Читать книгу Period - Emma Barnett - Страница 17

Sure, mate. But this example shows just how long we have lived with this ritualised shaming of women.

Jump forward two millennia, back to London and my wedding lessons – it was so very odd to hear such backward advice still underpinning the way women are made to feel today. In the developed world, religion may not have the control it once had, but it’s still a huge cultural force that shapes norms and makes people feel a certain way about things.

Often, as with so many other day-to-day battles that make us weary, we can zone out when a religious teacher says something we would normally question. But keeping this shaming, impure narrative around periods going within our oldest religious institutions, despite leaps in medical advancements, at the very least has the subliminal effect of making women feel dirty and wrong.

And it reinforces the idea amongst men that our periods are something to fear and be sickened by.

So, question the nonsense when you happen to hear it. By all means laugh at it. Make sure you ridicule anyone who tells you that you are impure for your body doing something so natural that the entire human race depends on it. It isn’t easy. I failed to do so out of a mixture of shock and a fear of offending the kind people trying to prepare me for my wedding. And I still regret it.

You are a warrior – who bleeds and goes to work every day. Not some dirty hermit who deserves to be quarantined and needs male approval to be reintegrated into mainstream society after your monthly bleed.

Religion has no borders. It was viral before the internet. That is why a privileged educated woman like myself can be told, while living in one of the most advanced societies on earth, not to hand my husband a piece a steak I’ve made for him while menstruating. I am about as far away as you could get from a girl in Nepal banished to menstrual huts away from her home while she bleeds. And yet, we ended up getting a similar memo. Except I have the tools, power and voice to push back.

You see, without us realising it, these myths permeate, settle and erode confidences. Keep your antennae up and tuned. And have the confidence to belly laugh and challenge the shaming beliefs in religion.

Our periods hold the key to bringing the next generation of society into being. The least we can do is make sure we have the right attitudes towards them and diagnose any lingering bullshit from the days when only men had the power to tell the stories that narrated and controlled our destinies, regardless of whether they understood us or not.

Today, women control our bodies and our narrative.