Are disposable menstrual products liberating?

I have written on here before about how great menstrual cups are and my thoughts haven't changed.

I was really excited to be able to do a course on feminist theory this semester (POLS/PHIL 362 - do it if you ever get the chance) and even more excited to be able to write my final essay on any topic at all... Unsurprisingly I chose the topic of disposable menstrual products. It was really cool to be able to read and write about them in an academic setting. My essay explored various tensions in feminist thought relating to disposable products. Are the really liberating or are they a form of patriarchal regulation of our bodies? Can we talk about consumption only in terms of the end product or do we need to look more deeply at how our consumption fits into a global system of exploitation? Should menstrual activists reclaim menstruation as an essential feminine experience or seek to deconstruct gender categories altogether? (SPOILER: my answer to all these questions was the latter in each pair).

Anyway I'm not gonna post my whole essay on here but what follows is the speech I presented at the mini-conference we did the other night. It was a great way to end the semester, and super exciting to rant about this stuff to the 50 or so people who were there.

“Are disposable menstrual products liberating?” 

I have posed this as a question, because I think that the narrative that menstrual products are liberating is something that feminists really need to challenge.

By disposable menstrual products I mean pads and tampons. They seem totally normal to us today, but are actually a fairly recent invention. Cloth pads were the norm in Western countries until about the mid 20^th century. Washing them was time consuming and stigmatised work. Disposable pads and tampons were a luxury, which women had increased access to as they entered paid employment. The marketing of these products was heavily linked with ideals of freedom, hygiene and modernity.

Second-wave feminists generally accepted and even embraced this narrative. Judith Lorber explains this in her foreword to Chris Bobel’s book (more about this book below). She says, “for a second-wave feminist like me, whose early goal in life was to have a full-time career and a family at the same time, menstruation was to be minimized, managed and made invisible…. My generation gratefully seized on tampons and “the Pill” to accomplish the goal of making menstruation and birth control less of a bother.”

I think feminists need to interrogate this idea of liberation through consumption of disposable menstrual products. I don’t want to say that pads and tampons are always bad for everyone. But I do think that their monopoly on both the market and the discourse of menstruation creates and perpetuates patriarchal oppression of our bodies and is part of a fundamentally exploitative global capitalist system.

Let me explain. Menstruation is highly stigmatised. Studies have shown that periods are the thing that women hate the most about their bodies. It is even more stigmatised among menstruators who aren’t women, such as intersex people, genderqueer people, and transmen. This is because menstruation is coded as feminine and we live in a patriarchal society.

We live in a world where women’s bodies are problematic. We have a culture of concealment, secrecy, stigma, shame and objectification, so that menstrual products can be marketed as the solution to the problem. This meant that disposable sanitary products became, and are still, markers of modernity, class privilege and respectability. And menstruators have internalised this, self-surveilling and self-policing, spending money every month on disposable products so they can discretely “manage” their periods. Most of us don’t stop to ask why menstruation is a “problem” in the first place.

I love talking about menstrual cups to anyone who’ll listen and writing my essay was great cos it gave me an excuse to. For the uninitiated, they are reusable cups that last for up to 10 years. They are inserted like a tampon, and they collect menstrual fluid rather than absorbing it. I was explaining them to my dad a few weeks ago. He said, they sound great, why have I never heard of these before?

My answer was basically capitalism. There is a lot more profit to be made from something which needs to be bought every single month than something which can be used for 10 years.  As consumers, we think we have choice. Libra has 47 different products. But when the choice is between 47 different types of pads, liners and tampons, this choice is not actually a choice. It is constrained by the messages from these companies that disposable products are the only option. They do this through advertising, obviously. They also do it in more subtle ways. Menstrual product companies sponsor the educational materials that schools use, so only pads and tampons are mentioned. This severely constrains our choice.

We also have to question the global impacts of our consumption. Few of us stop to think where and how our pads and tampons are made. What ecosystems are being destroyed in order to produce the cotton they are made from? What workers are being exploited? Are they liberated by these disposable products? What about the toxic chemicals used to bleach them? Where do they come from? At what cost? What about the landfills, clogged up with the waste of 11,000 pads and tampons that the average menstruator uses in their lifetime?

Chris Bobel talks about radical menstruators in her book: New Blood: third wave feminism and the politics of menstruation (which is pretty much the best book on feminism I've ever read so have a look at it if you get the chance). These activists advance a third wave feminist critique of menstrual products which incorporates queer theory, anti-essentialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, de-colonisation and environmentalism. They reject the not only the narrative of menstruation as shameful, but also the narrative of menstruation as an essentially feminine, spiritual experience which unites all women. They see menstruation neither as a curse nor a gift, but rather a healthy bodily process which some people experience. They see menstruators not as a unified group of women, but as a diverse group of women and people who aren’t women, with diverse race, class, sexuality and gender identities.

Radical menstruators employ tactics like zines, radical cheerleading, humour, art, and workshops to spread their message. These activists use individual actions not just as self-empowerment, but as a way of challenging and dismantling these multiple and intersecting oppressions on a global scale.

What are the alternatives to disposable products? There are a few. Personally, I think menstrual cups are amazing, and I’m gonna shamelessly plug my friend’s business, green girl stuff. I realise though, the irony and the limitations of spending money on a product as a stance against capitalism. On the other hand, they are a massive improvement on disposable products since they are a one-off investment and not clogging landfills. Other options include making your own reusable pads, or buying them. Some people also use sea sponges as an alternative to tampons.

What does this mean for feminism as a whole? I think menstruation is one of the most under analysed topics in feminist theory, and this needs to change. We need to start writing about it, thinking about it, talking about it, and challenging the norms that have been constructed by patriarchy and capitalism.  I think taking back control over our periods is an important step in liberating our bodies, and I think refusing to hand money over to multi-national companies who are exploiting our insecurities and destroying the environment is an important stance against our broken economic system. Seeking to dismantle systems of oppression through individual actions of resistance makes the personal political which gets to the heart of what feminist theory and practice is about.