In many traditional Indian families, the women are not allowed to many daily household tasks while menstruating. This includes cooking, cleaning, performing religious rituals, etc. In many cases they aren't allowed to enter certain parts of the home at all.

To me, that belief system has to change, and it is a gender based issue.

I grew with Indian parents and now I have two daughters. The thought of them growing up with these taboos and feelings about their own bodies is something I'm strongly against.

Watch the full ad for a spoof of every tampon commercial ever. They are absurd (basically the ad industry is in denial).

Maybe yours are different though.

I wouldn't be so quick to judge. If you're a woman in India and a strange man asks you to try something weird that could potentially harm your body, I think you have every right to be suspicious of that person.

this fatalistic selfishness isn't a gender based issue. It is, however, one of the corrosive elements of Indian culture that worries me

I agree that Indians are incredibly selfish in certain ways, especially when you look at their actions through the lens of western cultural practices, but this is probably not a good example of that.

"According to Sumathi Dharmalingam, a housewife who runs a napkin-making business based around the machine, rural women [snipped] have a devil-may-care attitude about their health. "When I caution them that they might have to have their uterus removed because of reproductive infections, they just say, 'So what? How long are we going to live anyway?'

She's basically asking these women to use napkins instead of "dirty rags, newspapers, dried leaves, or even ashes".

I'm looking at it through the lens of someone born in India, who has lived in India, whose parents still live in India, but who no longer does. It's certainly possible that I'm displaying some of the reverse-racism and cultural arrogance I've seen in other NRI / PIOs when discussing India.

As things stand, these women and all generations before them have been using rags. They really can't imagine why they need this new fangled thing called a napkin. Worse, it is very likely a choice between this new fangled thing they don't think they need, and having a bit less food tonight. In that context, it's obvious why they choose to go with the rag.

The point of the story is that yes, people should care about things like food, etc, before the environment. But at the same time, environmental degradation dramatically affects your ability to secure food, shelter, and safety. E.g. it is thought that the Indus River valley civilization declined because of ecological collapse. The costs of environmental degradation on human well-being are diffuse and often indirect, which means it's easy to completely discount them, whereas a rational analysis would factor them in fully into cost-benefit analyses.

This is particularly true at a time when clean water is becoming a crucial resource world-wide. The western world can afford high-tech solutions to clean up water, but the developing world cannot. For their own well-being, people in places like India would do well to be deadly-serious about keeping their water clean to begin with.

You might be surprised what the developing world can put together with electricity and a foot pedal.

I agree that it's fatalistic. But it's the opposite of egotistical and selfish. People with healthy egos generally care a lot about whether they will their lose organs, or their lives. The women in question apparently don't. From the article: 'So what? How long are we going to live anyway?'.

And maybe their lives suck so much that this attitude is understandable.

It's probably better to analyse this in terms of discounting rates (i.e. interest rates).