Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

by Rose George

Over 70 percent of the 747 women and girls surveyed during the Yatra’s travels had known nothing about periods before they began them because their mothers and grandmothers had told them nothing.27 During one of the Yatra stops, I meet Neelam, a fourteen-year-old girl whose mother had died of breast cancer. (She calls it “something rotten in the breast.”) When she started menstruating, she thought it was cancer, because who was there to tell her differently? Nearly a quarter of the MHM tent visitors also said that menstrual blood was dirty. This belief is not unusual. A survey by WaterAid in Iran found that nearly half of Iranian girls and women think that menstruation is a disease.28 In some cultures—Afghanistan, some Jewish traditions—the acceptable reaction to a girl’s first period is to slap her across the face, either as a punishment, because the blood is interpreted as a sign that the girl has had sex, or as a discouragement, so that a slapped girl will not immediately go and have sex with a boy, propelled by her powerful puberty like a jet stream toward sin.