Menstrual Hygiene Is Taboo

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In many cultures, discussion of menstrual hygiene is taboo, yet there is a wave—some might say a movement—underway that seeks to change that. Several individual Internet incidents contributed to this new phenomenon, but they’re all coming to a head with what people are calling “the Padman Challenge,” a sensation from India. As a result of it all, many peoples are coming to realize what the taboo of menstrual hygiene has meant for the women of cultures different from their own, so people in India and the U.K. who have caught onto this are, for example, hearing about the oppressive manner in which young girls have had to jump through abominable hoops to get pads in Kenya as teenagers, as evinced in a study conducted there and discussed in an …show more content…

One of the most striking discoveries in that enquiry was that female prisoners were actually clad in paper suits and restricted from the use of not only sanitary napkins but even underwear. The ICVA dubbed this a human rights violation and directed Home Secretary Amber Rudd to open an investigation posthaste, beseeching Parliament to institute the provision of sanitary napkins for women in custody.

The next step after all this was the so-called “Padman Challenge” on Instagram and Twitter, started by Arunachalam Muruganantham. Anil Kapoor of Fanne Khan—a Hindi musical comedy—and his co-star from the same movie, Rajkummar Rao both starred in a short video that initiated the challenge. In this video, Rao enters a store and asks for a pad, and Kapoor smiles and replies with what loosely translates as, “This is a chemistry shop, not a sports shop. You won’t get a cricket pad here.” Rao clarifies, and Kapoor ultimately says, “If men decide to buy napkins openly, it would make a woman’s life much …show more content…

The study focused on adolescent girls in Kenya. She said that these “Girls are literally selling their bodies to get sanitary pads,” which is definitely among the more extreme cases of cultural marginalization of women on the basis of menstruation. “When we did our study in Kenya, one in ten of the 15-year-old girls told us that they had engaged in sex in order to get money to buy pads. These girls have no money, no power. This is just their only

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