by Rose George
Change comes slowly and it is limited. “Sometimes,” says Kabi, “we have only got the women to be allowed to sleep inside the compound. We are trying to persuade people to set aside a separate room inside the house for chaupadi. We know it’s not perfect, but we are trying. There’s no electricity in the chaupadi sheds so it’s damaging girls’ education.” Even the ones who are allowed to attend school can’t study when they get home without light and in the cold. Before, it was worse: menstruating girls were never allowed books because the books were considered symbols of the goddess of knowledge, and they could not be dirtied.
A short walk away, I sit down with a group of girls at Radha’s school. They have come in especially to talk to me, even though there is a government strike that day and school is closed. Nepal’s government is fragile and any political party can call a national strike, which happens frequently. These girls are not fragile. They are feisty and smart. They say that chaupadi is embarrassing. “We know that you don’t do it,” said Pabitra, seventeen. “They don’t do it in developed countries.” But only four out of a dozen have been freed from sleeping outside in chaupadi sheds. “It makes no sense,” says Anjana, whose mother is a health worker. Her mother came home two years earlier and said they weren’t going to do chaupadi anymore. “Women bleed even more during childbirth but they can stay in the home. Goddesses are women, aren’t they? They bleed but they’re allowed to stay in the temple. Why can’t we?” She knows the answer. “It’s a lack of education. People think that because it’s an old practice, it’s authentic and powerful.” She says they talk about menstruation in their health lessons at school. “The teacher tells us it’s not a good thing.”
Chaupadi is powerful. It is also extreme. But in many countries, you don’t need a shed to build a menstrual taboo.
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Khushi knew it was cancer. Ankita thought she was injured. Everyone believed they had a sickness. None knew why she was suddenly bleeding, why her stomach was “paining,” as Indian English has it, what on earth was causing this sudden earth-shattering blood. They cried and were terrified and then they did their best to find out: they asked their mothers. And their mothers would not answer. So they asked their sisters and aunties. And eventually they were told, you are menstruating. You are a woman now.
I meet Ankita and Khushi in a schoolyard in Uttar Pradesh. I am traveling across India with a sanitation carnival called the Great WASH Yatra. Great, because its ambitions were big: five states, 1,243 miles. WASH, because that was what its ambitions consist of: to spread knowledge about water, sanitation, and hygiene (these are usually given the acronym WASH). And yatra, a Hindi word for a procession, pilgrimage, journey.
In each state, the Yatra sets up shop: a central stage, and dozens of stalls housing games and entertainment, all promoting better hygiene, hand washing, the use of toilets. One morning, I wake early and emerge from the dorm room to see half a dozen policemen earnestly playing a game of poop chess (where a blindfolded player has to navigate between turds and find the soap). Every day, the stalls all have long queues of boys and men. But in one corner is something different: a tent of golden yellow and red, which bears the sign FOR LADIES ONLY. This is the MHM Lab. A menstruation tent. (MHM is Menstrual Hygiene Management and the standard NGO acronym for anything to do with periods.) In 2012, when the Yatra and I trundled across India, this lab was revolutionary. I was used to shit being an unspeakable topic of development (things are better now). But menstrual hygiene? The scant level of attention given to periods made fecal sludge management look popular.
That’s why the organizers of the lab didn’t expect anyone to turn up. But every day, even on religious holidays, there are long queues of women and girls outside the golden tent. Cynics may think they had come for the freebies. There are reusable cloth sanitary pads on offer as well as instructions on how to make more. These are a draw and a good compromise: most women in India use bunched-up cloth (old saris are popular) because they can’t afford commercially produced pads. Visitors could also make a bracelet from red and yellow beads, to illustrate the menstrual cycle (twenty-two yellow, six red). Mine is made by a man who clearly should have stepped inside to learn more, because he gives me twenty-two days of blood and six days of relief. But he isn’t allowed inside. There, behind the curtain and the man-proof sign, the team is dispensing something that is extremely precious and only for women: information. There, the women and girls can come to find out about their periods, their bodies, themselves. It is this that draws the crowds, not the beads.
Over 70 percent of the 747 women and girls surveyed during the Yatra’s travels had known nothing about periods before they began them because their mothers and grandmothers had told them nothing.27 During one of the Yatra stops, I meet Neelam, a fourteen-year-old girl whose mother had died of breast cancer. (She calls it “something rotten in the breast.”) When she started menstruating, she thought it was cancer, because who was there to tell her differently? Nearly a quarter of the MHM tent visitors also said that menstrual blood was dirty. This belief is not unusual. A survey by WaterAid in Iran found that nearly half of Iranian girls and women think that menstruation is a disease.28 In some cultures—Afghanistan, some Jewish traditions—the acceptable reaction to a girl’s first period is to slap her across the face, either as a punishment, because the blood is interpreted as a sign that the girl has had sex, or as a discouragement, so that a slapped girl will not immediately go and have sex with a boy, propelled by her powerful puberty like a jet stream toward sin.29
In the Yatra survey, 99 percent of respondents said they faced some kind of restriction when they were menstruating. In the schoolyard in Uttar Pradesh where Khushi and Ankita tell me about periods, they also say this: when we are bleeding, we are not allowed to touch pickles, because we will rot them. This is such a powerful belief in India it inspired Whisper, a commercial sanitary pad company owned by Procter & Gamble, to launch a Touch the Pickle campaign, encouraging girls to break boundaries, smash taboos, and buy Whisper sanitary pads. I am trying to understand how menstruation could damage something suspended in acid when Khushi launches a follow-up. “I don’t paint my nails during my period because the varnish will go rotten.”
Don’t think her dumb or ignorant. She later marched me around her school complaining that her teachers weren’t good enough and that she wanted to learn. On the street, walking among fearful dust clouds, she gestured to the air and said, “Ma’am, this is Uttar Pradesh, you can find any pollution you like: noise pollution, water pollution.” And women pollution: this charming, memorable young woman thought she was as polluted as anything else in Uttar Pradesh, because she had also been taught that.
Research in the developing world, writes Dr. Catherine Dolan, “paints a picture of menarche as a fraught process, characterized by uncertainty, fear and distress.”30 But the importance of secrecy and hiding is not embedded in growing girls only in developing countries. Shame and embarrassment have nothing to do with poverty or education. Recently I met someone whose mother hadn’t told her about periods because she was convinced that if the girl knew, she would start her period sooner. But this girl’s mother was a middle-class academic with a PhD.
Stigma and silence spread a long way and in all directions. In the early 1960s, NASA was wondering whether women would make good astronauts, being smaller and lighter, both qualities ideal for cramped space vehicles. A 1964 report, though, found two problems: wombs and hormones. It would be unfeasible to match “a temperamental psychophysiologic human and the complicated machine.”31 By 1983, NASA’s understanding about women’s biology had advanced far less than space flight. When Sally Ride, the first female astronaut, was preparing for a seven-day space mission, she was asked how many tampons she would need. By scientists. Was one hundred the right number? She said no, that was not the right number.32 Today, NASA employs Dr. Varsha Jain, a woman with the best business card in science, as it reads SPACE GYNECOLOGIST.33 Hopefully the agency now knows how ma
ny tampons women need, on earth and above it. (Anyway, female astronauts usually opt to suppress their periods in space. You would, wouldn’t you?)
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“Menstrual taboo” sounds so NGO, doesn’t it? Along with “stigma” and “menstrual hygiene” and “menstruation” itself. We, the privileged women who have toilets and privacy and a massive feminine hygiene industry: we are protected from taboos and stigma by our culture, our education, our progress. We say “periods” or “the curse.” We send our boyfriends to buy sanitary products. We are advanced and immune.
Glacier National Park, Montana. Sharp mountains, blue-green water, dark conifer forests and woods, majesty and splendor: this place has the kind of scenery that inner-city children don’t know how to dream of. It was high summer, 1967, and there were campers all over the park. Glacier contains backcountry, and backcountry is bear country, so there are rules and suggestions to follow for humans who want to share the landscape with Ursus arctos horribilis. Keep an immaculate camp. Cover and seal all food and raise it off the ground. Leave nothing of interest. Sleep inside your tent. If you see a bear, climb a tree. Try not to menstruate.
One night that August, twenty miles apart, grizzly bears attacked and killed two young women. These were the first two recorded grizzly attacks since the park had opened in 1910. They were horrific. Michele Koons and Julie Helgeson, in black-and-white photographs, are fresh-faced. They have big hair and excellent American teeth. They look similar, though they weren’t related and probably didn’t know each other. But they have been paired in history not only because of how they were killed but because of a wrong and poisonous belief as to why.
Koons was camping near Trout Lake with four other young people; Helgeson had headed to the Granite Park Chalet area with Roy Ducat. They knew about grizzlies, because that was what many people came to Glacier Park to see. In Jack Olsen’s book Night of the Grizzlies, an account of the attacks, a park employee admitted that there was tacit encouragement of grizzly tourism and that garbage dumps were more accessible to bears than they should be.34 So bears associated garbage with food and with people. Either humans had food or they could become food.
When Michele’s companions heard a bear, four managed to escape their sleeping bags and climb to a safe height in time. Michele couldn’t unzip hers and died because of it. Over near Granite Park Chalet, the bear was too quick and aggressive. Roy Ducat was badly mauled but escaped. The bear caught Julie and dragged her downhill, where she lay in the open for nearly two hours before an armed ranger and a search party could reach her. Although there were three doctors staying at the cabin, she died of her injuries, which were grotesque and severe. Her legs had been partly eaten.
Michele and Julie are famous not because of their awful deaths but because they both became associated with a belief that endures: that bears and other wild creatures are attracted to menstrual odor, and that having a period in backcountry may be fatal. In its initial report, the National Park Service commented that “the Trout Lake girl was in her monthly menstrual period while the Granite Park Chalet victim evidently expected her period to begin at any time.”35 (Presumably they bothered to name the two young women properly elsewhere.) Michele Koons was wearing a sanitary pad when she died. The other young woman in her party had her period but “was using the internal tampon-type device which supposedly leaves no odor because the menstrual fluid is not exposed to the air.” Because the bear came to this girl but then left her alone, and because the Parks Service had received “a number of letters” from women who had been attacked by wild beasts while having a period, the conclusion seemed obvious. Menstruation, and particularly wearing a sanitary pad, “was a plausible reason for the attack.”36 As for Julie Helgeson, two tampons were found in her backpack, so she was obviously expecting her period and must have smelled that way to the bear. The presence of rubbish and food waste from humans attracted the bears, not an externally worn sanitary pad. The bear that killed Michele had hassled several other hikers over the summer. The 1981 pamphlet “Grizzly Grizzly Grizzly Grizzly,” published by the US Forest Service and the National Parks Service, advised visitors to abstain from “human sexual activity,” to be clean and tidy, not to wear perfume, and that “women should stay out of bear country during their menstrual period.”37
Scholars took this notion seriously enough to study it seriously. In 1977, Bruce Cushing of the University of Montana’s Wildlife Biology Program exposed four polar bears to menstrual odors, using the Churchill Bear Laboratory in Manitoba and a fan.38 He also had menstruating and non-menstruating women sit “passively” in front of caged bears. Outdoor bears were exposed to used tampons filled with menstrual and venous blood left on stakes, along with seal odor, horse manure, seafood, and chicken. Bears, Cushing found, love seal odor, scorn regular human blood, but are intrigued by the menstrual kind. They chewed the tampons. Cushing ended with prudence. “This study supports the theory that menstrual odors act as an attractant to bears, at least polar bears. However, this should not be taken to extremes as that is not the same thing as saying menstrual odors lead to attacks.”
Were the polar bears attracted to the odor? Pheromones? Some peculiar chemical? A later study was more conclusive, and its authors deserve applause for the most entertaining scientific method I’ve read about in a while. To establish whether black bears were attracted to period blood, they hooked used tampons onto fishing lines and cast them past ursine noses, then dragged them back again. The working hypothesis was that bears would be as interested by the tampons as by garbage and other control substances. So would I be, if a fishing line holding a used tampon had come sailing past my nose while I was minding my own business. They also exposed human-socialized bears to menstruating women by having them hang out together. After six experiments in various conditions over several years with different tampons, different women, and different bears, the scientists came to a conclusion. “No bear showed appreciable interest in menstrual odors regardless of the bear’s age, sex, reproductive status or time of year.”
In 1988, Caroline Byrd, a forestry specialist, was prevented from working in the backcountry because a bear had ransacked a hunter’s camp, and the US Forest Service decided it was the fault of menstruating women. “A few days later,” wrote Byrd in her master’s thesis “Of Bears and Women,” her fury barely contained by the calm Courier typeface of her manuscript, “my crew (three women and one man) was informed that due to the recent bear trouble, women would no longer be allowed to work in the backcountry during their menstrual periods.” The policy was eventually rescinded, but not the conviction that period blood was dangerous, which swirls and percolates far and wide, relentless.
Béla Schick was a Hungarian pediatrician who in 1910–11 devised the Schick test, still used to detect immunity to diphtheria. For that, we are grateful. He was also convinced that menstruating women made flowers wilt. This revelation came to him when he asked his maid to put some red roses in water and was shocked that by the next morning they had withered. She told him she was menstruating. Schick experimented further, giving flowers to menstruating women. The flowers died, quickly. He expanded into dough, getting several women to prepare some and noting that the dough prepared by the sole menstruating woman in the group rose 22 percent less than the others.39 Obviously, he concluded, a woman on her period was expelling not just blood and tissue but some potent chemical that had an abominable effect on botany and bacteria. It was, he declared, “menotoxin.” This also conveniently aligned with old-fashioned superstition and taboos. Pliny was right along with every other vividly absurd and usually male commentator on the corrupting superpowers of the bleeding woman. Women really could slay rodents with what a recent TV writer called our “menses badness.”40
Menotoxin was an attractive idea and an instance of ingenious branding, and it bore much academic fruit. In 1940, the anthropologist M. F. Ashley-Montagu wrote “Physiology and the Origins of Menstrual Prohibitions,” which explored recent research on me
notoxin. His list of references was unsettlingly long and predominantly German. Male scientists were clearly spending much time, effort, and money on the pernicious question of why dough didn’t rise properly when handled by a woman on her period. Some diversified from bakery, injecting menstrual serum, whatever that was, into guinea pigs. Their theories were diverse. Women were emitting choline, or choline transformed into trimethylamine. Or oxycholesterol or mitogenic rays. Menotoxin was being debated in the letters pages of the Lancet in 1974.41 Modernity has not prevented menstrual nonsense: recently, a renowned Japanese sushi chef declared that obviously women were discouraged from becoming sushi chefs because periods spoil fish.42
In 2002, psychologists in Colorado enrolled sixty-five students (thirty-two female, thirty-three male) in a study. First they were taken to a room with a woman they are told is a fellow student, asked to fill in a questionnaire, and then left alone. The woman then apparently accidentally dropped either a tampon or a hair clip. She did this “with a blank expression on her face.” The goal was to measure disgust. In disgust theory, both the hair clip and the tampon should provoke equal distaste. Cut hair is disgusting because it can carry disease, and so are hair accessories by association. A tampon, as the eminent disgustologist Paul Rozin found, sets off all the disgust alarms: when his research team asked men and women to put the tip of an unused tampon—unwrapped in front of them—into their mouths, 69 percent refused. Three percent wouldn’t even touch it.43
The Colorado study was striking. Students who had watched the woman drop a tampon then judged her to be “less competent, less likeable,” and they avoided her “psychologically and physically.” The effect was stronger than when the women dropped “a less ‘offensive’ but highly feminine item—a hair clip.” This aversion was the same in both men and women. When Tampax surveyed one thousand Americans in 1981, half the respondents agreed that a woman shouldn’t have sex while she was menstruating.44 A 2017 survey by ActionAid, an NGO that works with women and girls in poverty, found that half of British women don’t feel comfortable discussing their period with men (including their dads).45 Another by WaterAid found that 42 percent hid sanitary products from their work colleagues on their way to the bathroom, and 56 percent would not go swimming during their period. Nearly 80 percent amended their lifestyle in some way while menstruating, and the amendments were usually the limiting, hiding, avoiding kind.46
