are all sorts of conditions that afflict many menstruators that we can’t even talk about. I’ve heard a lot of menstruation stories as I’ve gone around to talk to people about this book. And I’ve heard stories that are terrifying stories where you know the moment that a young girl menstruate her mother slaps her another where you know she thought she was dying because she was bleeding this ignorance and this stigma has affected our views of our bodies to the point where we don’t know. There’s an incredible ignorance many women don’t know what their vulva is look like they’ve never seen them. They don’t know what it is. When you appear when they’re pregnant or when they’re their pregnancies they’re failing. I had a friend who had an ectopic pregnancy recently and she did not know the process of a lot of fallopian tube you gathering the egg from the ovary and putting it into the into the uterus. She didn’t know that process. That to me is so shocking you know. But these are reflective of how the stigma has snuffed our ability to explore and to understand our own bodies.
Anita:
And it’s this pathology of silence, and social stigma intertwined with misogyny that has kept women virtually mute on the subject. But the shame and secrecy around menstruation is slowly diminishing as it’s challenged by a new generation of feminists.
Some women are using shocking means to bring attention to the normalcy of periods. Like the London marathon runner, Kiran Gandhi, who refused to wear a tampon or pad, and was seen smiling in her blood stained biker shorts at the finish line in 2015. Or like photographer, Nolwen Cifuentes, who recently created a photo series called Period Piece, depicting queer couples enjoying period sex, to challenge the stigmas associated with menstruation.
Nolwen Cifuentes:
So having this conversation with my friends and then being so freaked out and grossed out about it just inspired me to make a photo series showing that period sex doesn’t have to be so horrifying. You know and it actually can be very uniting and bonding and intimate.
Anita:
For the most part, Nolwen’s photo series was well received. With some criticism coming from individuals who felt “period sex” shouldn’t be openly explored outside the bedroom. But that didn’t stop Nolwen from bringing attention to what she sees as an issue of social control.
Nolwen Cifuentes:
I think that the way to rethink this and to take back control of our bodies. Realize that this is a social stigma that we’ve been conditioned to think by people who don’t get periods that we’ve been conditioned to think because of extreme religion that sees women as you know objects to be owned by cis men.
So the first thing is just becoming aware of that. And then once you’re aware of that you can start talking about it and you can start talking about it with your partners. You know if you have a partner that doesn’t have a period you can start talking to them about you know how it felt like just talk about period. I think we just need to be like very vocal about it.
We need to not SECRETLY HIDE OUR tampons and we’re like passing it to a friend or we’re buying it just be more open about it and be more proud about it and also talk to each other about tracking your cycle you know and yeah like talking positively about periods. I think is really important to change things. There’s a lot of positive things about periods that we don’t talk about and I think that that’s really important.
Anita:
This emerging movement has led to some pretty creative efforts by women who are choosing to address menstruation through literature, photography, and even social media. Aida Salazar.
Aida Salazar:
There is an interesting hashtag on Instagram or anywhere you can find it’s got a just hashtag menstruation and you you’ll see how incredible women menstruators are taking back that that fear and loathing that that people have that narrative that people have given us by demonstrating what it is simply and making fun of it and celebrating it in different kinds of rituals. And actually showing blood and there certain artists are creating artwork with their menstrual blood.
People are being enlightening and very didactic about it. This is this is the way your body works. This is this is what the inside of a uterus that is bleeding looks like. And so there’s a lot of movement. I think that is happening across the country to combat that.
Anita:
In her recent book, The Moon Within, Aida Salazar, reclaims indigenous menstruation practices …. indigenous Machiko period rituals…as a way to empower women and celebrate the beauty of womanhood. A departure from the Western viewpoint that periods are simply to be tolerated rather than a spiritual process. Ma-chi-ko
Aida Salazar:
My book included a period end of sentence the documentary that won the Oscar recently also as part of this kind of Zeit Geist that is understanding that we’re not going to let the narrative the dominant narrative that world were or menstruations are the curse or to be feared or loathe to continue. We’re going to stop it. by challenging it and celebrating it.
Anita:
It’s this kind of excitement that’s both challenging patriarchy and providing space for women’s conversations about their health and wellness. It’s a new wave in an old ocean of women’s deep knowledge. New rituals building upon some of the women-centered ancient rituals–celebrating our periods as a natural process aligned with the moon’s cycle.
For Making Contact, I’m Anita Johnson
Narrator:
We are all used to paying sales tax on most of the things we buy on a daily basis. Taxes, after all, are a significant source of state revenue. But there are certain items that don’t get taxed – items designated as being basic necessities that are medical in nature – items such as aspirin, and Viagra, for example. So why then are feminine hygiene products, basic necessities, still being taxed? Reporter Rosie MacLeod looks into the so called “Tampon Tax” and how it’s impacting women around the world.
Rosie’s Feature: Tampon Tax
Narrator:
Over 20 million packs of tampons are sold every year in the UK alone. A woman uses an estimated 240 tampons per year. Pads and tampons cost the average British woman over 18,000 pounds in a lifetime, that’s more than $23,000 US dollars. So what makes these very basic items so expensive? Well, they’re taxed as luxuries at a rate of 5%. This is by no means unique to the UK. In the U.S., tampons and pads are treated as commercial products. How much they are taxed varies by state. There are currently ten European countries that tax menstrual products at over 20%. This is now known as the ‘the Tampon Tax’ and was kept well hidden until it was called out in 2014 by Laura Coryton, a student living in London.
Laura launched a petition on the website Change.Org. The purpose? To remove the tax on feminine hygiene products. The cause went viral and accumulated over 320,000 signatures.
Forcing many people to question the logic of a tampon tax to begin with. Laura Coryton.
Laura Coryton:
I looked into our taxation system and realized that even though tampons are taxed on a luxury basis, there are loads of other things that are not taxed at all because they are considered so essential like maintaining of private helicopters or eating horse meat or crocodile meat which is two things we eat a lot in the UK(!), alcoholic jellies, yeah.
Narrator:
Laura’s petition made great strides by succeeding in the UK. However, the government won’t consider ending the tampon tax until 2022. In the meantime, Laura has taken steps to ensure the government deliver on their promise.
Laura Coryton:
We decided to start this thing called Period Watch, which will essentially just keep an eye on the government and make sure that they are aware of the fact that we know they haven’t done it. We ask lots of people to send in stories of their periods or fun facts or whatever just so ‘a’- to keep an eye on the government so we can update people through that site and ‘b’- just so we can continue to break the period taboo.
Narrator:
The taxation of feminine hygiene products has been allowed to happen under the radar largely because the topic of menstruation is still so taboo. It’s rarely addressed in daily conversations, let alone public discussions. Opening up about periods has therefore been central to the American sister campaigns, widely known as the Campaign for Menstrual Equity. Its co-founder, is lawyer Jennifer Weiss-Wolf. Here’s Jennifer talking about her book “Periods Gone Public”, which has become a centerpiece for the campaign to end the Tampon Tax.
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
The book is actually intended really to be a platform for a policy agenda but in doing so of course we wanted to explore the history of menstruation, particularly in the United States, how access is so impacted by the ability to afford menstrual products, why it is that they’re expensive, why it is that we know so little about them, how your religious and social and cultural stigma fits in. So all of that is part of the book but what the book kind of culminates in is this policy agenda that focuses to ensure access to products through legislation, whether at the city, state or federal level. I was watching this tampon tax campaign unfold here in the UK and in Canada and in other parts of the world, and I thought ‘well, we should be doing that here in the United States, too’ because at the time, this was late 2015, 40 of the 50 states at that time did not exempt menstrual products from sales tax so it was gonna mean 40 different campaigns. But it struck me as just part of the entire structural disadvantage that women face just in leading their lives. We’re not a special interest population, we’re not some minority asking to be heard, we’re half the electorate. And there’s no reason that the very basic ways we live should be absent from the laws we live by. It struck me that it was going to be kind of challenging to get legislators to even say words like ‘tampon’ and ‘period’, let alone legislate about it and understand people who have this concern. So to me breaking the taboo is not separate from forging a policy agenda, you sort of can’t do one without the other when it comes to menstruation. And we’ve seen tremendous progress in the United States on the tampon tax issue. 40 states as of the end of 2015 had not exempted menstrual products from sales tax. 24 states in 2 legislative sessions in 2016 and 2017 introduced bills to exempt menstrual products from sales tax and 4 actually got it done. That still leaves us with 36 states to go but 4 states passing laws on an issue never before talked about within 2 years is in fact radically fast progress.
Narrator:
Increased awareness around the tampon tax has shown that not all women can afford basic, sanitary items. This has given rise to a new buzzword, “Period Poverty”. This is characterized by a ‘lack of access to sanitary products, menstrual hygiene education, toilets, hand washing facilities, and, or, waste management.’
The recent recognition of period poverty has produced a number of action groups working to provide menstrual products to those who cannot afford them. According to Girlguiding UK, the British equivalent of Girl Scouts, 49% of girls in the UK have skipped school on their period because they could not afford feminine hygiene products. 1 in 7 have borrowed the products they could not afford from a friend.
And period poverty impacts low-income women everywhere. Tina Leslie believes that the lack of menstrual education, combined with the challenges of poverty, create serious hardships for girls and women all around the world – hardships that are totally preventable. Tina founded Freedom 4 Girls, to provide maxi pads to women in Kenya. Volunteers hold workshops and show women how to make the pads.
Tina Leslie:
Basically, it was a colleague of mine who rang me up and said, ‘I’ve got some girls in this school and they’re not coming to school because their parents cannot afford sanitary protection’. But also, one of them also said she didn’t even realize what a period was. She was having a period for two years and she just kept quiet. On the back of the Kenya thing, it’s the same thing of ‘Right, what are we gonna do about it? Let’s start something up. Let’s start providing schools, colleges, refugee agencies, refuges, anywhere that needs products we will try and supply them. I mean, we do do the one-use products like the normal Always, Bodyform and things like that but we also make washable, reusable sanitary products so they’re really sustainable. We set up sewing workshops. We set up sewing workshops in Kenya, we’ve got them over here in the UK as well and we have volunteers that help sew them. But it’s about choice and at an early age, really, we need to be offering girls choice. So washable re-usables that we make last around 3 years. The menstrual cups are around ten years. I think the poverty issue is a really big issue, especially in the UK. It’s all over the world. Why do we know 60% of women and girls in Kenya don’t have access to safe period protection but we don’t know what it is in the UK? Because all the research that has been done has been on very small cohorts of girls, so between 14 and 25 year olds. What about all the women? All the women that are suffering period poverty? We’ve got lots of school girls from age 11 to 18, but what about 18 to…50?
Narrator:
Many influential women have taken the first step to destigmatizing menstruation by unapologetically bringing the topic to decision makers. As recently as October 2019, the founders of women’s reproductive brand LOLA, along with the campaign for Menstrual Equity, have named the sales tax unconstitutional. Since 2014, menstrual products have been weaponized in debates across the wider political landscape. Tampons have become central to a war between progressives and conservative legislators. In 2017, it was announced that UK Tampon Tax money was funding an anti-abortion charity. Some oppose scraping the tax because that money could be spent on government-sponsored women’s causes. Women’s causes that, interestingly, were not such pressing issues before this whole debate unfolded. Despite the efforts of activists in the UK and in the US, female hygiene products are still considered luxuries and the unfair “tampon tax” continues to create barriers for women worldwide.
For Making Contact, I’m Rosie MacLeod reporting from London.
Introduction/Transition to Detox piece
Period Activism is having a moment. With the call to remove the “pink tax” and eliminate the taboo surrounding menstruation, advocates have begun working to eliminate the secrecy around what goes into feminine hygiene products. Many claim that tampons and pads can be particularly harmful to women’s health.
Anita:
It is estimated that 85% of women in the U.S. use up to 16,000 tampons during their lifetime. Feminine-care ads often promote tampons as a way to “be clean” and “joyously content” while on your period. But how safe are these products?
Alexandra Scranton:
There’s really so much that we don’t know about how these products are affecting our health.
Anita:
That’s Alexandra Scranton, the Director of Science and Research at Women’s Voices for the Earth, a national organization working to eliminate toxic chemicals that impact women’s health.
Alexandra Scranton:
There’s a fair amount of data on toxic shock syndrome, which is linked to a bacteria that can grow particularly in tampons and lead to some very serious effects. What we don’t know is no one’s really looked at how many other kinds of reactions and adverse reactions like rashes or infections that are associated with the use of either tampons or pads due to the chemical exposures that come from these. We certainly have no idea whether, you know, women who use tampons or are getting more cases of cancer than women who don’t use tampons. No one’s even asking these sorts of questions.
Anita:
The business of feminine hygiene care is a 3 billion dollar industry, that isn’t required by the Food and Drug Administration to list product ingredients and chemicals used in the processing of these ingredients.
Alexandra Scranton:
“The Food and Drug Administration regulates menstrual products like tampons and pads and menstrual cups as medical devices. And because they are medical devices, there is no law on the books that says that medical devices need to disclose their ingredients.
Anita:
It’s this labeling of tampons as “medical devices” that has presented the greatest barrier in consumers’ right to know. Consider the fact that there are two main types of period products: external and internal. External products include maxi pads, while internal products, or tampons, go directly into the vagina to absorb blood flow before it exits the body. A woman’s vaginal wall is so permeable, any toxin and chemical in a tampon can make it to the bloodstream.
Alexandra Scranton:
We have found some very questionable chemicals in these products. Some that have been associated with cancer and reproductive harm. We find them at very low levels, but we don’t know what that impact has on these products that we use. You know, several days a month for nearly a lifetime. So there’s a lot of long term small doses of exposure that really need some more research to find out how these are affecting our health.
Anita:
As women, we have become so accustomed to seeking out the product that will most likely avert a period disaster (also known as a bright red stain on our clothing or sheets) that we have not fully explored the health impacts of these feminine hygiene products. Alexandra Scranton from Women’s Voices for the Earth, launched the Detox the Box campaign, created to raise awareness about the chemicals and their potential harmful impacts on our health.
Alexandra Scranton :
You know, when we started the detox box campaign, we only found two studies that were kind of in the Yale literature that looked at tampons. Was looking at chemicals called dioxins and furan that are very, very highly toxic chemicals linked to cancer and linked to a number of other health problems. So there are two studies that were done. Both studies concluded that this wasn’t a problem, even though they did find certain levels of these products in tampons. And then we couldn’t find anything else. So we in 2014 took some always pads. There was the leading brand in the U.S., took them to a lab and had them analyzed for volatile organic compounds, which are chemicals that can be very toxic, that could gas off a substance. These are chemicals originally gassing off of off the pad. We found things like styrene, benzene, tarulene. You mean these are not very friendly chemicals? They are. They are ones. They certainly were associated with kind of industrial exposures. And we did find them at very small levels. Since then, we’ve been kind of tracking the data.
Anita:
When we see ads for tampons and pads, we definitely don’t hear about what it takes to make these products, like bleaching of fiber – or what Tampax lists on its website as the “purification of cotton and rayon.” Although feminine hygiene product manufacturers started to adopt less harmful processes in the late 1990s, traces of the highly toxic chemical compound, dioxin, can still be found in the rayon raw material range at undetectable 0.1 to 1 parts per trillion.
While the FDA currently requires tampon manufacturers to monitor dioxin levels in their finished products, the results are not available to the public.
Alexandra Scranton:
We’ve tried to get some of that information through, you know, Freedom of Information, Act requests, etc. It’s very, very difficult to get. And they are very hesitant to share what that information is that they know about their products and how they’re ensuring that they’re safe. But I really think these days that the sort of stance of, you know, trust us where the experts is no longer satisfying for many consumers who really want more information about the potentially initially about the ingredients that are in their products, that people want to know what they’re being exposed to. And they also want to know how the how the companies are assuring that these chemicals are, in fact, safe.
Anita:
One would think that anything we put into our bodies should come with a list of ingredients, and if necessary, a health warning – kind of like cigarettes. But as we know, using the tobacco industry as an example, seemingly simple disclosures about ingredients and possible health risks, do not come without a fight. When it comes to women’s health, there are some advocates within the government who are demanding transparency from companies that produce feminine hygiene products.
Alexandra Scranton:
We have a bill in New York State that would require manufacturers to disclose the ingredients in menstrual products. There’s a federal bill that Congresswoman Grace Meng has introduced called the Menstrual Right to Know Act. So that’s getting it also into the kind of the public sphere that’s going into Congress. There’s the Robin Danielson Feminine Hygiene Product Safety Act. This is a bill that’s been introduced about nine times by Congressman Maloney of New York, also requiring more research into the health impacts of period in intimate care products on women’s health.
So there are ways of getting this conversation happening but I really think it starts with women talking to each other about what they’re experiencing. And then bringing their questions to the manufacturers of these products that could be affecting their health.
Anita:
Seventh Generation, an eco-friendly company, is one of the champions of Representative Grace Meng’s bill, the Menstrual Products Right to Know Act. On their website, Seventh Generation states that consumers need to worry about “what the heck is in the products you use around the vagina,” calling for tampon, pad and vaginal douche packaging to include a list of ingredients on the label, especially given the cancer risk linked to dioxins.
Alexandra Scranton:
I mean, it’s just this mind boggling increase in the last 30 years. It’s, you know, a very, very small number of women. And now it’s a larger, very, very small number of women who get this cancer. But, you know, this is not something that can be explained genetically. There is something happening that is causing this massive increase that really needs to be looked at. So, yeah, it’s certainly a concern. There’s a lot of unexplained, you know, illness, unexplained reproductive problems and lack of fertility for certainly. You know, there can be lots of factors that contribute, but the products that you use every day, that we can that we can rely on to be safe.
Anita:
More than 90% of human exposure to dioxins comes through our food supply, mainly meat, fish, shellfish and dairy products. So, does this mean that we should not study the presence of dioxins in feminine hygiene products? The message that women get is – tampons are safe, dioxin traces are very low – there’s nothing to worry about. But this is where research scientists like Alexandra Scranton say it is time to prioritize women’s health – through research of feminine hygiene products, through product transparency, and through strict safety regulations, even on so called organic pads and tampons.
Alexandra Scranton:
Over all our laws on chemicals and products are just unfortunately weak. It’s really hard with the laws we have in place right now to regulate chemicals in the products that we use every day, whether they be cosmetics or menstrual products. But people don’t want to talk about vaginas. They let things go. Right. So they don’t get the same attention. I mean, there’s certainly has not been a priority for the Food and Drug Administration.
Anita:
For Making Contact, I’m Anita Johnson
Bridge Break:
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