Why can't we talk about periods? | Jen Gunter

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2020

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"It shouldn't be an act of feminism to know how your body works," says gynecologist and author Jen Gunter. In this revelatory talk, she explains how menstrual shame silences and represses -- and leads to the spread of harmful misinformation and the mismanagement of pain. Declaring the era of the menstrual taboos over, she delivers a clear, much-needed lesson on the once-mysterious mechanics of the uterus.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features physician and author Jen Gunter, recorded live at TED Women 2019.
0:09.6	When I was a teen, I had terrible periods. I had crippling cramps. I leaked blood onto my clothes and onto my bedsheets, and I had period diarrhea.
0:23.9	And I had to miss school one to two days a month, and I remember sitting on the couch with my heating pads thinking, what's up with this?
0:31.7	When I ate food, I didn't leak saliva from my salivary glands. When I went for a walk, I didn't leak fluid from my knees,
0:39.9	joint fluid. Why was menstruation so different? I wanted answers to these questions, but there was no one for me to ask.
0:49.3	My mother knew nothing about menstruation, except that it was dirty and shameful, and I shouldn't talk about it.
0:55.1	I asked girlfriends, and everybody spoke in euphemisms. And finally, when I got the courage
1:01.8	to go to the doctor and talk about my heavy periods, I was told to eat liver. And when I went
1:10.4	to the drugstore to buy my menstrual products, my 48 pack of supermaxy pads,
1:17.6	back in the day when they were the size of a tissue box, each pad, you know what I'm talking about,
1:23.2	you have no idea how far absorbent technology has come.
1:28.5	I used to have to buy my menstrual products in the feminine hygiene aisle.
1:34.6	And I remember standing there thinking, well, why don't I buy toilet paper in the anal hygiene aisle?
1:40.3	Like, what's up with that? Why can't we talk about periods? And it's not about the blood,
1:47.2	as Freud would have you say, because if it were, there'd be an ear, nose and throat surgeon
1:52.6	up here right now talking about that taboos of nosebleeds, right? And it's not even about periods,
1:59.3	because otherwise, when we got rid of our toxic, shameful periods,
2:02.7	when we became menopausal, we'd be elevated to a higher social status.
2:13.7	It's just a patriarchal society is invested in oppressing women, and at different points in our lives, different things are used.
2:20.3	And menstruation is used during what we in medicine call the reproductive years.
2:24.3	It's been around since pretty much the beginning of time.
2:28.3	Many cultures thought that women could spoil crops or milk or wilt flowers,
	...

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