I'm On My Period

A decade ago, we could say this only in a hushed whisper to a select group of girlfriends. Has anything changed today?

- Dhvani Solani

All through my teens, I suffered from something I call ‘period horror’. It included taking a sanitary napkin to the school washroom in an exceedingly discreet manner, and being appalled if it slipped out of my pocket and landed on the floor in full public view. It also involved making sure the wad was stuffed in a landfill-friendly plastic bag when being bought, calling it ‘chums’ so the world wouldn’t know you had your period because ‘Ew!’, and choosing hara-kiri over stained jeans if given a choice.

Having a period was embarrassing, gross, shameful. Period.

Cut to 2017. The predominantly all girl Grazia gang is animatedly discussing all things menstruation. It doesn’t matter that the predominantly all-male crew of an autocar magazine sitting next door can overhear every word. Confessions and horror stories spill out – one talks of how she used a cloth pad for years because store-bought ones were too expensive, another narrates her experience with a storekeeper who when questioned on why he was insisting on packing the sanitary napkins packet in an opaque bag offered a barrage of offensive comments, ranging from “You have no respect for our culture” to “Why parade what you are shameful about”. One speaks about how she still carries her tampon to the bathroom discreetly because she’s socially conditioned to do so, and another speaks of the horror of blood-stained clothes.

I started this story thinking that period talk is pretty normalised today. My male friends might joke about ‘that time of the month’, and while I do understand it doesn’t carry any misogynistic undertone, I also know that men are known to use this as a weapon too. I can ask to take a day off citing period cramps, but then again, I have a female boss.