Who is Free to Bleed in America?

Today is Menstrual Hygiene Day. If you are an American, images and narratives of period poverty in the global south are probably coming to mind. We have been conditioned to believe that girls in Africa and Asia are the real victims of period poverty and require western intervention to improve their living conditions. 

While these thoughts may feel harmless, it is important to contextualize this day and its efforts outside of your first-world feminism. Missions to the global south under the guise of human rights have a long history of perpetuating western imperialism at the expense of the communities that need the supposed help. Furthermore, the West, but specifically the U.S, has zero grounds to play savior when period poverty is inextricably woven through the American experience.

The image of thin white women doing flips in Tampax commercials perpetuates the narrative that women in the U.S can afford to be empowered by their periods. On the contrary, nearly 23% of students are struggling to access period products, 16% have chosen period products over food or clothes due to the pandemic, and 51% have worn period products for longer than recommended. Menstrual hygiene and period poverty are our problems too. 

 Period poverty seeps through our institutions, from schools to prisons to detention centers, where menstruators are denied both the dignity and access to maintain their menstrual hygiene. These institutions are the hidden truth of America, where those who are not white or thin or rich suffer every month at the hands of the state. Period poverty, which impedes menstrual hygiene, results from an infrastructure that relies on keeping communities vulnerable on the minimal resources provided by the state. This is a form of gaslighting in which menstruators are led to feel grateful by these minor interventions, even though the state created the situation in which they had to choose between a pad or food in their stomach.

In 2019, it was revealed that migrant children in detention camps were being forced to bleed through their underwear because they were denied adequate sanitary products. One girl shared that she was never offered a shower during her 10-day detention and was only given one sanitary pad per day. This experience is not the result of a few bad apples. Detention centers were created to separate families at the most vulnerable times in their lives, detain them, humiliate them, and scare them. Denying menstruators the supplies to maintain their period is just another tool to deny migrants the human rights they deserve. 

It was also 2019 when ideas of free bleeding became popularized again in western media. Feminist media outlets encouraged the idea to willingly bleed through your clothes to combat period stigma and shame. This was followed by many spiritual interventions that suggested bleeding in your garden, having period ceremonies, and taking natural supplements while on your period. Suddenly, our ability to bleed was a superpower. 

Free bleeding is all about choice, the choice to resist a culture that believes that period blood should not be seen. But what are the implications of this choice when contextualized in the same country where menstruators are forced to bleed on themselves? How useful are practices like free bleeding into your garden when women in prisons face highly inflated prices for tampons that most cannot afford? Can we free bleed when menstruators are experiencing period poverty as carceral punishment? 

Ultimately, as long as periods are still used as grounds and material to humiliate, degrade, and dehumanize menstruators, no menstruators can bleed freely. So on this Menstrual Hygiene Day, I encourage us to continue fighting for menstrual hygiene around the globe and challenge how the United States is an active agent that forces period poverty and poor menstrual hygiene onto the most vulnerable menstruators. To eradicate period poverty and poor menstrual hygiene, we need to confront the institutions that thrive on its existence. And as an American, that starts with looking in the mirror. 

Blood on Their Hands

Her name was Breonna Taylor, and she was killed by the Louisiana Police Department while in bed with her boyfriend. 

Her name was Natalie Simms, and she was forced to watch her tampon dangle between the fingers on the hand of an agent of the state. She consented to them searching her car but never her body.  

Her name was Oluwatoyin Salua, and she was found dead after seeking refuge with a man that looked like her, that she marched for - a woman we wouldn’t have to mourn if men, both in uniforms and without, listened the first time. 

To be shot in your own bed; To have an officer possess the remains of your uterine lining; To be killed for not having a bed. While the police brutalize all marginalized bodies, they seem to acuminate special cruelty for women- in many cases because they know they can violate women in ways that can never be reciprocated. 

It is no coincidence that 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence or that many survivors don’t find asylum in a police department. The police, descendants of slave patrols, have always been tasked with the protection of property not humanity. When blackness and femaleness are commodified, people with those identities are subject to their jurisdiction. If a woman is property, you do not need her consent; If a black person is murdered, you are not a murderer; and if a black woman is found dead, there are no repercussions.

As a woman, a menstruator, and a Black person, I felt a part of me die when Breonna was killed, a part of me disappear when Natalie was violated, and a part of me retreat when Oluwatoyin was ignored. I was not consoled to hear that Natalie’s abuser was a woman or that Oluwatoyin’s abuser was Black, because they all heard no and kept going. And that hurts in a deeper way - my community lines are blurred or rather may not exist at all. Where do I go when other women, black people, and the state are all predicated on my demise? How do I exist?  

And then everyone asks for my empathy that they have never returned - Black men ask me to fight, white women ask me to approve, and the police ask me to respect. They make me feel guilty for even thinking about myself. But the truth is that my existence is a hole in the fabric they have tried to knit; where people are and embody just one thing. My proximity to womanhood, blackness, and menstruation was never imagined - and that is why I live in a constant state of fear, because people must create brutality for me that is as intricate as my existence.

And I am tired; tired of being asked to give the most while receiving the least; to speak the loudest for others that are silent for me; to love the hardest while being neglected. I refuse to be everything in a world that deems me nothing. So I commit myself to only myself in hopes to find some semblance of autonomy, worth, and happiness - so that I can look at a bed without crying, a tampon without cringing, a helping hand without fear. And my active choice to live rather than survive is a radical act in itself. 

Why Your Period Hates Capitalism

Most period rage in the U.S is about accessibility. There are protests about the tampon tax because 33 states do not deem menstrual products a necessity. There is a movement advocating for free and safe pads for inmates in federal prisons- facilities in which menstruators have reported vaginal infections, leaking, and price gouging of menstrual products. There is even support for menstrual leave which would allow workers paid time off from their jobs during their period. Throughout these movements, capitalism proves to be the obstacle to proper period care. 

Capitalism is an economic structure that relies on people being at the bottom of its economic ladder. In other words, in order for capitalism to work there needs to be poor people. And as long as we include period products in this system, there will always be people who cannot afford to manage their period. This, compounded with the reality that women in America are  35% more likely to live in poverty, reveals that capitalism does not have the infrastructure to support menstruators. 

Period brands have done what they can to try and bridge the gap between menstruation and capitalism, but there is only so much that can be done. Period positivity has become a popular marketing campaign to help menstruators feel empowered in their period management. The surge in new period brands has even allowed menstruators the element of choice, nurturing this pseudo feeling of empowerment. But the bottom line is that some people still can not afford these products. 

It is also worth exploring what it means that in dominant culture, periods are nearly always spoken about in relation to consumer goods. Capitalism is the buffer we use to talk about our periods- it is ok to publicly buy pads and tampons but it is not necessarily ok to talk about the actual blood without the intent to then go purchase something that can stop it. There is a reason most of us feel more comfortable asking a friend for a tampon than talking about blood staining our pants. And when period positivity is mentioned, it is strategically used to encourage us to buy a product. So what is period positivity without consumption? And is it sustainable outside of a capitalist framework? 

Our periods were not meant to be discussed through an economic lens, but capitalism has forced us to. It proves difficult to talk about periods holistically when there are people that have to choose between a pad or food to eat, because they cannot afford both. So the current rage at the inaccessibility in period care should also be addressed to capitalism. As long as we separate the two, we will continue to treat symptoms and avoid the source of the pain. 

For many of you reading this, you may feel like this does not apply to you. If you can afford to buy period management products once a month, why should you care. And to that my answer is that you have a biological obligation to care about other menstruators. As long as period products are commodified, capitalism will continue to make them less accessible, eventually to a point that even you are left on the outskirts. Capitalism makes all menstruators vulnerable because it dangles our ability to manage our health right in front us- far enough that we can reach it but never close enough to actually claim it.