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“Houppert asserts that the menstrual hygiene industry reflects sexism and contributes to it by promoting negative attitudes about menstruation as something secret, which must be kept hidden and about which women are to feel ashamed. Her hypothesis is that this secrecy is psychologically disorienting and contributes to society's control over women.” (1622)
Leslie Hartley Gise, 2000. "The Curse: Confronting the Last Unmentionable Taboo: Menstruation." JAMA 283, (12): 1622-1623.

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American visual artist Jen Lewis creates conceptual feminist art by photographing specimens of her own menstrual blood. Lewis uses her art as a form of feminist empowerment and aims to challenge the stigma of menstruation.

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LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A 'period emoji' on mobile devices could help break the taboo of menstruation, according to an international child rights group, which is pushing for an icon to help highlight the stigma that girls experience when they menstruate.

Menstruation is still taboo in many countries around the world, where it's often considered embarrassing or shameful. Women refer to periods using some 5,000 euphemisms, such as "on the rag" and "Bloody Mary", a 2016 survey of 90,000 people in 190 countries found.

"Girls and women have told us about the embarrassment and shame they suffer when it's their period. We need to make it easier to talk about something that is part of everyday life," said Danny Vannucchi, Plan International's campaigns manager.

While there are symbols for avocado, a telescope, and even a unicorn, menstruation is not represented as an 'emoji', a small icon on smartphones and tablets commonly used to express emotions or physical things.

But that is something Plan International wants to change. The charity last week launched five 'period emojis' and invited the public to vote for their preferred icon. As of Monday, more than 15,000 people had voted, it said.

The winning design will be submitted to coding consortium Unicode for consideration, which distributes emojis across mobile devices.

"We're not saying that an emoji would solve all of these problems, but it will start a conversation, and raise awareness of the challenges women and girls face worldwide - and that can only be a good thing," Vannucchi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

He said issues related to reproduction and the sexual health of girls are often considered "dirty", so girls are forced to keep quiet about menstruation which adds to the taboo.

"It's completely normal, but in many settings there is still a false belief that menstruation is dirty and shameful," he said.

"These taboos can have a damaging impact on the lives of girls and adolescents, from missing school because they face bullying or unfair treatment, to causing infections due to a lack of menstrual hygiene education and products."

On any given day more than 800 million women between 15 and 49 have their period. However, globally 1.25 billion women do not have access to a toilet during menstruation, according to the charity WaterAid.

The United Nations estimates that due to a lack of facilities, one in 10 girls in Africa will miss school during their period and will eventually drop out of school as a result.

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advocacy groups / pressure groups / lobbies

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Charity calls for 'period emoji' to address taboo of menstruation

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LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A 'period emoji' on mobile devices could help break the taboo of menstruation, according to an international child rights group, which is pushing for an icon to help highlight the stigma that girls experience when they menstruate.

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Fu Yuanhui openly talks about her period affecting her performance.

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Fu Yuanhui openly talks about her period affecting her performance.

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The Chinese swimmer was very frank wen explaining why her performance wasn't up to her usual standard. Female athletes do not usually discuss how their periods affect their ability to compete. I have also included some articles responding to her interview.

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Fu Yuanhui Talks About Her Period (English Subs)

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This image was banned from Instagram due to it's depiction of menstrual blood. This raises another key issue about Instagram and the censorship of women's nipples. Instagram does not allow photos depicting women's nipples and have even removed photos of female children's nipples. Men's nipples however are perfectly acceptable on Instagram, as is men's blood. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/instagram-slammed-for-censoring-period-283123

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When Donald Trump said of journalist Megyn Kelly, "you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever", the American artist Sarah Levy responded by painting a portrait of him using her own menstrual blood.

Setting aside, (as if one could), the overt misogyny implicit in Trump's comments, his views amplify the anxiety the open body creates - the destabilisation of the intact body of the viewer, a momentary collapse of self.

Artistic freedom is given so as to encourage such exploration. Art operates as a laboratory for ideas, it can be radical, political and sometimes deeply confronting; no more so than when art confronts audiences with bodily fluids most often hidden from view. To paint with menstrual blood is a provocation. It asks that we see things differently, and presents us with what is usually unseen.

But not all blood is equal. When blood is spilled it is generally presumed to be male, frequently in the name of the nation, and spent in some heroic act or another - largely on foreign shores, commemorated but rarely seen. Blood has its place - contained, controlled and out of view.

When blood escapes the body or laboratory, it is particularly disturbing and unruly. We speak of spilt blood as contaminated, infected, impure. Controlled blood-letting is a symbol of masculinity; menstruation a sign of abjection, and gay men's blood is to be feared, to say nothing of the anxiety of intermingling blood between people, races and species. To work with blood can raise ethical issues, but is equally an opportunity to shed light on the source of many prejudices and misconceptions.

Read more: Explainer: what's actually in our blood?

The feminist art movement of the 1960s and 1970s took aim at these entrenched religious and societal norms, and presented audiences with menstrual blood: both as the subject of art works and the material with which artists worked. Feminist artworks that included blood acquired their potency because of its taboo status. Blood was dangerously out of place.

Before Tracey Emin's blood soaked tampon appeared in her Turner Prize nominated work My Bed, Judy Chicago produced Menstruation Bathroom as part of Womenshouse (Los Angeles, 1972) an iconic feminist art installation. The bathroom contained a rubbish bin with bloodstained sanitary pads and tampons as "unmistakeable marks of our animality". Carolee Schneeman's Blood Work Diary (New York, 1972) consisted of a series of bloodstained tissues blotted with blood from one menstrual cycle, as a response to a male partner's revulsion at the sight of menstrual blood.

These artists sought to make visible the quotidian blood spilling of which we do not speak, enacting the mantra of the feminist movement of the time: "the personal is political". As Germaine Greer famously said: "If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby". As we see from Levy's portrait of Trump, societies' taboos continue to imbue art using menstrual blood with threatening power.

A destabilising of self

The ability of the presence of blood and the open body to destabilise one's sense of self is often utilised by male artists to instil a sense of vulnerability. Franko B's performance work I Miss You, in the Tate's Turbine Hall (London, 2003), saw him naked with blood flowing from cuts to his arms and seeping into a canvas covered runway. Largely because of our long standing gendered perceptions of bodies and blood, when male artists bleed, both they and their work tend to be queered, as if "real men" do not bleed.

And so it was that the HIV-AIDS epidemic in western gay communities produced its own form of gendered crisis and diverse cultural and artistic expressions. The blood borne virus also fundamentally changed the way blood was viewed. If women's menstrual blood was considered taboo, gay men's blood was considered lethal.

Suddenly the metaphors of blood, pure and impure, clean and unclean, became frightening literal. The spectre of HIV-positive blood pervaded political and social conversations, and the mere sight of blood in association with the gay community set off hysterical reactions.

Read more: Restricting gay men from donating blood is discriminatory

The spectre of blood was ubiquitous during this period, yet ill-informed anxieties around the infection ensured that blood itself was largely absent in art. One exception was Ron Athey's performance piece, Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, performed at the Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis USA 1994).

Completely fictionalised accounts of the event circulated, with one report describing HIV-positive blood being thrown at the audience. Athey is HIV+, and blood did flow, but it was that of his HIV negative collaborator, Darryl Carlton-aka Divinity Fudge. The erroneous media reactions fuelled the psychic transmission of the virus, if not literally infecting others, at the very least, creating a fear that bodies might silently and secretly be contaminated by mere proximity.

Such fears persist, in spite of scientific knowledge that the virus can only be transmitted intravenously, through sharing needles or blood transfusions, and unprotected sex. It is these phobias that the German artist Basse Stittgen addresses when he creates objects and vessels out of blood products. He challenges audiences to consider whether they would drink out of, or even hold these objects if they were made of blood from HIV or Hepatitis positive donors.

Mixing bodily fluids is also taboo: Andres Serrano's photographs of semen and blood most notably made this connection between life and death in his Bodily Fluids series in the late 1980s.

After his son Lucas's birth, meanwhile, artist Mark Quinn created a sculpture out of the mother Georgia Byng's placenta. The work challenges us to consider where the mother and child separate, where bodies begin and end. Stelarc and Nina Sellers asked similar questions with their work Blender, which mixed both their blood and extracted fat.

But what of interspecies blood mingling? May the Horse Live in Me!, a collaborative project by Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin presents us with this very provocation. Over time, Laval-Jeantet built up an immunity to horse blood, sufficient to enable her to be injected with horse blood plasma as part of an experiment that they describe as a "foray into human/animal 'blood-sisterhood'."

This work can also be seen as a response to the hubris of the anthropocene, the implicit assumption that humans are something other than animal. Ultimately this seems to be the common thread in these artworks: each asks questions of the ways in which humans are gendered, categorised and deemed separate from animals and from each other.

An exhibition at the Science Gallery at the University of Melbourne, Blood: Attract and Repel, addresses our ambivalent attitudes to blood. Laval-Jeantet and Mangin's work is represented in it, as is Stittgen's Blood Objects.

The Hotham Street Ladies (a collective based in Australia, UK and Berlin) present in the show what might be considered as an hysterical homage to Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom. Vivid icing and confectionary is used to create menstrual murals in two toilet cubicles. There is no real blood this time but perhaps the work is all the more abject through its excess.

Blood is also absent in Irish artist John O'Shea's Black Market Pudding. He had hoped to produce a sausage using blood drawn from a living pig, but at the time of writing this is apparently a step too far for Australia, with no farmer willing to provide a pig to be bled.

The work has been produced elsewhere - highlighting how our industrial, legal and ethical frameworks make it easier to slaughter an animal than bleed one, but keep it alive.
Blood: Attract and Repel opens on August 2 and runs until October 5 at the Science Gallery at University of Melbourne.

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Spilling blood in art, a tale of tampons, Trump and taboos

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When Donald Trump said of journalist Megyn Kelly, "you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever", the American artist Sarah Levy responded by painting a portrait of him using her own menstrual blood.

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In response to Trump's comments about Megyn Kelly, American artist Sarah Levy painted this portrait of Trump using her own menstrual blood.

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Chinese swimming sensation Fu Yuanhui has earned plaudits back home for breaking the sporting taboo of discussing menstruation.

Fu, whose theatrical post-race interviews have transformed her into a national hero in China, made her remarks on Sunday after her team came in fourth place in the 4x100m medley relay.

"I don't think I performed very well today. I feel I let my teammates down," a visibly pained Fu told state-broadcaster CCTV in a brief poolside conversation following the race.

Asked whether she was suffering from stomach pains, the 20-year-old swimmer said her period had started the previous day. "It's because my period came yesterday, so I felt particularly tired - but this isn't an excuse, I still didn't swim well enough," she said.

Chinese sports fans used social media to praise Fu for breaking the silence surrounding the menstrual cycles of female athletes. Many said they had not realised it was possible for a woman to swim during her period. "Our Ms Fu dares to say anything," wrote one user of Weibo, China's Twitter.

"I really admire Fu Yuanhui for swimming while she was on her period - women can be affected during their periods, especially with period pain," wrote another, according to the BBC. "She felt guilty for coming fourth, but Fu Yuanhui we're still very proud of you," the fan added.

A third fan wrote: "It is a normal physiological phenomenon, so why can't we mention it? Fu Yuanhui is awesome!"

Eight decades after tampons first went on sale in the United States, a deep-rooted cultural resistance and inadequate sex education in China are blamed for the fact that only 2% of Chinese women use them, according to one recent study.

China's first domestically produced tampon - named Crimson Jade Cool - is set to go on sale soon with the businessman behind the initiative planning to target sport centres for sales.

Fu, who won a bronze medal in the 100m backstroke but is better known for her hilarious, over-the-top interviews, has proved a bright spot in a so far disappointing Olympics for China, whose athletes have claimed fewer gold medals than anticipated.

Fu's viral interviews - "I used all of my mystic energy!" she told one journalist to explain a strong performance - have earned her millions of social media followers and made her a national treasure virtually overnight.

Mark Dreyer, who is tracking China's Olympic fortunes on the China Sports Insider website , said Fu's popularity pointed to a healthy shift away from China's notorious obsession with "robotic" gold medal-winning athletes. "She's probably got more name recognition at this point than any of [China's gold medalists]," Dreyer said.

"People are more interested in the personality side of things and the individual side of things rather than, 'Here are 50 Chinese robots who are winning for their country and for their Party'," he added.
Additional reporting by Christy Yao Topics

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'It's because I had my period': swimmer Fu Yuanhui praised for breaking taboo

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Chinese swimming sensation Fu Yuanhui has earned plaudits back home for breaking the sporting taboo of discussing menstruation. Fu, whose theatrical post-race interviews have transformed her into a national hero in China, made her remarks on Sunday after her team came in fourth place in the 4x100m medley relay.

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'On the marathon course, sexism can be beaten. Where the stigma of a woman’s period is irrelevant, and we can re-write the rules as we choose. Where a woman's comfort supersedes that of the observer'

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'On the marathon course, sexism can be beaten. Where the stigma of a woman’s period is irrelevant, and we can re-write the rules as we choose. Where a woman's comfort supersedes that of the observer'

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Kiran Gandi ran the London marathon without a tampon to challenge the stigma of visible menstruation. While the act of sweating while running is acceptable, the act of bleeding (menstrual) blood was an act of rebellion and protest in 2015. For a woman, especially a woman in active wear, the thought of leaking menstrual blood is the pinnacle of embarrassment and shame. Gandi suggested that her comfort is more important than that of people watching her and she wanted to provoke a response but also to show that periods are a normal part of our bodily function.

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Runner who completed the London Marathon during her period without a tampon says she did it to 'break the stigma' after receiving support - and criticism - for her actions

Kiran Gandi, 26, a musician and Harvard graduate, ran London marathon

Ran with 'blood dripping down legs' for 'sisters who don't have tampons'

Her story has gone viral - with mixed social media reaction

A woman who ran the London marathon without a tampon to raise awareness for women who don't have access to sanitary products has sparked an online debate.

Kiran Gandi, 26, a musician and Harvard graduate, let her period flow freely as she ran around the route in the UK capital in April this year - and whilst some Twitter users have spoken out in support of her, others have been quick to criticise her actions.

Kiran, who toured with M.I.A. as their drummer this year, wrote about her experience on her personal site, explaining that 'if there's one person society won't f*** with, it's a marathon runner.'

Under a post titled Feminism, she wrote: 'I got my flow the night before and it was a total disaster but I didn't want to clean it up. It would have been way too uncomfortable to worry about a tampon for 26.2 miles.

'I thought, if there's one person society won't f**** with, it's a marathon runner. If there's one way to transcend oppression, it's to run a marathon in whatever way you want.'

Kiran, who ran with her two best friends to raise £3,800 ($6,000) for Breast Cancer Care, continued: 'On the marathon course, sexism can be beaten. Where the stigma of a woman's period is irrelevant, and we can re-write the rules as we choose. Where a woman's comfort supersedes that of the observer.

'I ran with blood dripping down my legs for sisters who don't have access to tampons and sisters who, despite cramping and pain, hide it away and pretend like it doesn't exist.

'I ran to say, it does exist, and we overcome it every day. The marathon was radical and absurd and bloody in ways I couldn't have imagined until the day of the race.'

The runner's story has gone viral and she says she is so grateful that 'so many people get it'.

Social media reaction to Kiran's story has, however, been mixed. One user, Demiurgic, wrote: 'You are one AWESOME woman! Thanks for boosting my confidence and clearing my equivocal mind.'

Nilima Achwal echoed her sentiments, writing: 'Whoa - kudos your courage and resilience.'

However, Bellyrina wrote: 'I don't know about you, but I don't find this feminist. Just unsanitary,' whilst Mark Byron added: 'I think people are already aware of periods and I think she is a vulgar capital V.'

Kiran, who believes the rules would be different if men had periods, added: 'It's intelligently oppressive to not have language to talk about it and call it out and engage with it. I really can't think of anything that's the equivalent for men, and for this reason, I believe it's a sexist situation.'

Kiran finished in 4:49:11 - and ran across the finishing line hand-in-hand with her pals, who she says didn't leave her side the entire way.

Speaking to Cosmopolitan about her experience, Kiran discussed how she felt meeting her brother and father on the finishing line, explaining that she didn't want them to feel awkward. But, she says, they 'didn't give an eff'.

'They were my family, that's their blood too. On a spiritual level, that's amazing. That connects men and women in a very amazing way. Instead of men getting grossed out by it or women being grossed out by their own bodies, we should move away from that,' she said.

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Woman, 26, ran marathon WITHOUT a tampon in

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Kiran Gandi, 26, a musician and Harvard graduate, ran London marathon Ran with 'blood dripping down legs' for 'sisters who don't have tampons' Her story has gone viral - with mixed social media reaction A woman who ran the London marathon without a tampon to raise awareness for women who don't have access to sanitary products has sparked an online debate.

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"Humans are uneasy with the fact that they leak." - Karen Houppert.

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"Humans are uneasy with the fact that they leak." - Karen Houppert.

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Our only interest is in protecting you. -- Tampax ad, 1972 "Welcome this new day for womanhood," Tampax Inc. announces on July 26, 1936, in its very first mass-market ad. Describing a brave new world, the company boasts "thousands of women have already tried Tampax and would no sooner go back to the old-fashioned napkin than they would to the methods in use fifteen years ago."

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This interesting mini documentary deals with two taboo/shame inducing issues - homelessness and menstruation. The women depicted in the video talk about their experience having periods without proper facilities or access to hygiene products. This issue is prevalent across the world in developed and developing countries. This video highlights the stigma of uncleanliness associated with menstruation and also feelings of shame experienced by these women.

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How Do Homeless Women Cope With Their Periods? | Bustle

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Trump was being interviewed about Fox News reporter Megyn Kelly who had several encounters with the President which did not cast him in a favourable light. Trump suggested that Kelly had her period when interviewing Trump as the reason for her negative questioning of him.

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Trump Suggests Megyn Kelly Was On Her Period

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Fu Yuanhui has just turned the airwaves red. The Chinese swimmer - known for her outspoken post-race interviews and amazing facial expressions - has gone viral after explaining the reason her team came fourth in the 4x100m relay at Rio 2016.

"I don't think I performed very well today. I feel I let my teammates down," 20-year-old Fu told broadcasters after they saw her crouched over in pain. "It's because my period came yesterday, so I felt particularly tired - but this isn't an excuse. I still didn't swim well enough".

This is not the only time an Olympian has analysed their performance post-event. Britain's Katarina Johnson-Thompson and Jess Ennis-Hill both said the crazy scheduling of the heptathlon contributed to their struggles in some of the events. Other athletes have spoken about injuries preventing them from doing their best, while others have questioned whether the facilities were up to scratch (green swimming pool anyone?)

Those comments have not gone viral. No one really bats an eyelid when an athlete talks in detail about a torn calf muscle or a snapped ligament. Most people don't create memes over an Olympian saying they've only had four hours sleep before competing.

But when a woman mentions her period? The world goes mad.

Twitter is currently awash with people praising Fu for her honesty, others trolling her for talking about the P word, and - worryingly - far too many people admitting they hadn't realised women could go swimming while menstruating. Yes really.

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Don't praise Olympic swimmer Fu Yuanhui for talking about her period - ignore her

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Fu Yuanhui has just turned the airwaves red. The Chinese swimmer - known for her outspoken post-race interviews and amazing facial expressions - has gone viral after explaining the reason her team came fourth in the 4x100m relay at Rio 2016. "I don't think I performed very well today.