“South Asia’s women are shackled by a myriad of social customs and beliefs that embrace and straddle the patriarchy.” Kamla Bhasin.
Observing right from the period of Aristotle, who regarded a woman’s rightful place as her house, because of her ‘special abilities’ as a wife, mother and householder, while a man acquired that a woman’s function was to “keep and store”, a path for differences and discrimination has built up.
Such social constructions have formed a society of oppression. In order to give up a mentality that treats women as entities associated with the ‘useless’, the pre-existing thought processes that people possess have to be challenged; these were a result of a life long history of oppression itself.
It’s not hard to believe that an environment least favourable for women proportionally indicates less importance with regard to their demands and needs that rightfully belong to them.
According to 2011 population data, 336 million girls and women in India are of reproductive age and menstruate for 2-7 days every month and yet the topic of menstruation is expected to be a hush affair.
The privilege that many people residing in an urban area carry to talk about menstruation is as difficult and impossible to understand, for those who live in rural areas.
The embarrassment attached to this natural process makes the life of many girls and women difficult. Blind belief in socially and culturally constructed norms by society has created a belief system that teaches women how to behave according to those norms.
It is the age-long practice of oppression and neglect by a society that has brought women to an artificial and subordinate status. According to the National Family Health Survey 2015-2016, it was estimated that of the 336 million menstruating women in India, about 121 million (roughly 36 per cent) women are using sanitary napkins, locally or commercially produced.
During the Sabarimala temple case, Acharya M R Rajesh wrote that the four Vedas never state anywhere that a woman’s body is impure or that she cannot do poojas during menstruation.
Prohibiting women from entering temples and castigating them as impure is squarely against the teachings of the Vedas. There is an image ingrained in people’s mind that menstruation is a disease; as a result of this, we neglect behaviour towards health-related issues attached to it. This amounts to a society where women might be considered as goddesses in temples but in reality, they’ll be kept in huge turmoil.
An individual who’s been suppressed for ages finds it difficult to come out and discuss their problems. The first step in moving towards a more open ground for discussion and responsibilities for normalisation of menstruation/periods is to fight against the socially constructed rules.
A dialogue or a conversation initiated first kills the fear of being judged. A sensitive issue always requires collective efforts of cooperation and empathy. The fight for sure is against the social and cultural practices that keep a woman’s health at stake but more than that, it is about making the society understand that menstruation is normal.