Last week, a man on Facebook decided to show his expertise on menstruation and educate menstruators on how to cut down on the costs of having a period. He outlined quite clearly how to do this and concluded by suggesting we ought to 'cut down on [our] starbucks venti frapps and stop whining'.
The thing that scares me most about this is that this lack of understanding is not uncommon. I don't blame this individual man for his ignorance, I blame the patriarchal society in which we live. A society established by men that allows, and even encourages, men to be ignorant about all aspects of health that are traditionally seen as 'women's problems'.
To address the ideas in his comment, anyone who experiences periods will know that a suggestion of using only seven tampons per cycle is not only preposterous but dangerous. Tampons must be changed at least every eight hours to avoid toxic shock syndrome which is very real and deadly. Along with this, not everyone uses tampons on their period and sometimes we use both tampons and pads. What's more, I don't know about you but I'd be pretty grateful if my period only came for nine months of the year, as this man suggests.
But there are other costs involved with having a period. The Huffington Post highlighted just some of the extra costs, on top of sanitary products, that we have during our periods. This includes heating pads (or time taken out of work to walk to reheat a heat pack), acne medication, sanitary products, chocolate (because having a period sucks), pain relief, new underwear, and birth control.
But there are other costs too, and as March is Endometriosis Awareness Month it would be remiss of me to not highlight this. Endometriosis affects one in ten menstruators and can only be diagnosed through a laparoscopy which can be a costly and time consuming operation.
But that is not the only problem with diagnosing endo. For many menstruators, a diagnosis takes years to get because our symptoms are dismissed and we are simply considered weak. We have to fight our doctors to get them to take our pain seriously. There is no cure for endometriosis and treatment for it can involve having multiple laparoscopies to remove and limit the problem. But it can lead to other costs later in life, with one in three endometriosis suffers having issues with fertility and struggling