Effects Of Period Shaming

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In today’s society, both women and men are under constant pressure to look a certain way. Yet, it appears that over the course of history women have been the main victims of society’s pressure to feel and look in a specific way about their bodies. Nowadays, when there’s shaming for everything such as, fat, skinny, beauty, and slut shaming, we encounter period shaming. Of all things, menstruation is a natural, biological process that every woman experiences over the course of roughly, forty years, and yet it is one of society’s oldest taboos. I cannot help to wonder and question, whether if if the situation was involving men, would there be so much shame about menstruation? And would it be socially accepted? Overall, the purpose of this paper …show more content…

As foolish as it may sound, periods are not socially accepted, and they are often associated with shame and embarrassment. As women we’ve come a long way, from fighting for voting rights to access to education, and the last thing one would want to encounter in the twentieth century is menstrual scrutiny. Period shaming is a real issue, regardless of what critics may say. Once a girl gets her period for the first time, the first thing she is told by her mother is to be discrete, and to be careful not to let boys see her sanitary products. We grow up with the idea that periods are not be discuss, and we often go to extreme ends trying to hide our sanitary products from the rest of the …show more content…

Would society have the same need to shame periods or would it embrace it as what it is, a natural thing? In a 1978 satire for Ms. magazine, Gloria Steinem answered the question that so many women have asked: “What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? The answer is clear menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much.” Why can it be the same for women? No matter the time period, it appears that society will never fully accept menstruation as something that should be freely talked about. It does make you wonder if period shaming exists because of gender. It’s no secret that women around the world are still seen as second class citizens, and the fact that period shaming is an actual issue suggests that women are under constant pressure from

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