Chris Bobel

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me why menstruation is trending….

The biological process is not new, and neither is its persistent companion—stigma. And in spite of what you might assume, menstrual activism did not spring out of an Instagram post or a Gen Z high-school project. It has been around at least since the late 1960s, an outgrowth of second-wave women’s health activism, consumer rights advocacy, and environmentalism. The critiques were varied but they shared a distrust of the menstrual care industry and its products of dubious safety (heard of toxic shock syndrome?) and the resultant landfills.

There were also movement actors who—reflecting the cultural essentialism of the era— reclaimed menstruation as a source of untapped feminine power and connection.  And on their heels, the radical menstruation wing, shaped by third-wave feminist, anarchist, punk, and queer sensibilities emerged. They said “fuck you” to corporations, refusing to accept their framing of  the pernicious problem (your disgusting leaky body) and the welcome solution (menstrual invisibility via sanitary protection).

So why this, why now? Whence did Menstrual Activism 2.0 come? And how?

I have two answers—one hopeful and one cranky.

Hopeful:  Perhaps the flourishing menstrual activist movement is a social media-enabled feminist success story of embodied resistance. After all, menstrual activism is about blood and so much more because it instigates steadfast refusal of gendered, raced, and classed body norms. Menstrual activism done right—that which is centered more on menstrual literacy and less on market and material—is an assertion that, in the words of poet and activist Sonya Renee Taylor, “the body is not an apology.”

Cranky:  Today’s attention paid to menstruation is rooted in the tenacious commodification of the body that turns us to the market as seductive savior. And it is powered by the paternalistic impulse to protect menstruators, frankly, from themselves. Here we have—yet again—hungry capitalism and tone-deaf neocolonialism, ever wily, discovering ways to exploit otherwise good impulses.

Perhaps the forces that have kept menstruation out of view are the same ones that obscure its complexity, its activist history, and the durable interventions we need. Surely, millennia of menstrual stigma also constrains who gets to break the silence. Writers like Anita Diamant are filling the space, as earnest as they are naïve to the long history of this activism. Diamant admits that she was so new to the field that she began her research by setting up a Google alert for “menstruation” (a move that reveals a common assumption—there can’t be that much out there, right?). No doubt, Diamant skillfully leverages her writer’s craft and her feminist commitment to make clear that “shame is not required of us.” She is right, of course, and I am delighted that legions of readers will take in these words. The book contains many enjoyable and some edifying moments, including a rich catalog of old and new traditions that embrace rather than reject menstrual experience. This section includes a discussion of mikveh, the Jewish water immersion ritual dear to Diamant, who has led efforts to reinvent the tradition for the twenty-first century. I also appreciate her section on menstruating in the workplace, since menstruation in schools has been the myopically singular focus of most global development efforts.

But for the most part, Period. End of Sentence.’s contents are neither new nor radical. There’s the oft-repeated history of the menstrual taboo and the many euphemistic references to menstruation. There’s the now-trendy discussion of the so-called tampon tax. There’s the simplistic discussion of chhaupadi (menstrual huts) as the most egregious of enduring menstrual restrictions. There’s the celebration of a few good men in the movement who regularly get outsized acclaim.  While Diamant holds sexism constant as the source of unnecessary menstrual distress in Period., the other “-isms” seem additive, not multiplicative. As I read, knowing the audience Diamant has earned, I longed for a deeper exploration of why stigma is so sticky, and stickier still for menstruators on the margins (not just that it is but why it is).  She describes the book as “an album of moments”—“not comprehensive or exhaustive”—anticipating her critics, I suspect. I like an album as much as the next person, but we really don’t need another one. While I appreciate that the book is written for a general audience, there are already others like it. Frankly, I fear we are running in circles. We are ready for—indeed we need—more analysis informed by the decades of work that make sense of menstrual realities across the life course and the critiques that question if we can buy (or donate) our way out of this mess.

I know the “not new, not radical, not nuanced enough” assessment is typical when an academic reviews a mass-market book. This is the scholar’s lament. This is why we are no fun at parties. Truth is, I have felt underwhelmed with popular treatment of menstrual activism for a while.  When the book’s inspiration won an Oscar, my inbox lit up with “Isn’t it great?” “No,” I sighed. Is this the best we can do—another frustratingly reductive quick fix for inequality?  Let’s be clear: Blanketing the world in menstrual products (or toilets or painkillers) will not undo the persistent devaluation of the menstruator. I miss those young anarchists from the 1990s who sent their Tampax back to Procter & Gamble with defiant notes. I miss their trenchant takedown of the industry that left no room for gratitude for corporate social responsibility schemes and new entrepreneurial ventures. I miss the DIY gyno-care workshops and scrappy zines that asserted agency without the chirpy positive messaging. This is your period. Love it. Or not. It’s up to you.

Menstrual stigma is one of many noxious expressions of the denigration of certain bodies and it is multiplied through the violence of ableism, of racism, of heterosexism, of ethnocentrism, and the painful exclusionary fiction of the gender binary. Its correctives are vulnerable to the conceptualization of our bodies as eternally flawed until someone (an aid worker, a donor, a business with a big heart) rushes to the rescue. So, when we do menstrual activism, both in deed and in word, we have to resist these forces, to take control of our self-definitions, to restructure the institutions on which we uneasily rely, and to decide—for ourselves—what it means to live a body that bleeds.  Ultimately, we must write the end to more than the sentence, we must write the end to the whole damn story of menstrual stigma.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji

In recent years, Black and Brown girls have been hypervisible in humanitarian and international development discourses. From photo exhibits of menstruating girls isolated in cowsheds to campaigns to end child marriage and female genital mutilation, there has been an almost obsessive concern with the leaky, mutilated, young bodies of girls from the global South.

I therefore hesitated when invited to write about Anita Diamant’s book, Period. End of Sentence.: Will this be yet another lamentation about the wretched conditions of Black and Brown girls? Another litany of how they are abused by their religion, men, and cultural traditions? Another text that shows that the other out there is not like us and hence should be civilized/educated/reformed/saved?

In particular, I had been wary of the recent ventures of white photojournalists into the world of menstrual hygiene. In visual texts that feature girls from Nepal to Kenya, articulations of third-world girls in/through menstrual hygiene discourse often traffic in sedimented tropes about the nonwhite body being ontologically dirty, incomplete, and an imperfect representation of full humanity. Campaigns posit Black and Brown girls as being unable to partake in modernity’s offerings, which includes not only consumption products (such as sanitary pads and tampons) but also enlightened ideas and values (often linked to women’s menstruation, health, and sexuality). Crucially, such discursive strategies are precisely how race and racial meanings are produced, for race is about a system of domination that confers impurities upon particular bodies. The inspecting gaze of the photojournalists, the writers, and eventually their Western audiences lodges impurity and dirt in girls through invocations of blood, excrement, and leaks. I have thus viewed some such campaigns as racial projects that organize human bodies in a hierarchy, into victims and saviors.

I was relieved that Anita Diamant’s book broke away from these sedimented storylines.

Diamant does not make menstruation hygiene a third-world issue. Instead, she mobilizes menstruation as an experience that influences the lives of women and girls globally, even as the precarities that this experience produces take on specific, different, and local forms. That, I believe, is a key strength of the book. We learn about how girls in both Boston and Nairobi encounter the stigma and shame around menstruation; we meet activists from New York working to provide free tampons to local homeless women; we read about those seeking to dismantle taxes on sanitary products and invent low-cost pads made from locally sourced materials. We thus do not end up with a flat, homogenous figure of the menstruating girl. Instead, we meet girls and activists working in a range of different contexts to address locally specific forms of stigmatizations around menstruation.

The most joyful section of the book is part 2, which delineates Indigenous wisdoms around menstruation. This small section, in my opinion, does the heaviest lifting for the book by offering a reparative reading of cultural practices of nonwhite people. We learn about communities of color where menstruators are celebrated, where songs are written about them and poems are shared to celebrate this life-giving flow. These Indigenous practices give us a peek into an alternate universe. They show that another interpretation of this natural bodily process is possible and worth striving for.

Diamant thus breaks the mold through this book.

Pema Lhaki

Recently, I was invited to speak at an event to discuss the role of men in the menstrual movement in Nepal. The three men who spoke were all well intentioned and were very proud of the work they did to break menstrual taboos and stigma. One made pads and taught underprivileged women how to do it as an enterprise, another gifted pads to young girls, and the third taught girls how to use pads. When asked by one of the participants whether they consider themselves feminists or at least allies, all three responded they are “humanists.” A man will now mansplain menstruation to menstruators. My view is that men should stick to sessions with other males to discuss roles they play in perpetuating stigma and taboos.

That is why, like Barkha Dutt in Anita Diamant’s book, I am part of the “other half” who is against menstrual leave policies. A provision in some nations is also a compulsion in others, like mine. In both contexts, however, such policies are still steered by an overarching patriarchy; they are patronizing and a poor excuse for empowerment.

Diamant’s book covers all the bases with apt chapter titles—“Curse,” “Shame,” “Shamelessness,” “Respect,” “Struggle,” “Dignity,” etc.—and the seemingly positive roles played by men, corporations, politicians, students, activists, and even some communities that celebrate menstruation. And, of course, she covers the lots and lots of products available. But what I saw less of was a critical analysis of what is happening in different countries and how they support or contradict each other.

So I find it interesting that the red tent, newly coming to be practiced in the US, and chhaupadi (requiring menstruators to stay in isolation, often in sheds, sometimes exposed to the elements), practiced forever in some parts of Nepal, are perceived so differently despite both being based on the same premise: confining menstruators to a defined space. Yet, only the perception of who has agency and the realities the practices represent is what is different. I wonder, is the red tent the new age chhaupadi or chhaupadi the old age red tent?

In countries like Nepal, menstruation is not just a biological process but a complex social concept used to control women. Like in the Indigenous communities and the newly created “period-positive” traditions mentioned by Diamant, in Nepal, too, rites of passage mark the first time an adolescent girl menstruates in most Hindu communities. But, unlike the period party, these ceremonies are somber and the social significance of the event great. From this point onward, the adolescent’s menstrual experience is defined by society. Hindu women are conditioned to believe themselves the spiritual protectors of the families, and adherence to menstrual restrictions is an extension of this role, similar to fasting for the welfare of the family. Sometimes, this may be the only opportunity they see to validate their usefulness to the family. So even if I were to provide a lifetime’s supply of free products of her choice, she will not stop practicing restrictions and start going into the kitchen or temples while menstruating. More homework is needed because doing away with menstrual stigma and shame is not as easy as free products and a few classes. Changing mindsets requires changing realities, which is only possible with solutions explored and led by the menstruators themselves.

A further challenge may be that “periods” has now replaced “menstruation,” the scientific word we have always known and used. I remember a discussion with some Washington, DC, advocates many years ago in which I opposed the use of the word “period” because it did not represent our part of the world. Why should a word used mostly in English-speaking countries be made the norm when, demographically, non-English-speaking menstruators are in fact the majority? This, for me, contradicted the principles of intersectionality. Yet here we are, many years later, and it has become the norm. We have once again been defined by what is comfortable for a few privileged nations, who have the resources and therefore the capacity to lead and determine the narrative of the global menstrual movement.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf

Back in 2015, when I first began engaging in menstrual advocacy and writing publicly on the topic, people would inevitably inquire if I had read The Red Tent. (I did, back in the late ’90s as a new mom in a suburban book club!) Fast forward to the here and now: who better to tackle modern day period activism than Anita Diamant herself, the brilliant author who envisioned all the ancient camaraderie and connectivity that could be conferred by menstruation?

For my part, I was particularly eager for a new, rich tapestry of testimonies, and Period. End of Sentence. did not disappoint. As I wrote in another review of it: “Diamant knowingly, lovingly represents it all with the keen eye of a reporter, the soul of a storyteller, and the voice of a trusted narrator.” The book provided so much of the deeply personal fodder that I crave – a glorious trove of intergenerational and global and religious and cultural reflections.

I received the galley of Period. End of Sentence. just as we marked the one-year anniversary of pandemic lockdown. It was hard not to fixate on the events of prior months – the strained safety nets, struggling frontline workers (so many of them women), and documented “she-cession” – as I read and absorbed it.

Which is partly why the book served as something of a prompt for me – to reconsider the menstrual advocacy agenda to which I’ve committed myself and how it is simultaneously succeeding and missing the mark.

Yes, we’ve pushed public agencies to be responsive to menstruation – especially as providers of period products – but what happens when schools and shelters are shuttered? How does this help those who are marginalized to the extent that they can’t access public programs safely or at all?

And as people worldwide confront the racism and brutality of our justice system, where can menstrual policy fit in? Last summer I was contacted by a young woman of color who shared that upon being arrested for peaceful protest, she was denied even toilet paper to take care of her period. (Eventually she managed to remove a saturated pad – handcuffed, with the help of a cellmate, and in plain view of all – only to be left to free bleed for many more hours.) How can the vision for menstrual equity make a dent when the systems themselves are so utterly and devastatingly broken?

But even more so, what to do with this avalanche of stories? Diamant doesn’t dictate that to readers, which I appreciate; the answer might look different for each of us. But I came away from reading Period. End of Sentence. with heightened personal clarity: these accounts have become my fuel to further recalibrate the framing of policies and laws so that they are more inclusive, more meaningful, and truly meet people in ways that have real impact. It is all about the stories.

I do want to touch briefly on Diamant’s exploration of the state of menstrual policy. (Admittedly, I can be a tough customer on that front! There are many, many times when people report on my own ideas and contributions, and they … well, don’t quite get me.) The chapter trio – “Period Poverty and the Tampon Tax,” “Menstruating at Work,” and “Dignity” – featured many good examples, but did not fully elevate the critical interconnectedness of all of these policy goals. More broadly, I think there is often short shrift given to the power of policy – and limited acknowledgment of just how much of a driver it has been for forging deeper, more radical conversations about menstruation. I would have loved for Diamant to wrestle a little more with those intersections. (It is not really a critique of the book, though, as much of as an opening for the movement. And that, perhaps, is my own obligation to keep pushing on, not Diamant’s.)

But Diamant’s reminder of the power of raising our voices is a true gift to all of us. With her book, she takes the baton, encouraging readers to speak their truths. Period. End of Sentence. is perfectly loud and proud, an invaluable contribution in every way.

I was gratified by Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s comments about my treatment of menstruation as a global concern and not a “third-world issue,” which she characterizes as “an almost obsessive concern with the leaky, mutilated, young bodies of girls from the global South.” This is a persistent problem.

Since publication of Period. End of Sentence., several press interviewers have tried to focus the conversation on problems in India and Africa – especially on stories of girls dropping out of school “because” they were too poor or uninformed to manage their periods.

In response, I steered the conversation to the fact that menstrual injustice is not a problem of people who live “far away” and pointed out that it’s an issue for menstruators “in your own zip code.” I also stress the global failure of education systems to teach kids about menstruation—indeed, the whole human reproductive system—and the harm caused by that ignorance.

I was careful to be sensitive and inclusive about the language in Period. End of Sentence.—beginning with an explanation of my use of the word “menstruator.” So, I was struck by Pema Lhaki’s objection to the use of “period” rather than “menstruation” in international spaces.  Lhaki is dismayed by the way the English word “period” has become the term of choice. She writes, “We have once again been defined by what is comfortable for a few privileged nations, who have the resources and therefore the capacity to lead and determine the narrative of the global menstrual movement.” I may have been misled by the widespread use of “period” in international news reports and advertisements. I need to revisit that assumption—among others she points out. There is always more to learn.

Chris Bobel has been thinking, teaching, and publishing about menstruation for more than fifteen years. I encountered her work via a powerful op-ed published in the New York Times in 2018, and she was the first person I contacted when I began my research for Period. End of Sentence. Over lunch (we live in the same area), she framed the issue of menstrual activism and global policy with such acuity and depth, I began to understand just how little I knew about the subject.

I learned a lot while working on this book and in writing it relied on stories both to illustrate the damage done by menstrual stigma and misogyny and to demonstrate how people are fighting to challenge that ancient and pervasive prejudice.

In her comment about Period. End of Sentence., Bobel writes that there is no need for another book that is “neither new nor radical,” “not comprehensive or exhaustive.” She says, “there are already others like it.” She also acknowledges that this is a “common knock” on mass-market books.

She’s right about “neither comprehensive nor exhaustive.” There is no way I could do justice to the depth, breadth, complexity, or history of the topic in a slim volume written for a wide audience. But I must disagree about there being “no need” for it.

Some of the stories in my book will be threadbare to people who have been fighting this fight for decades. (Like how NASA asked astronaut Sally Ride if a hundred tampons would be enough for a week in space.) But when I shared facts and anecdotes (like that one) with friends and acquaintances of all ages and identities, they were—to a person—shocked, outraged, and embarrassed by their lack of knowledge.

And as Jennifer Weiss-Wolf wrote in her thoughtful and generous review, making the case for menstrual justice is “all about the stories.”

Storytelling is my MO. Much of my career as a writer has focused on untold stories about people whose experiences have been overlooked and dismissed as unimportant – especially women’s lives. Those stories are not only important; they can be instructive, redemptive, and even inspiring.

As a thirteen-year-old reader wrote, “I was surprised by so many things that, in hindsight, should not have surprised me, and how many angles you could use to approach the story of menstrual justice …  this book is unapologetic, incredibly inviting, and feels like a fist bump from an army of people working to fight the same fight as I am. This book is wonderful. This book is needed. This book taught me to be proud because my period is bloody amazing.”