“The rules are still seen by more than half of the French as a taboo or a shame”, regrets on franceinfo, Saturday May 28, international day of menstrual hygiene, Maud Leblon, director of the association Rules elementary which fights against menstrual precariousness. The association is organizing this weekend the 1st Sans embarrassment Festival in Paris in order to highlight the ecological challenges linked to menstruation and to inform on the perception of menstruation throughout history.
>> One in five women have already experienced menstrual poverty, according to a study
franceinfo: Nearly 500 towel and tampon dispensers have been installed in universities, out of the 1,500 promised by the government. Are you asking for this deployment to be accelerated and perhaps beyond the universities?
What we are asking for is to provide a solution to the two million women who are in a situation of menstrual precariousness in France. A large part concerns male and female students, but also precarious women, middle school and high school girls. What we want is a massive and free availability for all people who need it and therefore mainly in public places, accommodation centers and colleges, high schools, universities.
Are there other ways to help these women? More than one in ten students have already had to choose between period protection and basic necessities. How to help them beyond these distributors?
Indeed, there are other solutions, and in particular for female students, what we encourage is the use, the provision, of reusable protection. It is a solution to menstrual poverty and a more acceptable ecological solution. Afterwards, it’s a budget, so we try to make these products available, in partnership with companies that give them to us. We also try to inform and raise awareness about the use of these products, especially among women in precarious situations.
We come to this issue of gender equality in this case. These are constrained expenses, only for women, is it a question of equality?
It’s all about equality. The question of menstruation in itself is a question to be taken in a broader way since discrimination is not only about menstrual precariousness. They are also, for example, on the fact that the rules are still seen, for more than half of the French, as a taboo and as a shame. This is the barometer that we released on our website. Today, there are very concrete consequences on the lives of French men and women.
For example, one out of two young girls has already missed school because of her periods. It covers a lot of realities, menstrual precariousness, but also the fact that the infrastructures are not adapted to having your period. The diseases caused by menstruation are also sometimes very painful and sometimes prevent young girls from going to school and women from going to work.
Maud Leblon, director of the Basic rules associationat franceinfo
In our barometer, we measure the taboo in different strata of society and in the business world, it is really the maximum. We have 70% of French men and women who think that this is not the place to talk about periods. However, what we see is that it impacts the lives of women and therefore, obviously, their professional lives. For reasons of menstrual precariousness, women who cannot protect themselves obviously cannot go to work. For questions of pathologies, nearly 20% of women have a pathology related to menstruation. This can induce very intense pain that does not allow you to go to work. Today, a doctor cannot arrest a woman for reasons of pathological painful menstruation. Another problem too is that these illnesses are very poorly diagnosed today, there is considerable medical error. Endometriosis takes an average of seven years to have a precise diagnosis.
You are organizing this festival “Sans embarrassment” for the first time in Paris on the climatic challenges linked to periods and on the perception of periods throughout history. Today, many period products are not reusable?
The more global challenge of this festival is precisely to break the taboo, to talk about the rules and to talk about them by linking them to subjects of everyday life because the rules of the life of 15 million of people in France. So we have this festival for two days at the Pavillon des Canals in the 19th arrondissement. It discusses rules and ecology, rules and history, rules and parenthood and sexuality. Indeed, on the subject of the rules of ecology, it is a subject that is close to our hearts since disposable protections are not very ecological. Moreover, the composition of these products is still not regulated. So this is also a subject that is close to my heart and we hope that the decree that should regulate this will be released soon. We are trying to address these subjects to move them forward since it is largely unthought of and this means that we are perhaps a little behind on the issue.