Menstruation

Half of the earth's population experiences menstruation at a certain point in her life. In different cultures, several products are used to manage the menses. In the west, the most known menstrual hygiene products are disposable sanitary pads and tampons. These products are bought in stores and companies such as the Kimberley Clark Company and Carefree profit from these commodities (Radosevic, 2015: 24; Newton: 2016: 172). Advertisements help these companies to sell their products and advertisers play with the feeling of shame in their publicity spots and even have been imposing this feeling upon women during the past centuries (Berkely, 1982; Radosevic, 2015). Further, the medicalization of the phenomenon increases the feeling of necessity of the product. Nonetheless, not only companies, but also many governments profit from the 'insecurities' of women (Lapekas, 2013). Recently, many activists have been questioning the role of the governments in the commodification of menstrual hygiene and the so-called 'tampon tax' (Crawford & Spivack, 2017). Even though many ecological and less expensive reusable menstrual hygiene products are on the market, these are less well-known and not many women use them. Advertisements of these products are less frequent and less visible than those of disposable products on which more is to earn (Bobel, 2006). It becomes clear that menstrual hygiene products are commodified by patriarchal societies. Until today many governments consider menstrual hygiene products as luxury products and many women still buy them, afraid of someone noticing their menses. The female body as well as the feelings of shame of being other than men or of not being hygienic and clean are commodified (Johnston-Robledo & Stubbs, 2012; Radosevic, 2015). Nevertheless, activists try to break taboos, to inform women, and to question policies.

First published in 1988, this volume redefined the anthropological study of menstrual customs. Examining cultures as diverse as long-house dwellers in North Borneo, African farmers, Welsh housewives, and postindustrial American workers, it challenged the previously widespread image of a universal "menstrual taboo" as well as the common assumption of universal female subordination that underlay it. Offering feminist perspectives on comparative gender politics and symbolism, the book has interested students and scholars in anthropology, women's studies, religion, and comparative health systems. Originally listed as a “Notable” book in Choice, it later won the first Most Enduring Edited Collection Prize, awarded by the Council for the Anthropology of Reproduction (a unit of the American Anthropological Association.). The book continues to be taught regularly around the world.

This paper has endeavored to find out the role of media to create awareness regarding female hygiene practices during menstruation cycle from the perspectives of females residing in both rural and urban areas of Bangladesh. Based on a review of the previous relevant literature, a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire was developed and used to conduct the survey among 200 respondents from four rural and urban areas of Bangladesh to collect primary data for realizing the objectives of this research. The research is descriptive in the manner that attempted to realize its key objective by conducting a comparative analysis of the data collected from the rural and urban respondents. By undertaking descriptive (mean) and enter-method regression analysis using SPSS 24.0, the findings from rural and urban respondents have been analyzed separately to identify the key modes of media playing crucial roles for creating awareness on female hygiene practices. However, after analyzing the secondary an...

The role of gonadal hormones on pain sensations was investigated in normally menstruating women ( n = 16) using the cold pressor test. Tolerance time, pain threshold, and pain intensity were examined once a week during a 4-wk period, and serum concentrations of 17β-estradiol and progesterone were determined at each test session, which were classified into the early follicular phase, late follicular phase, early luteal phase, and late luteal phase, as determined by the first day of menses and the actual hormone levels recorded. A group of men ( n = 10) of the same age interval was examined for comparison. The data show that pain threshold was reduced during the late luteal phase compared with the late follicular phase, and hormone analyses showed significant positive correlation between the progesterone concentration and lowered pain threshold and increasing pain intensity. Hormone analysis also showed an interaction between S-estradiol and S-progesterone on pain intensity, demonstra...

The anthropological literature on gender relations in Pacific Asia has tended to group ideas of menstrual pollution with sexual antagonism and the use of poisons and witchcraft by women against men in Melanesia, while the apparent absence of menstrual taboos, ...

This paper examines some of the traditional texts that deal with sexuality, birth control and childbirth in the orthodox Jewish tradition and presents the rules governing these areas. For instance, a married woman should avoid being alone with a male physician unless other people are in earshot and have access to the room. A husband and wife must separate during the woman's menses and for the first 7 days afterward. Contraception is permitted if childbearing would endanger a woman's life or health. Termination of pregnancy is also permitted to preserve a woman's health, including her mental health. During childbirth the health of the mother is primary and supercedes all other rules or laws, including those of Sabbath observance. In general, orthodox Jewish women try to live as much as possible within the framework of Halacha. These customs are examined as examples of the need for sensitivity to cultural norms that affect the behaviour of different ethnic groups.

Este libro articula poesía y fotografía e hilvana sus materiales gracias al protagonismo de un cuerpo que menstrúa. Se trata de veintiocho poemas que, secuenciados por la dinámica del ciclo menstrual, leen con perspectiva feminista la historia brasileña desde la irrupción colonial hasta la más urgente contemporaneidad. Los poemas sintonizan con fotografías en blanco y negro, a cargo de Sérgio Silva, que seleccionan partes del cuerpo de la poeta –los senos, la boca, las manos, la vulva– y que vemos intervenidas por hilos rojos y elementos metálicos. A su vez, Sangria es un film, una "serie de video-arte", en palabras de Romão, en el que más de cincuenta artistas performan los poemas trenzando diversos lenguajes, mientras la poeta da voz a sus versos a través del recitado y la declamación.

This study assesses the level of awareness of Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) and the prevalence of menstrual syndromes in college going women athletes and non athletes. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data on the respondents socioeconomic and physical activity profile, details of their menstrual cycle and awareness on PMS. The Menstrual Distress Questionnaire (MDQ) was incorporated in this to understand prevalence of menstrual syndrome across the different phases of menstruation. Forty two students in pre university from BMS College for Women, Bangalore, aged between 15-17 years were selected of which 30 were athletes and 12 were non-athletes. The results showed that none of the students except for one was aware about PMS, yet prevalence results showed that students had reported symptoms during all three phases of menstrual cycle. However, comparing results among athletes and non-athletes, it was seen that there was not much of a difference in symptoms reported during the Premenstrual and Intermenstrual phases, where as there was a prominent difference in Pain and Control reported during Menstrual phase. The study highlights the need to increase the awareness among students about menstruation and it also shows the importance of including physical activity in daily routine for a healthy lifestyle.

Proprioceptive training has been shown to reduce the incidence of ankle sprains in different sports. It can also improve rehabilitation after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries whether treated operatively or nonoperatively. Since ACL injuries lead to long absence from sports and are one of the main causes of permanent sports disability, it is essential to try to prevent them. In a prospective controlled study of 600 soccer players in 40 semiprofessional or amateur teams, we studied the possible preventive effect of a gradually increasing proprioceptive training on four different types of wobble-boards during three soccer seasons. Three hundred players were instructed to train 20 min per day with 5 different phases of increasing difficulty. The first phase consisted of balance training without any balance board; phase 2 of training on a rectangular balance board; phase 3 of training on a round board; phase 4 of training on a combined round and rectangular board; phase 5 of training on a so-called BABS board. A control group of 300 players from other, comparable teams trained “normally” and received no special balance training. Both groups were observed for three whole soccer seasons, and possible ACL lesions were diagnosed by clinical examination, KT-1000 measurements, magnetic resonance imaging or computed tomography, and arthroscopy. We found an incidence of 1.15 ACL injuries per team per year in the control group and 0.15 injuries per team per year in the proprioceptively trained group (P

A bio-psycho-social approach to the premenstrual syndrome suggests that cyclical hormonal changes are acknowledged and interpreted in light of the expectations and the attitudes acquired in the process of socialization. In this study, attitudes toward menstruation and premenstrual experiences of 229 Israeli students of different ethnic groups and gender role orientations were explored. The findings were consistent with previous reports: attitudes toward menstruation and premenstrual experiences were associated with exposure to premenstrual symptoms in women family members and negative messages during adolescence; respondents of a more traditional background perceived menstruation as relatively debilitating and bothersome but also a natural event and reported more severe experiences. However, models aimed at estimating the causal relationship indicated that attitudes toward menstruation depend on premenstrual experiences rather than predict them. The difficulties of investigating suc...

The Breaking the Silence on Menstruation campaign was an initiative of various women groups/organizations in Rwanda: Rwanda Association of University Women (RAUW), Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), National Youth Council (NYC), CARE Rwanda and PLAN Rwanda seeking to provide girls and women, who lack affordable and eco-friendly sanitary pads and menstrual health and hygiene education. RAUW in collaboration with SHE, won a project from the International Federation of University Women's Bina Roy Partnership in Development Program, and through this, funds were secured to carry out awareness programs

Practically every culture distinguishes between clean and unclean things, actions, and people. This is true for simple hygiene as well as for ritual or
religious purity. While in most cultures both men and women can become polluted, impurity is more often associated with women, especially during menstruation. Consequently, restrictions on menstruating women were imposed in a vast number of societies—both ancient and modern—including ancient Israel, where the Bible regarded all bodily emissions as defi ling and women were regulated by the niddah laws.
Throughout history, various societies have developed different ways of separating the pure and the impure, usually by imposing restrictions on the movement and behavior of the impure. The question of impurity, therefore, has a spatial dimension, and rules governing impurity had to be formulated in relation to space. So how were women and their families expected to follow such restrictions within the specific conditions of their settlements and houses?
This paper analyses this question within the context of Iron Age Israel, and demonstrates how this society separated the pure and the impure within the domestic context.

This article explores menstruation in the workplace in the context of a humanistic management approach which highlights the values of respect, dignity, and wellbeing at work. Increased public conversation on menstruation in recent years, supported by research showing the detrimental effects of menstrual stigma on women’s physical and mental health, point to a shift in consideration for women’s menstrual wellbeing. This paper is based on my research on the development and implementation of a ‘period policy’ at Coexist, a social enterprise in Bristol, UK, which I undertook between October 2016 and December 2017. The policy was co-designed by management and staff, and uses flexible working arrangements and contingency planning to allow women greater support when menstruating. I discuss the effects of the policy and suggest avenues for future research.

Chhaupadi is a form of menstrual seclusion practiced in Nepal in which women and girls are isolated during their menstrual cycles and follow numerous restrictions. The tradition dates back centuries and can have serious physical and mental health consequences. While the practice was criminalized in 2017 with fines and jail time, this legislative action comes after more than a decade of legal history, from an initial ban in 2006, to declaring it a form of violence against women in 2009, and finally, its criminalization in 2017. Exploring levels of awareness regarding the 2017 chhaupadi criminalization, perceptions of the legal penalties, and whether or not criminalization will lead to behavior change are imperative next steps for informing the development of evidence-based interventions targeting chhaupadi. In this qualitative investigation conducted in Kalikot district, six focus group discussions and 33 in-depth interviews were conducted with a total of 81 participants. School-going girls, girls who have dropped out of school before completing twelfth grade, mothers, fathers, teachers, health care providers, religious leaders, traditional healers, grandmothers and police participated in the study. The results indicate that criminalization is generally perceived as a positive step for initiating chhaupadi behavior change, and one-third of participants expressed that they plan to change their behaviors after learning that chhaupadi is punishable with fines and/or jail time. However, accurate information about the criminal code is extremely low and therefore interventions ensuring communities and law enforcement are informed of the criminalization and associated penalties are urgently needed. In addition, even after its criminalization, chhaupadi behavior change is anticipated to be gradual and is expected to require long-term interventions targeting social pressure associated with upholding the tradition and raising awareness via appropriate trainings, engaging the media, and beyond.

Against the backdrop of an unprecedented number of women deploying
in a new array of roles in the so-called "global war on terror" and
the official opening of combat arms units to women in the United
States military, menstruation has served as a key idiom in debates
about what it means for women to wage war. In this article, I explore
what public curiosity about and military anxieties over soldier menstruation
can tell us about the banal and bodily nature of women’s
militarization as a deeply affective, sensorial, and embodied process,
and the tensions these anxieties reveal within liberal promises of
a gender-integrated US military. Drawing on discourse analysis and
ethnographic interviews, I examine efforts within US military medicine
to hormonally regulate women soldiers’ menstrual cycles as a matter
of military operational concern, alongside public narratives by women
soldiers who deny the significance of menstruation to the work of
soldiering. I argue that both of these discourses enact a conflation
between womanhood and menstruation in the debate over women’s
role in and at war, in a manner that circumscribes the possibilities of
what we can apprehend – and feel – about war and soldiering as
gendered experience.

“Menstruation Across Cultures: A Historical Perspective” by Nithin Sridhar is an important book for several reasons, but I will mention only a few in this review. Instead of giving a chapter-by-chapter look at the key ideas from the book, my purpose and focus in this review is somewhat different. I wish to point out why I think this book must be read by all those interested in gender studies, and especially Indian women.

While speaking of some important points covered in the book, my main purpose is to highlight what I think are some of the main contributions of this book, in two key areas: a) menstruation related discourse in India, and b) connection between culturally grounded understanding of menstruation and a woman’s sense of identity and self-worth.

This article decodes the concept of God in Hinduism -on how the Supreme Brahman is perceived in five different forms of which idol worship at a temple is the easiest and meant for the community as a whole. As such rules and regulations for temple worship encompass restriction on women during menses. The only available scientific research on what happens inside a temple is recorded in this article. Based on the discovery of generation of negative ions in a temple, this article decodes the rationale behind the restriction on  women of menstruating age at Sabarimala.

This two-part series examines an often-overlooked aspect of Buddhist practice that was ubiquitous in late medieval and early modern China and Japan: cults to the Blood Bowl Sutra. According to the logic of this indigenous Chinese sutra, women are destined for a special hell composed of uterine blood, where they are to be punished for the pollution they produce during childbirth and/or menstruation. While cults to the Blood Bowl Sutra have mostly disappeared in modern times-and despite the fact that they have been largely forgotten, even by historians of East Asia-they were, by the 16th and 17th centuries, a common part of women's religious lives in both China and Japan. Cults to the Blood Bowl Sutra comprised a diverse set of practices that engaged concerns about female bodies, motherhood , filial piety, and suffering in hell. Part I focuses on the development of such cults in China, and Part II focuses on the cults' spread in Japan.

Anthropological literature reveals a widespread occurrence of ritual practices related to women’s cyclical bloodshedding, or menstruation, in cultures and religions throughout the world. Foremost among these are menarche (first menstruation) rituals; regular instances of ritual seclusion of menstruating women in special shelters, called “menstrual huts”; and ritual prohibitions and rules regarding food preparation, bathing, sexual contact with men, entrance to sacred places, etc., known as “menstrual taboos”. In order to convey the diversity of these rituals, this entry provides a few examples of each type of practice from a variety of cultures, including rituals in traditional settings, those prescribed by monotheistic religions and practices from New Age or Neopagan movements. Adopting a gender-sensitive approach, it highlights evolving interpretations of these rituals in terms of female subordination, power, agency, and creativity.

Among the parade of objects at the January 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. was a bobbing cluster of body-size tampons painted with dripping red rivulets and smirking, if not flirtatious, faces. And while the crowd responded to the bloody tampons with cheers and applause, such open celebration of menstruation and its attendant products is not typical in society. Examples of reclamation and positive appreciation of the female body and its “natural” effects, in particular menstrual blood, by contemporary artists finds its source in the feminist practice of Judy Chicago, notably her handmade lithograph Red Flag, 1971, and Menstruation Bathroom from Womanhouse, 1972. Chicago’s visualization of a taboo subject is often historicized, and thus ossified, as representative of a particular moment of 1970s “in-your-face” feminism. However, I argue that Chicago’s work constructively and subversively flows beyond historical containers, as demonstrated by the continued artistic interest by twenty-first century female artists who use menstrual blood as aesthetic material. Such employment of menstrual blood in contemporary performances, paintings, and photographs connects these artists and their work to Chicago via a discursive lineage where abject material, and specifically menstrual blood, is visually rendered as something politically and positively riotous.

Testosterone (T) and other androgens are incorporated into an increasingly wide array of human sexuality research, but there are a number of issues that can affect or confound research outcomes. This review addresses various methodological issues relevant to research design in human studies with T; unaddressed, these issues may introduce unwanted noise, error, or conceptual barriers to interpreting results. Topics covered are
(1) social and demographic factors (gender and sex; sexual orientations and sexual diversity; social/familial connections and
processes; social location variables), (2) biological rhythms (diurnal variation; seasonality; menstrual cycles; aging and menopause), (3) sample collection, handling, and storage (saliva
vs. blood; sialogogues, saliva, and tubes; sampling frequency,
timing, and context; shipping samples), (4) health, medical issues, and the body (hormonal contraceptives; medications and nicotine; health conditions and stress; body composition, weight, and exercise), and (5) incorporating multiple hormones. Detailing a comprehensive set of important issues and relevant empirical evidence, this review provides a starting point for best practices in human sexuality research with T and other androgens that may be especially useful for those new to hormone research.

**** Note: this is a preprint, please refer to final published version for page numbers

Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic work on menstruation and gynecological examinations and surgeries in Salvador, Brazil, this article explores the way that bodily boundaries are constituted through medical practices. Focusing on the re-enactment of the boundary between the inside and the outside of bodies, it analyzes that which is detached from bodies and, by falling away from them, contributes to their constitution. It then considers how the gynecological examination and vaginal plastic surgery can be used to speak of the problematic and contingent act of delimiting bodies from the inside out.

Keywords: abjection, bodily boundaries, Brazil, dys-appearance, gynecological examination, menstruation, plastic surgery

Esse artigo busca analisar a menstruação como um fenômeno biológico com dimensões sociais e culturais que influenciam diretamente a maneira como as mulheres lidam com o seu sangrar, sendo essa relação vinculada à autoestima e ao autoconhecimento das mulheres sobre si mesmas. O material de estudo constitui um vídeo publicado pelo canal DRelacionamentos e uma pesquisa virtual. A análise tem como objetivo entender qual a relação que atualmente as mulheres estabelecem com a menstruação.

Menstruation is a natural, physiological process, but it can be a challenging experience for millions of women around the world. In Nepal, a geographically small yet diverse country of 125 caste/ethnic groups, understanding how caste/ethnicity impacts menstrual health is critical for developing context-specific interventions to improve women’s health. A community-based, cross-sectional survey was conducted with
679 women and girls between the ages of 13–51 from the country’s most populous castes/ethnic groups. Forty eight percent had high menstrual knowledge, 60% had positive menstrual attitudes, and 59% had positive menstrual practices. Caste/ethnicity was a significant
predictor of menstrual knowledge and practices. The caste/ethnic groups Tarai/Madhesi/Other, Newar, Janajati, and Muslim all had statistically significant fewer odds of positive menstrual practices compared to Brahman/Chhetri (high caste groups), with Janajati
(indigenous ethnic groups) having the poorest outcomes. Despite Nepal making impressive advances in health, certain caste/ethnic groups have fallen behind in terms of menstrual health outcomes. Consequently,
blanket menstrual health programs may not be sufficient for improving menstrual knowledge and practices for all. Future programming should consider the use of local languages and context-specific content that incorporates indigenous beliefs, as well as cultivate partnerships with indigenous health organizations, and develop outcome indicators disaggregated by caste/ethnicity to ensure improved menstrual health
for all.