[Moon Affairs Revolution] In the beginning, in Delhi, India, a few girls bowed their heads awkwardly and shyly, "Ask her first", "No, why didn't you say it first?"
"Menstruation?"
The questioner and the girls covered their faces and laughed together.
"I know what it is, but I feel shy, I can't say it." said a girl.
"What's the reason for the bleeding? This is something only God knows, and what comes out is bad blood." An elder woman said to the girls.
"Have you heard of menstruation? Yes, I have heard that it is a disease that most girls will get." A group of boys replied when asked.
[Moon Affairs Revolution], which won the best documentary short at the latest Oscar , was only 26 minutes long, but it was a "revolution" that most involved women's daily rights and interests.
Because it focuses on the menstrual rights of women in Delhi, India, or their right to use sanitary napkins.
In India, menstruation is one of the biggest taboos. They cannot talk about it publicly, nor can they use sanitary napkins because they are expensive.
They use homemade cloth strips that need to be constantly changed and washed, but sometimes it is inconvenient to change the cloth. Many girls will drop out of school because they cannot change the cloth strips at school.
During the menstrual period, they could not enter the temple to pray to the gods, could not travel far away, and secretly bury the used cloth strips in the soil at night.
In this revolution in [Moon Affairs Revolution], it is women workers who use their own hands to make low-cost sanitary napkins, trying to make sanitary napkins affordable for everyone.
What's interesting is that this story has been made into a movie, and it has been screened in China before, and Taiwan has translated the name into "pad man" .
When we came to us, the name suddenly became a more decent [Indian partner] , and the sanitary napkin in the male protagonist's hand on the poster was replaced with a piece of white paper.
"Menstrual shame" is still everywhere. Even though it is not too difficult for women to use sanitary napkins in most countries, this concept is still deeply rooted:
Menstruation is dirty, unclean, ugly, and shameful. It cannot be talked about or exposed in public.
It still leads most people to believe that menstruation should be a taboo.
So you see, the red tide in all sanitary napkin advertisements has been replaced with blue liquid, although everyone knows that no one on earth shed blue blood;
What about the women who shed red blood in the ad? Was eaten by sharks long ago!
So you see, the post called "Menstruation" posted by Indian-Canadian artist Rupi Kaur on Instagram was quickly deleted by Instagram;
In addition, many actresses such as Jolin Tsai, Manila Luzon and others have worn "sanitary napkin" dresses well but were criticized by the public for "bad taste";
......
In fact, as long as you think about how many nouns that can refer to "menstruation" have been invented, you know how much we don't want to use this word.
There are really idle people who have counted people in more than 190 countries trying to avoid mentioning this matter. For this reason, people have created more than 5000 implicit slang terms.
For example, "Shark Week", "Bloody Mary", "That Time of the Month" and "Lady Business" are used abroad.
Of course, there is also "Visit from Aunt Flo" , we also say the same.
There are too many words for menstruation invented in ancient China. The words "moon letter, moon messenger, moon vein, moon dew, red yuan, red vein" seem to be more romantic in comparison.
There is also a "Carrie" in the Western pronouns, which is the classic horror film [Witch Carrie] in popular culture in 1976.
In [Carrie Witch], there is a story in which Carrie, an introvert and plain-looking girl, didn't know what it was when she first had her menstrual period.
It was after a physical education class. She saw the red body fluid flowing out of her body while taking a bath. She hurriedly and horrifiedly asked the surrounding classmates for help, but was ridiculed and bullied by all the classmates.
Everyone threw miscellaneous things on her, insulted her ignorance, laughed at her cowardice, and left her alone in a corner.
This story became a foreshadowing turning point, including the red pig blood that was poured on her head by her classmates mischievous when the witch Carrie was blackened. There are metaphors for menstrual blood.
How does menstruation appear in the movie? Anyway, most of the time it is not a good thing. For example, in the horror film here, the physiological process of the girl Carrie becomes a turning point in her transformation.
There are also mocking in sex comedies, such as the "Lanzibang" [too bad] , which has a plot where boys are stained with red pants by girls menstrual blood on their bodies.
The next thing is natural to accept everyone's ridicule.
Also in 1980, in [Youth Coral Island] starring Brooke Shields, the heroine Brooke Shields and the male mainstream fell on a deserted island and lived a more natural and primitive life.
But when Brooke Shields was taking a bath in the river, she found red blood in the water, and immediately screamed and called the male lead to come and help, until she realized that it was her menstrual blood, and drove the male lead in embarrassment. go.
The awkward atmosphere of this scene really passed from the screen to the screen, even though the two had already faced each other naked on the island, they still couldn't face menstruation calmly.
Because it is a taboo, it has been from ancient times.
The "Bible · Old Testament" wrote:
A woman who walks through her life will be unclean for seven days; anyone who touches her will be unclean till night. When a woman is in filth, everything she lies on is unclean, and everything she sits on is also unclean. If there are other things on a woman’s bed or on the thing she is sitting on, if there are other things, one person touches it, And it will be unclean till night.
The Catholic dogma says that when Eve tempted Adam and was expelled from the Garden of Eden, menstruation and pain were the punishment for the sins Eve committed.
Therefore, female believers before the 20th century were not allowed to go to church during menstruation, nor could they receive Holy Communion.
Hinduism in Nepal also requires female believers to live in a mud hut called "chaopoti" during menstrual periods, away from the crowd, and cannot return until the end.
The government didn't ban this rule until 2005, but to this day this custom can still be found in many backward areas.
Pliny the Elder, a historian in ancient Rome, wrote in Natural History:
Women’s menstrual blood will make new wine sour, wilt wheat, kill bees, corrode iron and copper, and fill the air with a disgusting taste. A dog with rabies bit the same.
In the Middle Ages, it was generally believed that if a man’s penis touched menstrual blood, it would be burned, and that the child conceived during the menstrual period was born as a demon.
In ancient China, people put menstruation alongside disease, dead bodies, and sexual intercourse, and believed that menstruation was one of the most filthy things in the world.
But they miraculously like to use this kind of "filth." For example, in the Boxer Movement in the late Qing Dynasty, it was generally believed that the filthy power of menstrual blood helped the Boxer defeat the Eight-Power Allied Forces.
Because they will hang countless menstrual-stained cloth strips collected from the whole city on the wall, and use menstrual blood to make the opposite cannon misfire.
In Yan Geling's "Jinling Thirteen Hairpins" , menstrual blood is a kind of "bloody" comparable to war:
My aunt Shujuan was awakened by her menarche, not by the gunfire outside Nanjing on December 12, 1937. She ran to the toilet along the dim corridor, thinking that the strong blood came from her fourteen-year-old body.
In the 1960s, NASA was worried that one of the reasons women could not become astronauts was that the absence of gravity in space might cause menstrual blood flow back?
There have been no female sushi chefs in Japan for a long time, because they believe that women’s menstrual periods will make the sense of taste unbalanced.
The hidden logic behind menstruation taboos from ancient times to the present is: because menstruation is a symbol of filth, so that women are ashamed of menstruation and also feel ashamed and disgusted with their bodies.
Even in 2019, there has been a lot of talk about equality between men and women, and a lot of women no longer being discriminated against, but menstrual shame has turned into a collective unconsciousness, hidden in people's hearts.
In many cases, people's aversion to menstrual blood is almost instinctive, and it secretly forms part of misogyny.
But there is always someone to do something.
For example, the "Global Women's Rights Charity British Plan International" dedicated to the protection of women's rights spent two years to promote the adoption of menstrual expressions ;
Chilean artist Carinaúbeda made five-year menstrual sheets into installation art for people to appreciate its beauty;
Kiran Gandhi, a girl in the British Marathon, refused to use sanitary napkins in the race and let her blood flow. Faced with controversy, she became a kind of folk hero.
In [Women of the 20th Century] , the artist Abby played by Greta Geweig announced at the dinner table that she was menstruating, and said word by word to the men beside her:
If you want to have an adult relationship with a woman, for example you want to have sex with a woman’s vagina, then you need to accept the fact that the vagina has menstruation. It's no big deal to tell the fact of menstruation.
When can it be recognized as an uncommon part of daily life experience, and when will people dare to talk about it and name it normally?
[Indian partner] (Padman) said that menstruation is not a disease for a woman, but it is shameful to feel it.
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Author/curl
This article was first published on WeChat public account [Pocier]
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