Accursed
Oh god. More of that cis privilege we rejoice in:
A schoolgirl in Kenya has taken her own life after allegedly being shamed in class for having her period and staining her uniform.
The 14-year-old’s mother said her daughter hanged herself after being humiliated by a teacher, Kenyan media reported.
Kenya passed a law a couple of years ago making sanitary pads free in schools, but not all schools have implemented it.
The girl’s mother said a teacher had called her “dirty” for soiling her uniform and ordered her to leave the class in Kabiangek, west of the capital Nairobi, last Friday.
“She had nothing to use as a pad. When the blood stained her clothes, she was told to leave the classroom and stand outside,” the mother was quoted as saying in Kenyan media.
She said her daughter came home and told her mother what had happened, but then when she went to fetch water she took her own life.
She was only 14, she was new to it. It’s all too easy to feel ashamed and embarrassed when you’re new to it.
In Kenya, as in other countries, many girls cannot afford sanitary products such as pads and tampons.
A UN report in 2014 said that one in 10 girls in sub-Saharan Africa missed school during their period.
Some girls reportedly lose 20% of their education for this reason, making them more likely to drop out of school altogether, the report said.
Isn’t that just fucking great.
Why do girls and women do this every month? Because their bodies are where human beings are made. All human beings throughout history were made in the bodies of female humans. Women are the source of human beings – yet they are also shamed and called dirty because of the very processes that enable that to happen. Menstrual blood isn’t Ew Gross Stuff, it’s the life support system for a fetus if the woman gets pregnant. Humans wouldn’t exist without it but girls are tormented for having it.
It’s not fair. None of it is fair.
“She was new to it.”
Yes she was, the poor child. One article I read about this says it was her “first time.” My first time brought horrific pain my mother didn’t care about because I had to get used to it. My brother ran to her because I “was sick,” and was told to leave me alone. Now I was “a woman” at age thirteen, and all that meant was pain, the possibility of getting pregnant, and not being mothered anymore. Had it happened to me at school, I know I would have wanted to die.
Laurel, I too was fortunate enough to begin at home. I thought I was dying. My mother threw a pad at me and I had to ask my older sister what it was and how to use it. My mother found it difficult to talk about because it was “dirty”.
In light of your bitterly ironic “cis privilege” introductory comment, I wonder in how many places your simple, straightforward, factual description of menstruation (which doesn’t mention or reference trans people at all) would be branded as “transphobic?”
Wait. (GC Epiphany number 327 occurs here)
“Which doesn’t mention or reference trans people at all.” Ay, there’s the rub. Without the manditory, obsequeous “inclusiveness” that demands the minimization and erasure of the reality of female biology, this is a big red flag. The mere unapologetic, unqualified account of the realities of the lives of girls and women (Newspeak=”menstuators”) is seen as a slap in the face of TIMs as it is a clear, honest description of the very things they can never be and never obtain. Sure, there will be a brief, perfunctory, pro forma nod to the existence of trans men, but we all know what it’s really about. How DARE such a passage refuse to downplay the exclusively female experience of menstruation and do so without some recognition of the needs and feelings of men! The failure to apologize for and euphemize that simple description is a Mortal Sin and constitutes Actual Violence.
iknklast @ 2, that is horrible. I’m glad you had a sister in the house.
My mother and I never talked about it either…until that day in the sixth grade when all the girls were herded into the library to watch Disney’s “Story of Menstruation” cartoon. I ran home almost in tears, praying to be told it wasn’t true. If not for that, I would have had no idea what was happening. This was in the late 1970s FFS!
Laurel – I had that “girl’s” film in 1970. It was not a Disney Cartoon, it was dry academics telling us what it meant to be a woman, and I didn’t understand any of it, least of all that I was going to bleed every month. That’s why I thought I was dying when it started.
One day in junior high in the 1950s: girls were sent to the library, boys to the gym for their respective film studies. Boys got a film on VD — not that it was clear [to me at least] what they were talking about, since the images were of soldiers and 1700s style banquets, cutting to men in white coats mumbling something about prophylaxis. Took me a while to figure out the connection or why the serving ladies all had low-cut dresses and all appeared drunk..
Yeah, loren, that sounds like my experience, too, only without the soldiers and the serving ladies. Just clinicians. Very concerned clinicians. Very concerned clinicians who wanted us not to have sex. I was 10. I wasn’t interested in having sex. I only sort of understood what sex was, and most of what I understood was wrong. This film didn’t help at all, and it certainly didn’t help with menstruating.
The main thing I remember is the boys lined up outside the classroom, faces pressed to the windows hoping to catch a glimpse of some naughty bits. I’m sure they were disappointed. There were no naughty bits on display.
loren and iknklast,
The sex ed classes at my school were probably fairly good, for the time, at least. For example, they taught that masturbation was healthy and normal — which was pretty progressive considering that even a decade later, Bill Clinton made his Surgeon General resign for suggesting just that. But even then, they split us up into boys and girls classrooms for about half of it, which really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I mean, boys should learn about women’s bodies in sex ed, and vice versa. Menstruation shouldn’t be treated as some vaguely shameful thing that is only to be whispered about among womenfolk. Girls should be taught that there’s no such thing as blue balls.
I could sort of see segregating the genders if the idea was that students would be less intimidated about asking questions without the opposite sex around, but that seems fairly naive: at least in the boys’ room, none of us were willing to ask any questions with or without girls present, and we knew damn well that any question we asked that was deemed embarrassing would be repeated for the girls’ benefit at the next recess or lunch break.
In the early 1980s, a few years after *Walt Disney Explained It All, I had a very good, very comprehensive sex ed course with both sexes attending. We were even told what to expect when we had our first OB/GYN visit, which was incredibly helpful. How the same school system could get it so wrong and then so right I do not know.
*Anyone interested in animation should give this a watch BTW–a lot of the animation is by Freddie Moore.