By obfuscating language, corporations are profiting from the plight of the female condition
After Lakshmi* got her first period, her family arranged a ‘coming of age’ ceremony in her village. This custom dates back to ancient cultural practises announcing a daughter’s fertility to potential suitors who might be interested in asking for her hand in marriage. It also serves as a declaration by the family that Lakshmi, their daughter, is ready to be bred like livestock; and the family will pay for the transaction under the guise of ‘dowry.’ Lakshmi is adorned with garlands and whatever jewellery the family can afford, kept on display for onlookers’ scrutiny, as she is deluded into believing that her family is indeed celebrating her. While the rag cloth shoved between her legs absorbs copious amounts of menstrual blood, she sits there smiling before she is cast away to a ramshackle hut. Along with being deprived basic hygiene or clean running water, she will face the ignominy of going through the most natural part of being female. Even more unfortunately for Lakshmi, a cyclone ravaged Tamil Nadu, destroyed her makeshift home and left her ‘fairy-tale’ life in shreds.
Lakshmi’s story is not a standalone case. Nepal and India are two countries in which the isolation of women and girls during their menstrual cycles is all too commonplace. Roshani Tiruwa (15), went to her ‘shed’ after eating dinner around 6 p.m. She lit a fire in the tiny mud hut before going to sleep. Tiruwa’s father found her body the next morning. District police suspect the ninth-grader died from a lack of oxygen. Amba Bohara, 35, and her sons, aged 12 and 9, had lit a fire on Tuesday night to keep warm in the freezing mud and stone hut, but were discovered dead the next morning by her father-in-law, police said. It is also not unusual for animals and snakes to enter the hut, and there have been several reports of women dying from snakebites whilst in isolation.
In 2015, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) directed state governments to take effective measures to eradicate the practice. In a letter, it says that the Commission, “further expects that the government should also consider that such type of activity be treated as a cognisable and punishable offence as Gaokor custom cannot be accepted at the present time in a civilised society and the women should not have to undergo such type of punishment for none of their fault.” As of 2022, no action has been taken; and girls continue to die in isolation huts due to natural disasters, suffocation, pneumonia, snakebites and infections.
Open defecation crisis in addition to period isolation
Nearly half-a-billion Indians – about 48% of the population – lack access to basic sanitation and defecate in the open. Many women, usually in the rural areas, have to wake up extremely early in the morning to empty their bowels in the open, while it’s still very dark, and before the men start to come. They often have to walk for miles before they can assume privacy of some sort. Despite that, they become a target for sexual violence when they use the outdoors as their toilet. This is why groups of women walk together, and hurry back before the sun is up. The gruesome rape and hanging of two teenage girls in the populous Uttar Pradesh state brought to light the biggest victims of India’s sanitation crisis. “We have had one-on-one fights with thugs in order to save our daughters from getting raped. It then becomes a fight that either you [the thug] kill me to get to my daughter or you back off,” a helpless mother said, as she pointed out the chilling frequency of such assaults. Senior police official Arvind Pandey said, “They take place when women step out to defecate early in the morning and late evening. It is a very worrisome trend.” Speaking of rape cases in just one city called Bihar, “about 400 women would have “escaped” rape last year if they had toilets in their homes,” said Pandey.
“After Phailin in 2013, I had contracted a vaginal infection and had to take medication. So, having faced all of this, during the recent ‘Yaas’ cyclone, I was determined not to use any toilet or go out in the open to defecate or urinate. I ate less and even restricted my water consumption so that I didn’t have to use the toilet frequently.”
Apart from man-made dangers to women, natural disasters play a huge role in contributing to women’s period isolation. Jyotsana Rani Das (42) said, “I have seen all major cyclones in my state (Odisha). During Amphan, I had my periods and would go out in the open to defecate and urinate. There was no water to clean my used cloth so I would wash it in the floodwaters itself. There was no water available in the house and because I was menstruating I had to isolate myself, so I decided to stay home[…]. After Phailin in 2013, I had contracted a vaginal infection and had to take medication. So, having faced all of this, during the recent ‘Yaas’ cyclone, I was determined not to use any toilet or go out in the open to defecate or urinate. I ate less and even restricted my water consumption so that I didn’t have to use the toilet frequently,” Das said.
Lack of access to sanitary products due to economic status and poor awareness
According to a study by the NGO Dasra, nearly 23 million schoolgirls in India drop out each year because of their periods. They lack access to basic menstrual hygiene management facilities, hygiene products, and furthermore- they lack basic knowledge. Inadequate menstrual protection causes adolescent girls (age group 12-18 years) to miss 5 days of school in a month which amounts to 50 days a year. Around 23% of these girls actually drop out of school as soon as they start menstruating. As per a 2011 study, only 12% of India’s 355 million menstruating women use sanitary napkins, others resort to shocking alternatives like unsanitised cloth, ashes and husk sand.
Products like rags, paper towels, and reused pads put women and girls at a compounded risk for urogenital infections, such as urinary tract infections and bacterial vaginosis. Bad menstrual hygiene has also been linked to at least 70% of all reproductive diseases in women, resulting in 40,000 cervical cancer deaths each year. The emotional toll accompanying such an acute lack of basic sanitation often results in poor mental health outcomes, such as elevated anxiety, depression, and distress.
While women’s bodies are punished exclusively on the basis of sex, menstruation, a female-only bodily function is now being paraded as an unspecified ‘open for all’ experience.
Indian corporation’s woke misogyny
Women’s health has never been a priority for Indian men, despite relentless advocacy by women’s groups demanding basic medical needs. In my experience campaigning for access to Emergency Contraceptive Pills for women, I witnessed firsthand the ignorance exhibited by men in positions of power. I observed, with horror, the fate of women’s bodies at the mercy of men who think only promiscuous women seek contraception. While women’s bodies are punished exclusively on the basis of sex, menstruation, a female-only bodily function is now being paraded as an unspecified ‘open for all’ experience.
While stories like that of Lakshmi will never make it to the boardrooms where men sign off millions of CSR funds for superfluous woke policies, one questions their motive behind obfuscating language. In recent news, Scaler (by InterviewBit), has announced 12 days of Period Leave for ‘all employees who menstruate’. Scaler – a prominent name in the tech sector, raised 20 million USD in Series-A Funding from international venture capitalists in 2020 – understands the merit in garnering woke social capital among its American peers. While their funding would pave the way for potential IPOs, their woke index will ensure social media popularity among stock buyers online. A company with 700 employees that boasts ‘equal opportunity’ surely knows which 33% bleeds every month.
While men have jumped on the bandwagon of marketing menstrual products for bleeding after vaginoplasty, women are fleeing from the female experience.
Trinetra Gummaraju, a trans identifying man (who now has his sex marker changed to ‘F’ on his passport after surgically altering his body) has been the face of British cosmetic brand ‘The Body Shop’ endorsing their menstrual hygiene products. Recently, the company expanded their market base to include men who are “bleeding for weeks” after vaginoplasty. While men have jumped on the bandwagon of marketing menstrual products, women are fleeing from the female experience.
A brand called ‘Boondh’ that sells menstrual cups wants to ‘ungender menstruation’ – whatever the f*ck that means! A poker faced model stares at the camera, clothes smeared red, with a text on screen that reads “pain doesn’t have a gender, why should menstruation?” Another model claims “the blood flowing out of my body every month does not make me any less of a man.” Boondh is just one of the many corporations feeding on the plight of the female condition. Our media is making matters worse by capitulating to the West and enabling editorial policies to be changed to ‘woke speak’.
Orwellian future
How is it possible for a human being – regardless of ‘identities’ – to menstruate if they do not, in fact, have ovaries and a uterus? Even before one could finish that sentence, the liberals come chanting “Not All Womxn Menstruate; Not All Menstruators Are Womxn,” drowning you out along with any opportunity to have a reasoned argument. Women with DSD who may not menstruate due to any medical condition, will still be female. The small percentage of women with such an anomaly does not call for the erasure of femalehood or blurring of terminologies.
While gender ideology may seem ‘cool’ to the ‘educated’ idiots online, in reality Lakshmi has not the luxury to give her pronouns, nor her gender identity so much as a cursory thought.
Women are in this mess because the male dominated corporate world has decided it wants control over women’s sexual and reproductive capacities. Not trans or enbee sexual and reproductive capacities – women’s. Young girls, connected vicariously through their electronic devices, are turned into battery operated slaves to these tyrants- chanting the media slogans and impassively furthering a misogynistic agenda. In a country like India where the reality of being female is a nightmare, the already impotent medical system pays scant attention to our bodies as it is – the obfuscation of womanhood serves to erase us completely.
Woman is an adult human female. Having been bullied and deplatforned by TRAs, I understand that this uncomplicated truth can be hard for many of us to say. But if we don’t start speaking up against this new misogyny, we add to the bleak future for our children. While gender ideology may seem ‘cool’ to the ‘educated’ idiots online, in reality Lakshmi has not the luxury to give her pronouns, nor her gender identity so much as a cursory thought.
*Character created for the purpose of illustration, a girl’s death due to a cyclone while she was in period isolation is real.
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Thank you for writing about this. The disconnect between reality for women in most parts of the world and the delusional beliefs some hold is extraordinary, and it is hard to believe the cultural appropriation that has taken place. Grieving for all women affected, basically all of us.
Instead of spending their resources on eliminating the problems women face, corporations are spending their resources on creating more problems for women and silencing the women who speak against it. Thank you for all your work.
It’s genuinely disturbing how many ideologies from the West are creeping into India, a country where abject poverty and social evils are a reality even today. How can we as a nation be so blindsided that we blatantly indulge in any and all practices that the West is indulging in, without any critical thinking or societal analysis of our own? How can one say that Onlyfans and prostitution are empowering while girls and women in red light areas are all trafficked, raped, and exploited every day? How can we play this woke liberal political game without any realization of how millions of people in our villages are living today? Let the first world play their rich bougie games, but we as a country need to realize that bringing in every single concept of the West into India without even thinking twice about how much of it can be integrated into our society will never get us anywhere. In an age where the “esteemed” feminist organizations and media houses of India are busy indulging in vapid, corporate and marketable liberal feminism, voices like Vaishnavi Sundar are absolutely a need of the hour if we want to get rid of social evils. Thank you for all the work you do.
Means the world to me to read your comment and good wishes. It is truly a dark and lonely road; but I am grateful for glimmers of hope every once in a while!
Thank you so much for the reply. Looking forward to more articles from you.