College campaign aims to end period shame

Embarrassment

In China, sex and related topics such as menstrual health have been taboo for thousands of years.

Even today, menstruation is a sensitive subject that few people are willing to discuss openly. Many teenage girls are embarrassed by their early experiences of periods.

"A feeling of humiliation was common among my female classmates in high school. Many felt ashamed when they had their period. There were even pranksters, mostly boys, who played jokes on other people with sanitary napkins," Yang said.

He recalled an incident when he was a 14-year-old junior high school student. Some boys stole a sanitary napkin from a girl and stuck it on the blackboard before their new mathematics teacher, who had just graduated from a teachers' university, arrived in class.

"There was a burst of laugher when the teacher came in. Of course, she noticed the pad, but without saying anything, she took it off the board and began the class. The owner of the pad didn't attend class when she discovered it had been stolen," Yang said.

"Although the teacher eventually discovered the name of the person responsible, she didn't pursue the matter. Maybe she didn't know how to deal with it?"

He noted that it is now possible to discuss sex-related topics more openly in China and that people are slowly becoming more tolerant of the subject, mainly thanks to the internet and information widely available online.

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, China was home to 904 million netizens at the end of last year's first quarter, while the internet penetration rate was 64.5 percent, a rise of 5 percentage points from 2019.

Even so, Yang believes that there is still a long way to go.

"People's attitudes toward menstruation have hardly changed in recent decades. I think gender stereotypes are deeply rooted in our minds due to thousands of years of historical and social influences that are hard to shake," he said.

In July, the Maple Women's Psychological Counseling Center in Beijing published a survey in which almost 70 percent of respondents said they always hid sanitary towels if they had to carry them around.

Moreover, research released last month by Beijing Normal University showed that interviewees usually used synonyms to describe menstruation, and nearly half said they always packed sanitary products in nontransparent bags.

Yang believes the mutual help campaign is definitely a driving force to gradually eradicate the "shame" of menstruation.

"I'm pleased to see the topic spreading rapidly online, being discussed by lots of people and the media. The more it is talked about, the less sensitive it will be," he said.