In February 2018, Twitter lit up with selfies of stars of the Bollywood screen posing with an object typically kept hidden. And that was the point. Called the #PadManChallenge, camera-friendly celebrities stared straight into the lens while clutching a bright white menstrual pad . With each post came a short list of their peers who were then challenged to post a similar selfie. The challenge was initiated by Arunachalam Muruganantham, the celebrated inventor from Southern India who captured the hearts of journalists, filmmakers, and others who see in him an irresistible story of overcoming obstacles to reach an unlikely goal. In the late 1990s, Muruganantham, a humble school dropout from a village in the state of Tamil Nadu, invented a low-cost tabletop machine for making single-use pads. Refusing to use the machine to make his millions, he insisted on a modest business model by which he sells the unit to small NGOs and women’s self-help groups, primarily, though not exclusively, in India, enabling the establishment of microbusinesses.1 Press accounts vary, so it is difficult to capture an accurate number of how many of his machines are sold and where. In one account, he sold 4500 of his patented machines and more in as many as 19 countries (Baral 2018). In another, he sold 1300 machines in 27 Indian states, and exports them to “developing” countries all over the world (Think Change India 2017). Whatever the number, this unlikely hero is colorful, candid, and positively charming—and of course, as a man fixated on a so-called women’s issue, a magnet for global attention, including throughout the Global North. Muruganantham is covered widely in the Western press, including being chosen in 2014 as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.2
The #PadManChallenge was likely a clever publicity stunt as it began just days before the release of the Indian biopic loosely based on Muruganantham’s life and work. Titled Pad Man, directed and written by R. Balki and featuring Bollywood mega stars Akshay Kumar and Sonam Kapoor, it was a box office success. It cast the humble inventor a smasher of taboos and literally, a superhero. The trailer for the film opens with a shot of the NYC skyline with the tongue-in-cheek voice-over: “America has Superman, Batman and Spiderman. India has… Pad Man.”
Pad Man and the #PadManChallenge are pop cultural evidence that there is a cultural shift underfoot, even a movement, to “Make Menstruation Matter.” Increasing numbers of menstrual cycle researchers, advocates, activists, social entrepreneurs and a rising number of government officials are sounding this alliterative clarion call, and it is getting louder by the day. But the volume is recent, heralded by unprecedented global media, development, business, and scholarly interest in this topic steeped in centuries of stigma. A quick rundown of a few watershed moments will make this clear.
In April 2016, the popular US news weekly, Newsweek, made history when it published a cover story about menstruation. With the catchy title, “There Will Be Blood: Get over It” in huge white letters against a crimson background, a tampon (unused, of course) is pictured beneath the type. While Newsweek compellingly made the case that “The Fight to End Period Shaming Is Going Mainstream,” (Jones 2016) other high-circulation Western magazines, such as Cosmopolitan and The Atlantic, ran similarly robust features. Around the same time, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and Al Jazeera published stories on a variety of menstrual topics, including menstrual art,3 efforts to remove the sales tax on menstrual products, emerging menstrual care technologies such as “smart tampons” (no, I am not making this up), legislation requiring independent testing on menstrual care products, and arguments both for and against menstrual leave in the workplace.
Popular interest in menstruation continues to swell as indicated by a widely circulated 2017 story in The Guardian titled, “We’re Having a Menstrual Liberation: How Periods Got Woke” (Rador 2017).4 This fact became even more apparent when Meghan Markle and Prince Harry named the Myna Mahila Foundation, makers of menstrual pads and providers of menstrual health education in Mumbai’s slums, as one of the seven charities to receive donations made in honor of their Royal Wedding (Srivastava 2018). In response to their choice, no doubt the first of any British royal, social and conventional media alike were abuzz with praise for the progressive couple’s commitment to menstrual activism (see, e.g., Perabo and Weiss-Wolf 2018).
The mounting wave of interest in menstruation has reached the halls of law makers too. In the last few years, the national governments of India, Kenya, Uganda, Niger, and Senegal, among others, have approved national policies to improve how girls manage menstruation in schools. In 2017, Kenyan president Uhuru signed a law that requires government provision of free menstrual pads for schoolgirls . In that same week, the Menstrual Health Hub was launched to build connection and community among those working on issues of menstrual health and politics, a move that signaled the dizzying growth of the movement and the dire need for resource sharing and coordination. Within months of its founding, the Menstrual Health Hub listed more than 200 “diverse actors working on the topic of menstrual health around the world.” A year later, the number has swelled to 275 (mhhub.org). A harbinger of a movement growing a break-neck speed, it describes itself as
In March 2018, the Agreed Conclusions—the principal outcome of the annual UN’s Commission on the Status of Women—included the following language in its concrete recommendations for governments, intergovernmental bodies, and NGOs to be implemented at the international, national, regional, and local levels: “take steps to promote educational and health practices to foster a culture in which menstruation is recognized as healthy and natural and in which girls are not stigmatized on this basis” (UN Economic and Social Council 2018). The formal recognition of menstruation as a matter of global development is a massive step forward. In the same month, the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal began issuing free menstrual pads to schoolgirls (Dawkins 2018). And in August 2018, Scotland became the first country to provide free menstrual products to students at schools, colleges and universities (Yeginsu 2018).a global and interdisciplinary Community of Practice (CoP) for menstrual health actors and practitioners. The MH Hub seeks to overcome geographical and thematic barriers to help professionalize a fragmented field and strengthen collective impact at the local, regional and global level. (mhub.org)
On May 28, 2018, the fifth annual global Menstrual Hygiene Day was celebrated, logging a rise in events in more places and increased traditional media coverage and social media engagement than in the previous four years of the global awareness campaign. The day was marked through 450 events—concerts, workshops, parades, presentations, and rallies—in 70 countries and covered in 670 news articles including in major mainstream outlets like ABC News, Teen Vogue, BBC, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, The Huffington Post, Hindustan, and The Globe and Mail. Government engagement rose too, as evinced by Toronto mayor John Tory proclaiming May 28, 2018, “Menstrual Hygiene Day” (email communication with author) . Alongside and arguably due to increased media attention to menstruation, efforts have been underway in a number of countries to remove sales tax from menstrual products. For instance, just days after the 2018 Menstrual Hygiene Day , the Tanzanian government proposed to exempt value-added tax (VAT) on menstrual pads in 2018/19 financial year (Kamagi 2018).
Menstrual Activism Goes Big
All of these actions and many more, too numerous to list here, are part of what I began calling “menstrual activism” in the mid-2000s, a constellation of diverse efforts to resist the menstrual mandate of shame, secrecy, and silence (see Bobel 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008, 2010). What’s always been fascinating to me about menstrual activism is the way it is about blood, and so much more. The movement instigates us to radically rewrite the rules of gendered, raced, and classed embodiment, to imagine a world where bodies are not problems to be solved (or hidden or shamed) but instead, sites of power, pleasure, and potential. It is a crystal clear assertion that, in the words of poet and activist Sonya Renee Taylor, “the body is not an apology” (thebodyisnotanapology.com/) and part of the larger body positive movement that resists hegemonic standards of embodiment that value some bodies (the white, the thin, the able-bodied, the straight, the male) over others.
A movement has been defined as a series of organized activities in which efforts to change attitudes and direct and improve resources are both sustained and intentional (Jasper 2007); as such, menstrual activism qualifies as one—though one could quibble with the assertion that menstrual activism is very organized. This is changing. Today, a new form of menstrual activism is taking shape with the dawn of a new coordinated policy and legal arm of the movement—what activist Jennifer Weiss-Wolf (2017) calls menstrual equity—the “laws and policies that ensure menstrual products are safe and affordable and available for those who need them” as a necessary condition for menstruators to gain and sustain access to “a fully equitable and participatory society” (xvi). British activists have begun referring to their related efforts as the fight against “period poverty” (George 2017).
At the same time, menstrual activism is breathlessly proliferating in low- and middle-income countries , the so-called developing world, or what I refer to as the “Global South” in this book. The rapid rate of growth of menstrual activism has stunned even me, someone who has been tracking and cheering this heretofore little-known movement since 2001. Across this wi...