I will never forget the first time I encountered menstruation. The fear I felt as the first drops of blood left my body, the intense pain I experienced, all of it hit me at once, without any warning that my body was going through a process of change. I went to my mother carrying a feeling mixed with fear and guilt. I did not know how to tell her, and stranger still, I did not know what to call it.
When I told my mother, she handled the matter with complete calm. She explained it as though she had expected me to already know that my body was going through a natural process.
She brought me a folded cloth and told me to use it and to eat warm foods. When I asked, “Why am I bleeding and why does my body hurt?” she said: “You have become ill, just like all the other girls who become ill at a certain age.”
I thought to myself that perhaps all of us girls fall sick and feel unwell after a certain age, and that we all share this condition. But I was still curious, and I asked: “What kind of illness?” She said: “An illness that signals a girl’s coming of age. You will experience it every month.”
That was all my mother told me. She explained how to take care of myself, mentioned that I could use sanitary pads in addition to cloth, and spoke briefly about diet during menstruation. I learned the finer details from my sister. She is older than me, and she told me more about the process: what I should do and what I should avoid.
The thing my mother emphasized most was that I must never speak about my period in front of my father, because it is shameful and I should feel embarrassed for even saying the word. From that moment on, that mindset took root in me. And not only in me. My friends and the girls I knew also felt ashamed to speak of menstruation aloud. We believed it must be something deeply embarrassing. We grew up in an environment where menstruation is treated as a source of shame, even though everyone knows that girls experience it.
We first encountered the word “menstruation” tucked between the pages of books taught at the mosque exclusively to girls, never to boys. A female teacher delivered those lessons; the community considered it shameful and sinful for a man to teach them. We never spoke of menstruation in front of men at home either.
At school, when the biology topic of reproduction began, the boys were sent out of the classroom and the subject was taught only to the girls, to the point where even buying sanitary pads always carried that same sense of shame.
But the question is: why are those books never taught to boys? Why, when a topic related to the female body comes up, are boys expelled from the room? Why should boys not know that girls typically experience menstruation every month after puberty? Why are boys subtly led to believe that girls should be ashamed of this, and why do we girls internalize that shame?
Menstruation is a natural part of human biology. Boys need to understand what it is and why it happens so that this knowledge can become the foundation for mutual respect and understanding. When boys are kept ignorant of the subject, menstruation becomes a “women’s secret,” and that silence is never broken.
In contrast, a boy’s circumcision in the family is celebrated with music and festivity. The community sees it as a sign of the boy’s natural development and treats it as something entirely ordinary. Meanwhile, the girl in that same household experiences shame and humiliation alongside her first period. Words like chatal (dirty, filthy), napak (ritually impure), and murdar (defiled, a term also used for carrion) are used to make girls feel bad about themselves, and when the period ends, people say: “You are pak now,” meaning clean, which frames that blood as a mark of impurity.
Menstruation should be treated as a sign of health, something natural and normal. Yet here, it remains a taboo, wrapped in silence. We must not allow this taboo to continue. We must break this silence and refuse to pass this decayed mindset on to the next generation. It is our collective social responsibility, men and women alike, to understand menstruation and to shatter this cycle of shame and silence. This is part of our struggle for equality.
You can read the Persian version of this story here:
روند طبیعی یا «راز زنانه»؟ چرا برای پسران درباره قاعدهگی آموزش داده نمیشود؟
