When the broadcaster Sandi Toksvig was at university, her anthropology professor held up a picture of an ancient bone with 28 markings on it. “This,” Toksvig recounts her professor saying, “is alleged to be man’s first attempt at a calendar. Tell me, what man needs to know when 28 days have passed? I suspect that is women’s first attempt at a calendar.”
Humans have been menstruating since before we were chasing down sabre-toothed tigers, but somehow it has become something of a taboo subject in Western society. How could something so intrinsic to the human experience develop the shame that grew around menstruation?
“The Western worldview and the colonisation of indigenous populations has changed the narrative around periods, as they were seen to be dirty, an illness or whakamā,” says Kylie Matthews, co-founder of AWWA, a New Zealand company making ethical, organic period
