Women Are Live Tweeting Their Period, And It Is Hilarious

NEW DELHI: The fact that it is taboo, or at the very least socially awkward, to discuss “that time of the month” is ironic given that half the world will at some point or the other menstruate. Well, Twitter has decided to break the taboo, and the hashtag #LiveTweetYourPeriod is making this social upheaval possible.

As Jenna Wortham writes in the New York Times: “On the surface, this seems like little more than communal commiseration, but to me, it felt like something bigger: a microprotest against a modern paradox. Social media is saturated with images of hypersexualized women, but these are rarely considered as scandalous as content that dares to reveal how a woman’s body actually functions. The hashtag came to my attention a few weeks after Rupi Kaur, an artist and poet, posted images on Instagram of a woman, fully clothed, with what appear to be menstrual stains on her pants. Soon an Instagram user or moderator flagged it as objectionable, and the post was quietly deleted. Which is precisely what Kaur expected to happen. She reposted the images with a note about Instagram that included the phrase “Their patriarchy is leaking.”

These two campaigns exist in separate but parallel universes, each highlighting gender bias as it exists on social media. Why is it that Facebook users are mostly fine with certain kinds of imagery (bikini-clad spring breakers, say) but often offended by others (a mother breast-feeding her child)? To activists, such double standards reinforce the notion that women’s bodies are primarily sexual objects — and that very little has changed since the days of old media. Perhaps posting about taboo topics ­in public, right alongside the quotidian details of our lives, helps normalize, desexualize and destigmatize women’s reproductive health — a topic shrouded in shame for far too long.”

Agreed Wortham. Here are some of the best Tweets using the hashtag: