Blood by Lawrence Hill Read Free Book Online

Globe and Mail reporter Stephanie Nolen caught the essence of this strange dynamic in an article that she wrote last year about a man in India who discovered that his wife was forced to use unsanitary and makeshift means to catch the flow of blood during her period. Arunachalam Muruganantham found his new wife sneaking around the house one day carrying old rags and newspaper. He asked her what was going on, and she brushed him off. When he insisted, she admitted that she was menstruating. He asked her why she wasn’t using sanitary napkins and she said that they couldn’t afford them. Muruganantham embarked on a long quest to develop an affordable sanitary napkin for Indian women, a process which included parking himself outside a medical school and asking female students about their periods, and walking around with a blood-filled goatskin strapped to his body, which was connected by means of a tube to his underwear. From time to time, he would squeeze the goatskin and force it to release blood, to see if the napkin he had made — and was wearing — would absorb the flow.
    Muruganantham’s efforts to invent the perfect — and affordable — sanitary pad were judged sufficiently insane to prompt his wife, mother, and sisters to move out. They came back after he won a prize from the Indian Institute of Technology for his invention of a tabletop machine capable of shredding cellulose fibre and shaping it into sanitary pads with a hydraulic press. Instead of trying to make a bundle of money by selling his invention to a company, he sold it at barely above cost to some rural Indian women who started production in a rented garage. The women who purchased the equipment now make the pad and go door to door explaining its use and sanitary qualities, and Muruganantham also delivers the machines to isolated mountain villages so that girls in schools can make their own pads and make some money in the process. As Nolen said, miraculously, in a country where men are not known for meddling in the monthly affairs of their women, Muruganantham has become known as the sanitary-napkin man.
    The American feminist and activist Gloria Steinem jokes about how different the world would look if it were men, instead of women, with menstrual cycles, in “If Men Could Menstruate,” an essay in her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions . To begin with, she says, “Men would brag about how long and how much.” In addition, she predicts, “Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (‘ men -struation’) as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat (‘You have to give blood to take blood’), occupy high political office (‘Can women be properly fierce without a monthly cycle governed by the planet Mars?’), be priests, ministers, God Himself (‘He gave this blood for our sins’), or rabbis (‘Without a monthly purge of impurities, women are unclean’).”
    These are but a few examples of how the bleeding that differentiates the genders gave rise to negative social stereotypes that still permeate our societal beliefs and values today. But sadly the divisive nature of blood does not end there.
    The necessity of access to safe and affordable methods of dealing with menstrual blood is not limited to developing nations. In 1980, epidemiologists began reporting cases of toxic shock syndrome related to the use of a super-absorbent Rely tampon that Procter & Gamble had manufactured for use in the United States. The tampon had been designed to contain a woman’s entire menstrual flow without leakage or replacement. The Rely tampon was meant to contain nearly twenty times its weight in blood, and to expand into the shape of a cup as it filled. The company recalled the product, but later it was demonstrated that the super-absorbent tampons of any manufacturer were linked to increased risk of menstrual toxic shock syndrome. TSS , as it is known, results from bacterial infection.