- Do not touch the pickle! The odour of a menstruating woman is bad for preservatives in such food.
- Do not step out of your room or get into the kitchen; and dare you touch food made for other family members.
- Do not bathe during your period.
- Do not wash your stained/unstained clothes in the open.
- Do not go to the temple.
- But worst of all – do not go to school.
Being asked not to touch pickle seems relatively benign, but plucking an adolescent girl out of school and denying her an education is dangerous.
Not only for her but the society we live in as well.
Twenty-three percent of girls in India are said to drop out of school once they hit menarche, while many others are estimated to miss about 50 days of school a year. The absurdity of such practices makes it seem like menstruation is pathological, not physiological.
But baseless beliefs are far from the only crippling aspect in the life of many menstruating women in rural India.
Conservative beliefs, weak finances, and the inaccessibility to clean products are the trinity of menstrual nightmares. One which rural Indian women, more than their urban counterparts, consider a way of life, sadly.
Right on top of an already dismal list are the lack of access and the unaffordability of sanitary products.
While using cloth is not unhygienic, washing and drying it in a dark room is. For such material to be used successfully, it has to be dried in sunlight. As mentioned earlier, washing clothes in the open is unacceptable. Most activities of menstruating women are shrouded in secrecy, and this is proof enough that many do not have this (absurd as it may sound) luxury.
A widely cited study conducted by A C Nielsen called ‘Sanitary Protection: Every woman’s health right’, reviewed and endorsed by the community development organisation Plan India, revealed that only 12% of India’s 355 million menstruating women use sanitary napkins.
Shocking alternatives include ashes and husk sand too, making incidences of reproductive tract infections much more common among such women.