Why can’t we talk about periods?
Ted Talk by Jen Gunter (2020)
Jen Gunter is a gynecologist and pain medicine physician. In her Ted Talk she asked why we can’t talk about periods. She talks about how growing up she always wanted to know why menstruation was the way it was and how she had no one to ask. Her mom didn’t really know anyone and said that it was dirty and shameful to talk about, her friends all talked in euphemisms, and her doctor just told her to eat liver to deal with her pain. She says that the reason that we can’t talk about periods isn’t because of the blood or the period itself, it's because patriarchal society is invested in oppressing women and the way they do that during the reproductive years is through menstruation. She says that many cultures thought that women could spoil crops and wilt flowers and that when religion came into existence the purity myths only made things worse for women. Gunter talks about how in the 1920s and 30s it was thought that women secreted menotoxin which would in fact wilt flowers and kill off crops. There was no diversity in the places where people (men) said this so there was no woman who could raise her hand and say no actually that doesn’t happen. Gunter asks how you are supposed to break these myths if you can’t actually talk about what’s happening to your body. Gunter says that the culture of shame is so effective that women can’t even share their own experiences.
I really liked this Ted Talk because everything that Jen Gunter talks about in relation to having to deal with periods is true. Growing up girls aren’t told a lot about their periods. It’s hard to find someone to talk to about it because no one really talks about it. Even when you’re older it’s still not something you really talk about, the most that gets said is how much it sucks and that’s pretty much it. No one really teaches you what is actually happening and why it’s happening, you just know that it happens once a month as long as you don’t get pregnant and you know that it’s something that you have to suffer through. She also talked about the pain of periods and how if you say something about the pain to a man they just dismiss it and say it’s nothing. Gunter shares that the pain isn’t actually nothing because the pressure in the uterus during menstruation is actually equal to the second stage of labor and pushing without pain relievers. She says that if more people knew that then they wouldn’t call women weak they would congratulate them on getting that far. She says that we shouldn’t call the pain normal because that is too easy to dismiss, instead we should call it typical. I loved the way she ended her talk by saying that, “it shouldn’t be an act of feminism to know how your body works” and that “it shouldn’t be an act of feminism to ask for help when you’re suffering.” Periods aren’t dirty or toxic and we should be able to talk openly about them and we can break the curse of not being able to talk about them with knowledge.
AB
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