Happy International Women’s Day!
Happy International Women’s Day, all!
International Women’s Day is such a tremendous day for all women everywhere and this year, I was interviewed about feminism, menstruation, and what I blog about here all the time by Renee over at Womanist Musings.
Here is an excerpt of the interview specifically about the name of this website and the natural, normal function of menstruation that so many people seem to have such a problem with:
Your blog is named Menstrual Poetry. What do you believe is the reason that women’s normal biological functions have been constructed as foul and what steps can we take to reclaim this as normal and natural?
Menstrual Poetry has received an extraordinary amount of negativity because of its name. I have had people say “Oh, you blog? What’s your domain name?” and when I tell them, they actually say that they will not go to the site because of its name. I have even had a woman tell me that no one will read what I have to say because of my website’s name. Of course after getting so much negative feedback, even from other women, I realized that the problem is not the name of my website, it is the fact that people are actually afraid of menstruation; even just the word itself bothers people to the point that they must immediately act out and degrade me for what I named my website and it is all because of woman-shaming.
Women have been trained to feel ashamed about something that is natural and it is so unfortunate that women continue to feel that way about their body and natural, normal occurrences in their bodies. As soon as a girl gets her first period, she is immediately thrown into the woman-shaming world that is carried on by men and even other women. We are told that menstruation makes us dirty and undesirable and if that wasn’t bad enough, we have to also be quiet about how insane that frame of mind is.
What keeps this line of thinking alive is advertising companies and the marketing of “feminine hygiene products.” Even that description–”Feminine hygiene products” is shameful to women because it is automatically making us believe that yes, we are dirty and our vaginas are disgusting and must be cleaned by using products thought up by and manufactured by men and no, I do not believe that is a coincidence. There are companies trying to sell a myriad of different products that we are brainwashed into thinking that we need such as douches and soap specifically made for the vagina and there are so many women blindly buying into the fact that they are dirty when what’s really dirty is the fact that there are people profiting off of the shame women have when it comes to their bodies and bodily functions. Companies that are selling pads and tampons are running commercials about how discreet their products are so that no one knows you have your period because I guess in the made-up world these companies live in, if someone knows you’re menstruating they immediately start screaming, flailing their arms about, and running away from you because there’s something very wrong with you.
It is believed that women must always present themselves as pristine and in most cases, it is because we need to find and keep a man and men cannot know that women even have a vagina, unless they are in it. In order to reclaim menstruation as something that is normal and natural, I believe that we need discussion. We need to speak openly and honestly about our periods and about our bodies and we need to discard the shame that we have been brainwashed into believing. I have always been very open about my body and when you think about it, a woman’s body is miraculous. First of all, we represent and give life—That is extraordinary! We really are goddesses and we have to not only know that, but truly believe in it because we have so much power and our bodies represent so much. It is unfortunate that women have been put in the closet of shame for so long and it is even more unfortunate that women are okay with passing along this line of thinking. We need open and honest discussions and we need to stop waiting for the permission to speak about it because the longer we keep silent about the shame of women, the longer it is going to go on and the more companies are going to continue putting out ads that brainwash even more women into believing that they are dirty.
Read the rest of this interview here.
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