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The red badge of courage
By Zoë Williams
williamz@mscd.edu

My first caper with radical feminism came from a gender-equality group called Sabotage. By this time, obsessive reading and pro-honesty parents had bestowed enough knowledge in me to prevent conversations about sex, violence and abortion from shocking me. Still, one aspect of Sabotage completely rocked my comfort zone.

The women in this group would openly state that they were menstruating. For me, menstruation was known as my “period” – a monthly occurrence that was hidden from even my closest confidantes. I would panic if I had to write tampons on the family grocery list. I constantly feared being the snappy female during “that time of the month” or get accused of smelling because I was “on the rag.”

Illustration by Andrew Howerton • ahowert2@mscd.edu

In Sabotage, women were talking about cramps, using washable pads, debating the value of reusable sea-sponge tampons and addressing stigmas associated with menstruation. Men in the group listened and participated without a pause. These conversations happened as if menstruation were not unclean, smelly or disgusting. These folks acted as if menstruation were normal.

Then I realized something. Menstruation is normal. There is nothing to hide. It is no more unclean or shocking than any other bodily function. People should not be any more reserved about menstruation than they should be about dental hygiene, especially since our aversion to discussing menstruation has created a market for products that are bad for the body, bad for the earth and personally degrading.

Most women in this country use disposable tampons or pads – think Kotex or Tampax – to collect their menses. The average woman will use around 12,000 pads or tampons in her lifetime. These pads are made of pesticide-drenched cotton fibers treated with chlorine bleach to turn them a crisp and sterile white. This releases huge levels of dioxins, which contaminate waterways and poison wildlife. Additionally, chlorine bleaching creates rayon, a chemical that peels the mucous membrane away from the vagina, creating the conditions for illnesses such as toxic shock syndrome.

As the icing on the cake, tampons and pads come swaddled like bundles of joy with applicators, wrappers, boxes and bags that will resurface in the throats of suffocated marine life and public water supplies. It can take as long as 300 years for a tampon applicator to fully decompose in a landfill.

A monthly supply of tampons or pads costs around $4, for a total of $1,200 in a lifetime. Organic disposables will total up around $2,600. All that money is for exposure to poison and environmental degradation. I’ll take the cash, thanks.

Perhaps my greatest peeve with our cultural response to menstruation is the notion of “sanitary” products, which suggests that menstruation is dirty. While we’re at it, why not have sanitary underwear and jock straps? It is unsanitary to take a tampon, place it in a waste receptacle, have that emptied into a larger container, set that container outside for pickup and then dump it in a landfill. Washable alternatives simply require the user to wash the pad or sponge out with hot water and soap. It’s efficient, low-waste and much cleaner.

Changing my attitudes and personal approach to menstruation not only led to conscious choices for environmental sustainability, it made me feel better about my body. Nowadays the only discomfort I feel around menstruation is cramping, which I learned to treat with teas and stretches.

The website http://www.bloodsisters.org/bloodsisters has an abundance of alternative menstrual attitudes and products. Ladies, go there, find alternatives that work for you and learn to go with the flow. It will change your life and your planet.