When a girl enters puberty, she is forced to restrict herself so much while on her period.
She can’t enter a temple, she can’t touch a pickle container, she can’t touch religious plants and trees and whatnot, and we girls follow them without even questioning them. Shouldn’t we question them? How can someone who is menstruating destroy a plant or upset the taste of a pickle?
Is there any logic?
And these practices are not just being followed in rural areas but also in well-developed and well-educated urban areas. Where is our all education going? What are we absorbing from our education or the degrees if we are following these taboos in the 21st century too? Are we just getting modern with our dressing sense or lifestyle and not with our mentality?
We should ask these questions to ourselves before blindly following taboos around menstruation. Menstruation or periods are not a thing to be ashamed of, this is a natural biological phenomenon. We should be proud of it, we are supposed to bleed.
A girl who is bleeding should be taken care of because she goes through physical as well as mental pain.
Millions of girls still have no access to sanitary pads. They use a cloth or soil or ash to soak up periods, they skip their schools and workplaces. This is how we are thinking to be a developed nation, where girls don’t even have access to sanitary pads, where we are ashamed of a natural phenomenon. Are we even aware of how it may affect a girl’s health? Are we even aware of how a mother’s health can affect her baby’s health? No, because we don’t speak about it, we find it so bad that we hide it.
Isn’t a thing to be ashamed of? Think about it.
We need to understand that these taboos and hypocrisies can be changed only if we start speaking about it and only if we start questioning them.