Oscar 'Period' laureate shows how Indian men make women's lives difficult



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Young men who think that menstruation is a disease of older women and men who refuse to acknowledge the subject in public to men who stare at women trying to buy sanitary napkins at a neighborhood store , Period of Rayka Zehtabchi . End of the sentence skillfully reveals the true menstrual health challenge facing a majority of women in India. And the biggest challenge is the Indians, their inability and reluctance to tackle the subject.

The film that won the Oscar for the category "Best Short Documentary" highlights the concern shared by various health workers and women. human rights activists working at the grbadroots, trying to improve women's access to menstrual health products. The film punctuates interviews with women from a village in Uttar Pradesh and interviews with men from the same village, skillfully mapping the source of their problems.

It shows a group of young men agreeing that menstruation is a disease that women contract, then it pbades to a woman whose uncle rented her home to set up a unit for the manufacture of sanitary napkins at low cost. When the investigators ask the man what he thinks to be made at home, the man says, "Huggies." His niece, who seems to have facilitated the payment of the rent, refuses to confront the man about it. In another scene, a brave young woman who aspires to join the police says that she did not tell her father exactly what she does for work – she works with a manufacturing unit of buffers. She explains that it will be too difficult to explain what she does to her father and that she may not work at all there if she does not. is not convinced.

Suman, who works in a sanitary napkin manufacturing unit, told the filming crew learned that men were aware of the times and the fact that women would make sanitary napkins, but they do not would never speak in public, thanks to patriarchy.

Another man is telling the film that the women in the self-help group will make "notebooks" for the children. The lack of a common language on menstruation reminds viewers of this movie, pointing out that issues such as the GST on sanitary napkins that rage in social media are the least of the menstrual health problems in India.

During various interviews with HuffPost India activists and health workers revealed that the main reason that women in urban villages and slums do not use sanitary napkins relates to men who stumble at home. HuffPost India a nurse living in a poor migrant colony in Mongolpuri, on the outskirts of Delhi, said that although she insisted that her young girls use sanitary napkins, they often felt embarrbaded . She lives in a 200-square-foot house that she shares with six other people, including her husband, son, and son-in-law. She said that she often stuffed packets of low-cost sanitary napkins manufactured and sold by women in her neighborhood into cartons of clothes or other containers, but that many times, men have finished to find them by searching these boxes for other objects. things. "It's very shameful. They had to touch the tablets, "she told HuffPost India .

Sabbar Tausif, Program Manager at Plan India NGO, said that many women had given them free tablets because they did not know where Swati Bedekar, who runs Sakhi Pads in Ahmedabad, says that in the villages, men refuse to let women throw fully biodegradable tampons into compost containing a variety of rotting garbage. After disposing of used towels in empty lands or shrubs, cats and dogs tear them up, Jaideep Mondal, maker of Aakar Inventions, which makes biodegradable sanitary napkins, told HuffPost India . Zehtabchi's documentary features a woman who echoes Mondal's concerns and complains that the dogs she's encouraged often tear up towels torn hygienic, thus making the exercise "very embarrbading". that whenever an NGO undertakes sensitization campaigns in rural India, it is usually led by men. Goonj organizes awareness camps that invite men and women to participate and asks male health workers to explain the dangers of using dirty cloths.

The self-help group model of sanitary napkins can be riddled with problems that the film does not solve, but Period rightly claims that men should unlearn their taboos before women can learn menstrual hygiene.

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