Pakistani society may not give women the rights, respect or safety they ask for, but it will never forget to give them a brown paper bag to furtively purchase sanitary pads. It doesn’t matter that entire aisle is on full display, or that the guy at the cash register will peer inside the Bag of Shame so he can charge you according to the brand or size, or that everyone knows by now that women menstruate. Society has conditioned everyone, but especially women, into believing that periods shouldn’t be spoken about, turning what is a very natural bodily function into a scandalous, dirty, shameful secret.
Take the fact that most women can’t even refer to periods without having to resort to some sort of subtle codename to let the women around them know that it’s ‘that time of the month’. Or that they are sometimes forced to wake up at sehri and offer prayers during Ramzan, even when on their period, just to keep up appearances in case their father or brother asks why they aren’t fasting. Or if you went to a co-ed school, taking a pad out of your bag to the bathroom required secret spy level stealth.
What is about periods that makes people so uncomfortable? Especially when you consider the fact that PMS is spoken about with no problems, and is used as an insult with great ease. A woman is angry at you? Oh she must be PMS-ing. Your wife is grumpy? Is it that time of the month? Your girlfriend is sad? It must be the hormones. Except, maybe it’s not? Maybe if men were less reluctant to actually understand how periods work (and how women are entirely capable of feeling angry, grumpy and sad without period hormones playing a role), we could progress further from the collective male understanding of menstruation revolving around how ‘it makes women crazy, yaar’.
But anyway, back to pads and the God awful brown bag. Don’t be mistaken, if a woman feels more comfortable carrying her pads in a brown paper bag, by all means, she should be able to do that. But the problem is when people expect you to do that. When they give you judgmental side glances if you opt to forego the bag. When the cashier decides for you and gives you a brown paper bag at checkout, even though you didn’t ask for it. Why are women expected to be ashamed or embarrassed of something that they have to go through every month?
Is it because it involves vaginas? And of course, our sexual repression will not let us think about vaginas and penises without immediately associating them with the sexual. But until we progress past this way of thinking, we won’t be able to talk about anything that has to do with the body. If mere existence is all it takes for people to think sexually, then we’re doomed. Just because menstrual blood comes out of vaginas, it becomes vulgar to talk about. Just like how a visible bra strap becomes a cause for moral crisis because it suggests that women have, God forbid, breasts! How dare she have breasts? How dare she acknowledge the existence of said breasts?
The importance of being able to talk about pads and periods isn’t just so that we don’t have to use brown paper bags at the grocery store next time. It’s more serious than that. The state of women’s health awareness in this country is already very concerning. If we can’t even talk about the female body or its functions, how can we spread awareness about all the ways to protect it? Maybe foregoing brown bags can be the first step towards putting away our discomfort with all things periods.
