Reading: Kissling, Elizabeth Arveda (2006) Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation

• “In spite of all the social, political and economic gains women made in the twentieth century, taboos still limit women’s activities and public communication about menstruation…menstruation is either an illness to be managed or a hygienic crisis to be cleaned up and hidden.”

• “Femcare ads have long emphasized the importance of secrecy; both menstruation and menstrual products must be concealed.”

• “One must keep menstruation concealed, to prevent one’s carefully constructed front of femininity from being damaged by the taint of menstrual pollution.”

• “”One of the obligations that women have in a culture that sexually objectifies their bodies is to conceal the biological functioning of their bodies” asserts Tomi-Ann Roberts (2004)”

• “Within the current cultural logic of late capitalism, a woman’s relationship to her menstrual cycle is largely defined through consumer products.”

• “The freedom (if not freshness) in women’s everyday lives enabled by modern menstrual products is truly transformative, but freedom is never really free, at least under consumer capitalism.”