Such myths abound globally, especially in rural environments. Worse myths exist around tampons--that a woman who uses a tampon is no longer a virgin. The implications of this in more rural societies are staggering, as young women can lose marital prospects or even be killed.
What impressed me most about his work was the lengths he went to in order to understand the problems the women were facing. That "football uterus" made him an outcast and he was rejected, which is not wholly unlike how menstrual women were treated in his village. He really got the full "customer" experience.
His work will also greatly help those women who have severe menstrual bleeding problems, in which they bleed non-stop for weeks (or months or, sadly, years) at a time. Not only are they outcasts in their communities, but even children will pelt them with rocks. It's profoundly sad.
It might sound trite, but we hear about the man who built the Taj Mahal for his beloved wife. Look at how much he is revered! Now consider what this man has done out of love for his wife--he has far eclipsed even that magnificent structure.
Lest someone believe this is a belief held only in rural areas, let it be clear that ideas like this are incredibly common in not-so-rural places like in the US. It's usually accompanied by some equally ridiculous beliefs about what virginity is in the first place (protip: it's about having sex for the first time, not about whether the woman bleeds or how "tight" anything is), hard to find comprehensive and unbiased education, the total lack of knowledge of or misinformation concerning alternatives to pads and tampons (reusables, cups), and straight up shaming and misinformation about birth control usage. The big difference between the poorer and the richer is that honor killings, genital mutilation, and whatnot are far less common for the latter.
I love what this guy did for his wife and other women in the same situation, but there's no shortage of similar problems for women elsewhere and I wonder if there will be something revolutionary on that front too any time soon. I've been considering going to med school and see if I can eventually merge my interest in that and tech at the same time to do something here but that's a long term iffy goal, and surely there are already others interested in the same thing too.
I'm pretty lucky to have had reasonable and educated parents that were willing to tell me (or let me discover) all I wanted to know about these things when I was 10. But it feels like at least once a week if not daily I discover a teen or a preteen or even an adult woman asking basic questions on one of the women-focused communities I spend my time in. I wish I could help them. :(
Coincidentally, the family structure of the west has rotted since the sexual revolution of the 1960s[2]. Maybe if all those damaged children of divorce had a say in the matter we'd return to traditional morality and shaming of sex outside of marriage. The highest value of society shouldn't be doing whatever feels good regardless of the consequences.
[1] https://twitter.com/Witch_Hammer/status/435979358348378112/p...
[2] http://dalrock.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/u-s-historical-livin...
Of course, it's preferable to choose the right person to marry and settle down with in the first place, so that divorce isn't even on the table. This takes careful introspection and maturity. How does forcing people to get married before they even find out if they are sexually compatible help? How does tying an important life decision to irrational biological instincts help people choose sensibly, so they can have a happy life?
>Maybe if all those damaged children of divorce had a say in the matter we'd return to traditional morality and shaming of sex outside of marriage
Traditional morality? How traditional? Which era do you think had superior morals? 50 years ago, when racism and sexism were common? A hundred years ago, when women couldn't vote? 150 years ago, when brother fought brother over the right to keep slaves?
Perhaps the family structure is just as rotten as it always was but now we don't lobotomise our depressed wives, pile them up with valium and beat our kids to shut up about it.
It's no longer acceptable to put up with shit and abuse and unhappiness is the greatest thing that has happened to the western world.
"Over the past two decades, the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed. One in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four."
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/a-glut-of-antidepre...
Single parent families are a big part of the increasing economic stratification between rich and poor, and I expect our amorality will bear even worse fruits as time goes on.
Whilst you might be right that our amorality will bear worse fruits, the status quo prior to this wasn't any better ergo morality and the stable family isn't necessarily better, just different.
The difference is purely that people don't suffer in silence now. This in itself is a wonderful freedom that we all deserve.
Would you have preferred she stayed with the man she impulsively married and had children in a loveless marriage?
There are several confounding variables affecting this correlation, notably the fact that people who marry as virgins are much more likely to be practicing Christians (the data set is of US women).
I've never heard of this happening in the US at all, never mind being "incredibly common". Evidence?
I also grew up in LA and not in the middle of some super conservative area, but my girlfriends used to freak the hell out when they needed to dip into my stash during emergencies and all they found were tampons. Sex ed until I took the high school edition didn't help much there either. It was only into high school/college that tampons were way more commonly used. Today I still have a mix of tampons and pads in my bathroom for anyone that needs it.
I don't have an explicit "tampon virgin" story to share right now, but here's one I saved from reddit a while ago that made me gag: http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/utzu0/ladie...
There's also some terrible stories in this link shared with me on irc that made me almost have an asthma attack laughing earlier today: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1zinku/sexed_teac...
For the other stuff...idk. I hang out in /r/twoxsex and used to hang out on the VaginaPagina LJ community and read the hell out of Scarleteen among other resources. It's a bit self selecting, but there's a lot of myths that get busted often. One I can think of - I started hormonal birth control really early because I had very heavy+painful periods with iron deficiency anemia (like, passing out in the middle of the street bad) and my parents and I went through a couple different doctors that were all judgmental about a 13-14 year old on the pill. I eventually just went to Planned Parenthood for gynecology needs (amazing people!) and they were all understanding and hush hush because parents of other women would sometimes illegally pester them for more information. So there's the "young teen/woman on birth control must be having sex and not need it for anything else" bullshit right there. Another one: right now I have an IUD, and everyone feels the need to tell me about the one friend of a friend story about a uterine perforation - legitimately a risk, but not like it's an inevitability for everyone using the IUD. There's also the twist on the tampon virginity that involves the menstrual cup. I also like to talk about skipping periods since I used to do it for a few years, and so. many. people. think it's a terrible thing to do. Meanwhile every doctor I had since going to Planned Parenthood thought it was a good thing to do, and this year for the first time in ~14 years since hitting puberty I finally have normal levels of iron without making an effort to supplement it. It's pretty wild. So much of it is so everyday if you spend enough time around frustrated women that I almost forget that these are really big problems.
>I also grew up in LA and not in the middle of some super conservative area
>So much of it is so everyday if you spend enough time around frustrated women
I grew up in a fundamentalist conservative family in the midwest who believed the earth was 5,000 years old. Even we thought the "tampons kill your virginity" thing was ludicrous. I can believe it's a problem in the third world, but suggesting it's a common modern day belief in a first world country like America seems a bit hard to believe.
(A lot of religious people are still weird about the pill, though.)
A few teachers in my high school took it upon themselves to provide a sort of underground sex-ed for some of the girls who couldn't get parental permission for the official classes.
There was a fairly large Pentacostal group at my high school (you may recognize them as guys dressed like 1920s farmers and girls with long hair and all denim floor length skirts) and this group of teachers were a virtual life-line for those girls. [1] [2]
1 - To get an idea of what the mindset is read this page and the comments http://www.themodestmomblog.com/2012/07/why-i-wear-skirts-al... and then meditate on why women growing up in this have a terrible lack of knowledge and misunderstandings about their bodies.
2 - And another post on similar, but from somebody who escaped from it all http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2013/06/how-i-u...
Jesus disagrees with that, as these people would learn if they ever actually read their holy text.
1) Have you read the Christian holy text? I don't expect you to have read everything, but if you're going to make the claim that you did, you should have at least read the New Testament and the Pentateuch.
2) Could you please explain, in your own words, what the New Testament says about the laws presented in the Old Testament? Specifically, I'd love to know how you interpret Mark 2, Acts 10, Acts 15, and the book of Galatians, especially Galatians 2. Considering that Jesus himself didn't obey all of the Jewish civil and ritual laws (see Mark 2) yet proclaimed himself to be sinless, on what basis do you claim that Jesus teaches that Christians should obey the civil and ritual laws?
3) Isn't it a little bit arrogant to make a specious claim, thus demonstrating that you don't understand the Christian bible, then immediately accuse Christians of not reading their own holy book?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_Early_Moder...
It is laid out in very expressive form, if a bit long, in the Humanae Vitae Encyclical Letter by Pope Paul VI. If you don't wish to read the whole text, lookup points 12 and 14.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/docume...
"It does not, moreover, cease to be legitimate even when, for reasons independent of their will, it is foreseen to be infertile."
Insofar as your claim "can't be dissociated from breeding" can be constructed as a correct claim, it requires understanding that to mean it cannot generally be actively sought to be dissociated from breeding, but even that is incompletely accurate as (per paragraph 16) "If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained."
(The position laid in Humanae Vitae has often been criticized for being somewhat incoherent, which isn't really all that surprising given its history. See, e.g., [1])
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifical_Commission_on_Birth_...
LOL. Might want to give their religion's source material a read.
If you generalize a bit, you see that things went down hill since the protestants tried to reform Christianity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation , also, what I call "american brand C." is all a radicalized descendent of protestant reformation), had some mixed good and bad philosophical ideas mixed in with "faith", but mainly managed to take themselves waaaaaaay too seriously!
Mind it, I'm an atheist myself, but C. in not that harmful if not taken too far and it's sometimes good for humor ...now if only people could manage to also take Islam this lightly and look more at its funny sides :)
No; actually, it sounds like the sort of ignorance and stereotyping that people generally accuse religion of generating.
Unfortunately yes, and it isn't just in India. Many religions (if the relevant magic texts are followed literally and/or followed by the more aggressive interpretations) consider menstruating women to be a curse upon the world to be shunned until they get their shit together and stop all that bleeding nonsense.
I've seen educated folks doing this as well, so, sadly yes. It is true. Most women follow it because their mothers/sisters have been doing it. Since it is so common, people tend to accept these superstitions more easily.
If as stated in this article in these regions during menstruation:
1) The woman uses dirt, sand, ash and rags which are never sterilized but just reused month after month.
2) 70% of all pregnancy related medical issues can be tied back to this lack of hygene
Then its not unreasonable to say that the women are unclean in this period and should not have contact with the village water supply... its actually good sense.
> ... its actually good sense.
Just as surgeons learned to sterilize themselves and their equipment once they had a scientific understanding of infection, we now have lots of scientific understanding of human menstruation and cleanliness. We should therefor look upon those that insist that women be treated as "unclean" and kept away from the village water supply and temple the same way we'd view a surgeon that insisted that there was no need to wash up before operating.
traditionally it was the pig rolls around in its own feces, and smells bad, and folks seem to get sick from its meat...
the menstruation situation, its bloody, it smells bad, and the women seem to be in pain when they have it... maybe we should not have them handling or washing their clothing and rags in the communal drinking water does not seem like an irrational conclusion.
It seems pretty rational to me...
You also failed to explain why only women are "unclean" in this scenario, since men and animals are also covered in dirt and germs when they bathe. Wouldn't all people and animals be "unclean" then? Seems like the "pretty rational" behavior of keeping women out of the water fails to account for "unclean" men and animals as well.
Please explain.
I really doubt that they'd let a guy bleeding out everywhere do much of anything either. On a fundamental level, blood has a strong association with injury and sickness for what I think should be obvious reasons.
Certainly, these are crazy and superstitious, but given the realities of the times they come from, many of them were a net benefit to their rural society (or have minimal impact) - which is how they've survived to this day.
We have better knowledge now, and we should embrace it, but someone isn't necessarily stupid for following these rules.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#Rape_statistic...
Hey don't you see any reason for a victim of rape to not report her/his aggression? Once you find one or two, think about how they may influence the results in the US and in India. Does the comparison hold?
You can play blind if you want, don't try to convince others. Your statistics cannot be used for international comparisons.
And unreported rapes will be higher in India - much higher - than Botswana (92.9), Panama (28.3), Jamaica (24.4), Belize (6.7) because?
"Your statistics cannot be used for international comparisons." Glad I was able to bask in your unabashed superiority, testos. Btw, they are not 'my' statistics, which show that Canada has several degrees higher rape incidents that go 'unreported, or which are not recorded' than USA. That data point was left in the comment just for your argument.
It's good to quantify things but you need to understand the limitations of the figures.
Every religion has elaborate rules to oppress woman. FYI, the Hebrew Bible has all the same stuff. (So I read in The Year of Living Biblically.)
It's a question of "how literally does society obey those rules?" Will Americans who use the Bible to justify their bigotry against gay people ... also agree to lock up Sarah Palin for five days/month? Not so far.
"Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak" -- 1 Corinthians 14:34.
And clerical celibacy is also out:
"A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife" -- 1 Timothy 3:2.
2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition
But just discrimination, like trying to stop them marrying someone they love, even in a purely civil ceremony which objectively speaking is none of our damn business -- why, that's just dandy.
There is an active agenda attempting to legally force people to alter their actions to match others beliefs, "persecution" you might call it. Except it's not against those who have sex outside marriage it's against Christians - people who claim to uphold liberty of conscience simply will not allow Christians to express their views on marriage.
Marriage, in Christian terms and historically, is about creating community cohesion in order to provide a firm foundation on which to support the upbringing of children.
No matter how you legally alter the definition of marriage homosexual sexual union doesn't produce children.
All sexual activity outside of marriage is considered sinful within orthodox Christianity based on New Testament exegesis.
Christianity [generally] thus considers that homosexual sex is sinful in the same way as adultery or other pre- or extra-marital sexual activity.
Because you disagree with this analysis and it's foundational axioms doesn't mean you're being persecuted - whether you're an adulterer, a sexual idolater or whatever. It is sinful, you may peacefully respond to that however you like.
FWIW purity laws, ritual uncleanliness, sacrifices and such all ended with the New Covenant. It's a corollary to the very fundamentals of Christian theology; if you don't understand it then you probably have never read the NT and probably have no idea what Christianity is about.
Persecution occurs when the spouse dies, and her partner is deprived of any part of her estate.
Persecution occurs when we bestow a host of tax benefits upon married couples, but only if they are of the "correct" genders.
Persecution occurs when gay couples are denied corporate health insurance benefits automatically conferred to straight couples.
And persecution occurs when bigots justify these things by saying that gay couples don't "produce children".
Thank you for illustrating my point so vividly.
That must be why you never hear anyone objecting to gay marriage any more.
[/sarc]
Note that in earlier times getting water in certain region might mean traveling for miles and then bringing water home, which could be pretty heavy. Same is true for cooking, an Indian joint family could be very big (20/25 members). And cooking for the whole family in open fire is not an easy feat either. So most of household work in a big joint family could be extremely strenuous. Some of these traditions let the woman avoid strenuous work during the mensuration.
Though I am speculating here, some of the tradition indeed could be meant for the well being of the woman. It may not be very relevant in the modern world though.
Arunachalam Muruganantham is a hero. I use that word in its full magnitude. Since I am now an expert on the matter, having read the entire article, I'll speculate on what motivates this man:
- Grit. Crazy amounts of grit. The article is full of good quotes, but my favorite is what he said after being abandoned by his mother:
"It was a problem for me," he says. "I had to cook my own food."
- Humility combined with hunger:
"Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future."
"Every time he comes to know something new, he wants to know everything about it," [his wife] says.
- Love of humanity, on some level at least:
"Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty - everything happens because of ignorance."
As an aside, I LOVE the picture of his wife and daughter toward the end. This one photograph lends better context to the story than all the others combined. I know a single picture means nothing, but the look in his daughter's eyes makes me think she'll inherit something of her dad's baddassness.
And as another aside, bloody god-damn fucking hell, are the following bits really true?
There are still many taboos around menstruation in India. Women can't visit temples or public places, they're not allowed to cook or touch the water supply - essentially they are considered untouchable.
There are also myths and fears surrounding the use of sanitary pads - that women who use them will go blind, for example, or will never get married.