As a child I was often told to think before I speak, unfortunately no one taught the British parliament this important lesson. Every few months we hear a statement being made that both infuriates us and makes us want to double over laughing. This week it came courtesy of the British government and their decision to continue to tax tampons and pads as they are classified as “non-essential luxury items.”
I’ll give you a moment to collect yourself; I have to admit that when I first heard of this my brain kind of wobbled. As a woman in her twenties who’s been getting her period every month since she was 11 I can tell you first hand that absolutely nothing about having a period is luxurious. NOTHING! I couldn’t even guess how much money I’ve spent on tampons and pads over the last ten years, but I know for a fact that I will continue to shell out cold hard cash for something that happens every month to almost every woman in the world.
That’s what bothers me the most about this entire situation. More than half the world’s population are women, and they all have menstrual cycles. Sanitary items should be free! They should be giving these items away by the truck load, not profiting off our literal pain.
A few months ago a woman ran a marathon race without a tampon to try and stop the stigmatization of menstrual blood. It was extremely courageous of her to be so vulnerable because every day a woman is shamed for having a body that functions naturally. We’ve all had that feeling of having to go to the bathroom to change our tampon or pad and being so afraid of someone knowing that we were on our periods. The conditioning to this behavior needs to stop.
In recent months I’ve become quite aware of the lack of sanitary items in women’s shelters. Think about being homeless and finally being allowed to stay in a shelter. You’d expect to be fed, clothed, and generally provided with necessities, but sanitary items are seldom available. Many homeless women express the feeling of never being clean again. Now if we find leaking through our pants in gym class embarrassing, imagine the absolute mortification of walking around all week with blood stained pants. It’s a grim image, but its reality and we can’t afford to look away because it’s embarrassing or dirty.
What the mostly male British parliament was basically saying to billions of women was that they’ve no sympathy for what women go through physically. I feel as if they are looking at this decision to stop taxing sanitary items in a ridiculous fashion. The internet was flooded with women satirizing the notion of tampons being luxurious. A nice Bordeaux at the French restaurant while I wear my 100 percent pure cotton tampon necklace, why not?
Seriously though there are so many obstacles women face in this world, and being able obtain inexpensive or even free sanitary items shouldn't need to be so difficult.
