From the Interns: The Past, Present, and Future of Period Shame: A Casual Essay
Period shame has had a place in every menstruator’s life, from the locker room to the words on your grandma’s tongue. And yet this stigma serves no useful purpose at all. You may at this point be asking yourself: what even is period shame? Menstrual shame is the stigma and negative emotions associated with menstruation, a natural physiological function of the female human body. As Maureen C. McHugh states in her book The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, “our (negative) attitudes toward menstruation are neither natural, nor inherent.” The stigma surrounding menstruation…