As of this week, educational and public institutions in Scotland must provide free menstrual items. This is how you want to counteract the so-called period poverty. Germany also showed good will in 2019, when Finance Minister Olaf Scholz reduced VAT for period products from 19 to seven percent. Unfortunately, no long-term success, because manufacturers and drugstore chains immediately raised the prices again.
In Spain, on the other hand, a completely different debate is currently taking place: Should women who suffer from particularly severe pain during their period have at least one statutory, paid sick day per month? The government thinks yes. And in May presented a corresponding bill for menstrual leave. This has been common practice in non-European countries such as Japan since 1947. This is also the case in South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Zambia and China.
A vacation that really isn’t one
Abdominal cramps, dizziness, headaches and weakness: for many women, these symptoms are frequent side effects of their menstrual period. In every tenth woman, the pain is so severe that she cannot cope with her everyday life as usual for days – endometriosis is often suspected. The lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus, which can cause severe menstrual pain. Those affected told me that they sometimes vomited from the pain or even fainted.
Endometriosis is diagnosed far too rarely because periods are still taboo and because many sufferers consider the pain to be normal – and do not know how the period and its side effects turn out for others. Quite a few drag themselves to work or school with painkillers. Women burden their bodies with hormones from the birth control pill at an early age in order to be able to function. Everyone else does it too. That a colleague takes time off “because she’s on her period” is the exception. When in doubt, women prefer to deny their symptoms and use “stomach ache” as the reason for their absence. Why actually?
Periods are still taboo
The Roman scholar Pliny wrote that the “bloody woman” spoiled crops and killed bees; “if she touches the wine, it turns into vinegar”, milk also turns sour. As late as the early 20th century, women in French refineries were forbidden to enter a factory during their period. Otherwise the sugar would turn black. And the Viennese doctor Béla Schick believed that he had recognized that his flowers had only withered because the maid had had her period – that was in 1919. Anyone who thinks that almost 100 years later we would have renounced such stigmata is wrong.
Tampons are still exchanged in offices like illicit drugs. Menstrual blood is still blue in advertisements, which makes it appear less threatening and more sterile. And not a few men are more ashamed of the sentence “I’m on my period”. At school I once had a lesson with a trainee teacher who had a bloodstain on her pants. Whenever she turned to the board, everyone started giggling. After class, a student enlightened her. That day she only walked through the hallways with her sweater pulled down.
Women are ashamed of their periods because men have decided they should be. Periods have always been seen as proof of woman’s imperfections and her supposed abnormality from the patriarchal standard – man. How little we talk about periods today is also an indication that we are far from an enlightened society. Something primally feminine is belittled and stigmatized. The man is the norm. And since his reproductive system is comparatively simple, in the eyes of society, woman’s should be simple too—or at least pretend it is.
Menstrual leave would be a lever of change
Addressing this reality politically could bring about fundamental changes. Menstrual leave could become the legal lever for removing the taboo on menstruation, in that female realities of life find their way into the law. Women who go to work with severe menstrual pain out of shame and fear of failure would realize that they don’t have to – and that they don’t have to pretend that they are made up of an illness. They would learn that in a male-dominated workplace, the menstrual phenomenon is a legitimate reason to stay at home.
Incidentally, the female menstrual cycle and diseases such as endometriosis are still largely unexplored. New drugs are usually tested on men because of the hormone constant. Women’s bodies often react completely differently to hormonal fluctuations. There are five times more studies on erectile dysfunction in men than on premenstrual syndrome. And this despite the fact that the male disorder is comparatively much less common. If the period were recognized politically, this could also put pressure on pharmaceutical companies to finally step up their research.
Doesn’t such a law harm women too?
It is also clear that a female employee who has the option of more unpaid days can be more expensive than a male colleague. Here one could have to deal with the fear that women could experience new forms of discrimination in the labor market. Or even that, if in doubt, women would not even be hired in order to protect companies from financial losses.
After the USA, China and Japan, Germany has the highest gross domestic product in the world. Not entirely insignificant are certain virtues that Germans are said to have: diligence, discipline and a certain willingness to make sacrifices for the employer. Even illness rarely seems to have an impact on the latter: 47 percent of men stated in a survey that they went to work despite illness. Presenteeism is even more common among women at 56 percent. It seems unlikely that the introduction of a menstrual leave would replace the exaggerated sense of duty with sudden absences. A menstruation-related economic slump is therefore rather absurd.
In Germany, unlike in Spain, for example, there is something called continued payment of wages in the event of illness: If you suffer heavily from your menstruation, you can stay at home with us and be paid. But menstruation is not a disease – and is therefore treated even less like one.
The reality of the labor market shows once again that it was largely made by men for men. Here, too, it becomes clear how far-reaching the debate about men making decisions about women’s bodies actually is. The U.S. Supreme Court’s overturned landmark abortion ruling, Roe v. Wade, is just the tip of the iceberg. If we reject a menstrual leave with reference to the fact that women would have to experience new discrimination when they are hired, we will go in circles. In the end, it would again be men in positions of power who decide how to deal with the female body.
Equality and equality are not synonyms
There are two ways to reconcile period complaints and the world of work. Either you continue as before and act as if the complaints do not exist. Or the world of work meets the reality of female life, although a menstrual vacation would be a step in the right direction.
Female and male bodies have different requirements. Women have a menstrual cycle to give birth to children. Anyone who claims that a day off because of menstrual cramps makes women look weak is holding that the female reproductive system is inherently a weakness and is still applying male standards. However, equality does not mean an adjustment of the female to the male norm, but the establishment of conditions that are adapted to the requirements of everyone. Mentioning period pain as a reason for being away from work shouldn’t be associated with shame and fear. Statutory menstrual leave can pave the way for this.
In addition, politics would show that taboos surrounding the period are a thing of the past – and that it is time to further explore the once fabled period. Incidentally, Béla Schick’s theory was refuted in 1958. After all, for 64 years, Western medicine has agreed: menstrual blood does not wither flowers.