Shownotes Transcript
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Can you imagine swapping out your diva cup for a wad of buffalo skin? Yeah, me either. But that's what some women used to use to soak up their period in pre-medieval times. It depended on where you lived. Sea sponges were popular for coastal sisters and Egyptian women used grass and papyrus.
By the time we got to the Middle Ages, things took a grim turn. Menstrual blood was considered evil and linked to all kinds of malaise. Women had to use scraps of cloth or just bleed into their clothes. Fast forward to the 20th century and pads and tampons became standard items on supermarket shelves. But actually talking about bleeding from your vagina? No way!
These days, there are more options than ever when it comes to period products, but we're still a bit squeamish about periods. It's as though there is something uniquely germy about menstrual fluid. But here at Ladies HQ, we're not afraid of blood and definitely not fearful of vaginas, so we wanted to bring this episode out from the archives. It's about smashing menstrual taboos.
I trained for a year at the London Marathon in 2015. And I remember arriving at the start line and realizing that I was about to get my period. And running four hours is very intense on the body. So I was worried as to what to do. And so I remember just kind of evaluating my options. You know, a pad...
Wouldn't be ideal. Chafing is a real issue on a marathon course. And no man I know would put cotton between his balls and run 26 miles. I didn't have a moon cup on me at the time. And then I guess a tampon, you know, was somewhat of a viable option, but it didn't seem comfortable. I didn't want to run with an extra one to have to change along the marathon course. And there's no privacy. And so in a radical act to prioritize my own comfort, I decided to just bleed freely and run.
Did you hear that? I decided to bleed freely and run. In this day and age, that was a radical act. And we need to talk about why. In a lot of ways, we're cool with periods, but we've still got a way to go. Because it's one thing to ask if anyone's got a spare tampon. It's another when you leak blood onto your white shorts. Why are we so grossed out by menstruation when it's something so many of us do?
I'm Yumi Steins and ladies, we need to talk about periods. We're going to be talking about our shame and squeamishness with two period experts later on. But let's get back to our London marathon runner. Kieran Gandhi is a musician from New York City. We interrupted her laying down drum tracks at a recording session in Detroit to ask her about that time her period broke the internet.
I knew it would be a radical move. I knew it was combating stigma and my own shame and my own right. But I didn't know how powerful it would be. Did you have that sort of moment where you're like, oh God, I can feel the blood coming out? I didn't. I felt like it was so empowering. Like it wasn't...
uncomfortable at all. That's the thing. Obviously, I know what you mean. Like we as women don't even interact with our own genitalia, our own anatomy, our own body fluids. So obviously there was this aspect of like, oh, this is new, you know, but I have to say like, no joke. It was just so powerful. I was like, damn, I'm running in
bleeding. Like, are you kidding me? Like women do extraordinary things all over the world. I felt this enormous sense of power. I've actually got tears in my eyes thinking about it, Kieran. Yeah. The moment when I saw that, when I saw that photo of you, I, um, like I wanted to look away. I was like, like, really?
Right. And I think I closed the computer and went, no, I can't deal with this. And then I had to look at it again because I'm a runner as well. I've only ever done a half marathon. But I was like, fuck, that's so cool. And it shocked me that I was so –
All of us are. But all of us are conditioned through the male gaze. We look at ourselves, but through the filter of a male gaze, because most of the photography and what's visually out there in film and in media is made by men with the intention of the fact that we live in a patriarchal society. So it is okay that we have periods. It's something that we have to talk about. It's completely amazing that we bleed each month and give birth to the entire human race. And it's actually something that we should celebrate because women are doing extraordinary things on their cycles each day.
When you grew up, I know your parents are pretty cool. They're pretty radical and open-minded. But do you remember what you were told about your period? I think it was what we weren't told. I think my mom was really awesome on day one. And I did go to an all-girls school. And so this was something that was definitely discussed. And I knew that I had two options, which was a tampon or a pad. And I knew that if there was any pain, just to take a little bit of Advil or something
But beyond that, we don't learn about alternative methods of care to take care of ourselves. We don't learn how periods affect each woman so differently. We don't learn about, you know, what foods might be causing certain pain. Once one of my friends told me that drinking a lot of caffeine on day one and two of your cycle only exacerbates the
pain. And so I started drinking less coffee and that helped me tremendously. Everything is just shrouded in silence. And so we as women are not able to exist as comfortably in our own bodies as I believe that we should be. One of the misconceptions about your run is that you are like a pro-free bleeding kind of activist. I'm a pro-comfort activist. I'm not a pro-free bleeding activist, but I will say my favorite way to take care of my cycle each month is
to maybe use an organic cotton tampon on day one or two and then for the rest of the time not use anything and maybe use a pair of Thinx or Dear Kates, which are thicker underwear, just to be really comfortable. Also, I'm just busy, man. I'm in a different part of the world every other week. None of us women got time for searching for all this. It's uncomfortable. It's annoying. It's debilitating. So free bleeding ends up being a small part of my life, but it's not something that I advocate for actively.
You've said that one of the reasons you decided to free bleed was to raise awareness of women who don't have access to pads and tampons and stuff like that. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Absolutely. In India alone, only 12% of the entire population of bleeders have access to the products they need. I mean, that's dire poverty. And the fact that we don't talk about it is the reason why this happens. I mean, you go into parts of India, and of course, some places don't have toilet paper and things that we in the Western world value very
But for women, it's so much worse. And if you are bleeding from your body in sheer discomfort and you don't have the power to ask for the products you need because it's so stigmatized, you will continually live in shadows, in quietude, in poverty, and in oppression. And it prevents women from reaching their fullest potential. And so, you know, you go to the UN and you hear them talking about SDG 5, which is gender equality around the world, but they won't talk about menstruation.
And it's not just women in India dealing with these issues. It happens here in Australia too. If you're poor or homeless, sanitary products are super expensive. And in some communities, girls skip school when they have their period because pads and tampons cost more than $10 a pack.
So that's why this marathon was so radical. It shocked people into unpacking how stigma affects and holds women back around the world. And, you know, I want to be careful not just saying women, but, you know, not all women bleed and not all people who bleed are women. So I also want to be sensitive to that. So, you know, when we crossed the finish line, I knew it was a beautiful story. You know, I knew there was power in there and I knew so many women could relate to all the tons of times that we've been caught unprepared on our cycle and sort of embarrassing stories that go with it.
These embarrassing stories are part of the glue that binds the sisterhood. And that shame that we've felt, it is cultural and kind of pointless, but that doesn't make it any less real. We were like night swimming and I got my period and I was just like in a bikini and we were like hopping a fence and I was with like a bunch of guys. Probably I was like straddling the fence. And then like later that night when I got home, I was like, oh my God.
There was no bin in the bathroom, so sometimes I would sit in the toilet and wait for people to leave the bathroom so I could go out and throw away the thing in the bins next to the sink. But it's...
It's definitely, it's like horrible at times when you just get up and turn back and see, oh God, what's wrong? Kind of a thing. Yeah, that's been there. I had like bright blue uniform for my school dress. And I just remember sitting in class one day and like I got up and it was like all over my dress, all over the chair on this like bright blue uniform. I was like, oh my God. Just walking down the street and this random like good looking guy came up to me and told me that there was blood on my shorts.
I just like ran. I remember I was at work once and I sort of, you know, that terrible word flooded. And I was teaching and I thought, what am I going to do? Anyway, I just kind of cleaned myself up and sort of stood with my back to the board for the entire lesson. I spent my whole menstruating life scared stiff that something would happen. And once I did have a little bleed onto a dress in a crowded pub garden. That was pretty bad.
And can I please confess that I know it's stupid, but I get super paranoid about swimming in the ocean when I'm bleeding because I'm scared that sharks will be attracted to the blood.
Now, I don't want my daughters or anyone to feel like a monster is going to bite them off at the torso as punishment for the crime of menstruating. And I want to exempt my girls and myself from pointless shame around a very ordinary bodily function. So to get perspective, I thought I should talk to two women who are shameless when it comes to periods. First up, I asked them if they're ever embarrassed to buy pads or tampons.
Absolutely not. I don't think so. Why would you? That's Jane Usher. She's a professor of women's health psychology at the Western Sydney University. I sat down with Jane and with Karen Pickering. Karen's a feminist writer and educator currently writing a book about menstruation and menopause in collaboration with the Victoria Women's Trust. Both ladies have done a tonne of research in this area and I wanted to talk to them about why periods are still sometimes seen as...
well, as dirty. Culturally, there's a long history of periods being associated with dirt and disgust and shame and some might say fear. Some would say that it's to do with everything in terms of the female body that's sort of, that's leaking and seeping and coming out of us as women is seen as disgusting. So that would be menstruation, that would be breast milk, that would be sweat, that would be
the whole of, in a sense, what it is to be female is seen as abject. But I think what I would say is it's a sign of misogyny. It's a sign of positioning something that is essentially feminine as other and as dirty and disgusting and a way of containing and controlling women. Karen, can I ask that question again for you? Why are periods considered dirty? I would probably point out that
nearly all of the major religions of the world explicitly endorse a menstrual taboo. So the Bible, the Quran, the sacred texts of Hinduism, the Vedas, all explicitly talk about the menstruating woman as dirty and she must be segregated and separated during her period. So it's
That obviously has a massive effect on our cultures and the cultures that grow up with those religions or have grown around those religions. But when you get back to it, I do think it is largely based in fear of women's bodies and female reproductive power. Jane, how do you think that periods being secretive, how does that impact us? It has a huge impact. If you talk to young women...
across a whole range of different cultural groups about their major concern about menstruation. It's concealment. It's about not knowing that you're menstruating. The worst idea being blood being seen. And that leads to a lot of menstrual shame. So that can be internalised by young women and then it has a really big impact, not only on how they see their menstruating bodies, but how they see the whole reproductive body. So then can have an impact on their sexuality, on...
on their knowledge about the sexual body, about the vagina. It really can have a huge impact. Is it fair, though, to have a little bit of aversion to blood? I think that we don't have the same visceral reactions to, say, tears or sweat as we do to blood. You're right, and blood is certainly something that many people are phobic about.
But if you cut your finger while you were making dinner, you probably wouldn't find that revolting and disgusting and be ashamed that everyone else in your house had seen the blood on your finger. You might even put your finger in your mouth to stop the blood while you quickly figured out what to do next. And I think you could also say that blood on men often signifies heroism. Look at all the action movies and we see blood on men's faces and blood coming out of their bodies and
you know, it's seen as a sign almost of glorification, of look at what a hero I am. Whereas blood coming out of a woman's vagina and dribbling down her leg is seen as really, you know, something that we can't ever see. Even to the degree that when you have menstrual product advertising on TV, it's blue, it's not red, because the idea of dribbling red ink on a pad to show how absorbent it is would be seen to be disgusting. ♪
You know, we surveyed thousands of girls and women about, among other things, their first period, which is called menarche. And the responses time and time again when we asked, what would make getting your period better? Girls of school age said menstrual products where the wrappers don't make any sound. Oh.
How to keep it a secret. But I think what's also important about men are it's that first period that actually signifies adulthood and comes with a lot of constraints in many cultures where women are not allowed to be around boys, be around men. They're seen as a sexual threat. In some cultures, women are married as soon as they start menstruating. Now, that's not legal in Australia, but we certainly, in part of our research, interviewed women who were married at 12, 13 as soon as they started their periods.
You know, when I think about it, because I've got two daughters who've gone through this, is there's sort of a point where you do have to step up to manage it.
Do you know what I mean? Like you have to be across having tampons or pads in your bag and sort of schedule enough toilet breaks during the day. So suddenly from being a little girl who's quite carefree, you suddenly do have to sort of switch on a little bit more to your adult self. Karen, is that crazy talk? No, absolutely not. I think it can be really confronting for girls and a real contrast with the rest of their life.
that all of a sudden there's this one aspect of their life that they really have to be, yeah, responsible adults about. And they get the message very early that the stakes are high. The stakes are high socially and in terms of their family. Girls talked about how their relationship with their dad changed after that because he saw a responsibility to change their...
the way that he was with his daughter, maybe not have her sit in his lap so much. Like really sad things like this, that little girls are very aware that the world around them is changing as well as what's happening inside them. Now, Jane, your research focuses on the experiences of migrant and refugee women in Australia and how they navigate their sexual and reproductive health.
including their menstrual cycle. Can you share some of your discoveries with us? A really high percentage of women told us that they didn't know about menstruation before their first period, so that they felt horror, they felt shock. Many women thought they were dying or they thought there was something really wrong with them. So they hadn't been told about periods. They didn't have older sisters who told them about it.
So they really, really had no knowledge of menstruation. And their mothers didn't tell them either? No, they didn't. And actually when we talk to women who are mothers now who have young girls, they say to us, look, I want to be, I don't want my daughter to go through that. I don't want my daughter to go through what I went through.
but they don't know how to talk about it. They feel shamed in terms of talking about it. And, you know, young women saying that when I was a girl, I couldn't look at anybody. I went off in a room on my own. I cried. So I think really the importance of menstrual education and normalising menstruation is just a healthy, positive part of the female life cycle is really important. Karen, can you picture a life without a shame around periods? Yeah, I picture it all the time and...
if we can expand menstrual awareness into an actual broader concept of menstrual wellbeing. Our data shows us how little women actually understand that menstruation is just part of a cycle.
And that when you don't have your period, there are just as significant and dramatic changes happening in your hormonal profile. And so I think giving women the tools to understand that might mean that they will be able to look at their life and say, okay, yeah, maybe this week I'm going to have low energy. I'm going to need to...
take fewer trips to the gym or, you know, fewer responsibilities on. But this week before it or this week after it, I actually am at the top of my game and that's when I should maybe do longer hours or that's when I should, you know, ask for that promotion. So I think that it's not...
It shouldn't be a mystery what's happening in your own body. Sort of like going along with it instead of resisting or denying it. Yeah, so not seeing, you know, because I think there's also a lot of shame and stigma associated with PMS and premenstrual change that women can't talk about. And some women do experience quite severe premenstrual changes. But if we stop being ashamed of that and thinking that we're bad or mad, but think, okay, this is the time when I might be a bit more reactive, I might need some time out, I might need some support, or I might feel more sexual or creative, which some women do.
And actually going with that and being aware of that, that can be a positive thing. So just on a personal level, do you mark things in your diary so you know that these phases are coming?
I don't, but my partner does. He's a woman. And I'll sometimes say, am I premenstrual? And she'll say, yeah, you're premenstrual, which we both know before the diary's been looked at. Can I ask you about sex during your period? Jane, is this something in your personal experience that you're totally comfortable with or was it something that you had to sort of, you had to arrive there? When I was younger, I used to really enjoy sex during my period. And I think that was part of
being a feminist, about challenging menstrual taboos. I don't enjoy it so much now and I think maybe that's just to do with getting older and...
I think my libido is not as high as it used to be. So if I don't have sex during those couple of days, it's not a big issue for me. I know it's a really big issue for a lot of young women in particular. And I think it's really interesting in terms of that taboo around sexuality. And it was interesting when we were interviewing the migrant and refugee women, all of them said they didn't have sex during their period. And it was the only time in the month where they could legitimately say no to their partner.
So I think it serves particular functions in some contexts. But I think what I would say is it's about a woman feeling comfortable with it and also how much she's bleeding. If you're bleeding really heavily and you're in pain, then you probably don't feel like having sex anyway. No, and I've got to say when it's come up in my life, I've gone, oh, God, what about the laundry I'm going to have to do tomorrow? Yeah.
Can I tell you something that happened in my personal experience? My partner went down on me when I had my period and then, you know, we finished having sex and it wasn't like till later, like 10 minutes later or something, that I realised he had blood like on his face and he didn't know it was there and I didn't actually know how to tell him. Like I really sort of was confronted with my own inability to say something about it, you know, like...
We're all trying so hard to be open-minded and progressive but confronted by it. Something we found in our responses was that women in same-sex relationships had fewer problems around menstruation and sex. So there seemed to be a higher degree of comfort between two sexual partners who both menstruate
to just sort of either press on regardless or have different kinds of sex during that time. Would you agree with that, Jane? Yeah, I think also if you've got two women menstruating and they're not synchronising and they're not having sex during menstruation, you've potentially got two weeks in the month where you're off limits. Half the time. I think personally I haven't found a difference between men and my current woman partner who I've been with a long time.
you know, we're both comfortable around it. But if you're ashamed about it, if you're in a heterosexual relationship, then it allows the man to be ashamed. And I think I always found that men were really quite interested in menstruation because I always talk about periods and do research on periods and I mention it. And I think men found it a way to actually ask questions that they wouldn't necessarily ask a woman. So I think we sometimes assume a negative attitude in men that they don't have.
And that we can actually be role models for not being ashamed about it. And, you know, having, you know, your partner having blood on his face could have been actually quite funny, but... It was funny, but...
a year later. No, I love that. That's lovely. Now, Karen, if you could do one thing today to reduce the taboo around menstruation, what would it be? I would get menstrual education into the school curriculum. Because at the moment, a lot of menstrual education that's delivered even in public schools is delivered by corporations. And I think that's a scandal. If
Our school system, which is compulsory and free and secular, had a responsible approach. I think all students would learn about menstruation as just a normal part of life and I think that would really reduce the...
The harm done by the menstrual taboo. Menstrual taboo is a cross-cultural boogeyman, a silencer, a killer shark lurking in the seas of awesome ladyhood that we need to kill. But hey, if we can't kill it, maybe we can just slowly bleed it dry. Just kidding. Let's fucking kill it.
Ladies, we have a special bonus episode for you where the team sat down together and did a show and tell about what we use when we have a period. I decided that I wanted to switch to period undies. A lot of my housemates ask me if I'm wearing my pull-ups, but they do make them really kind of sheer and sexy and there's heaps of different designs you can choose from. So head to the ABC Listen app right now and search for Ladies We Need To Talk.
And if you've enjoyed this episode of Ladies We Need To Talk, please share it with your friends. They'll actually love you for it. And I've heard of at least three book clubs who have made this podcast their text for the month and it actually makes me so happy that I have tears in my eyes. I'm Yumi Steins. Thanks for listening.