Now comes a bizarrely paternalistic and silly proposal to further ghettoize us. A campaign in India has urged providing women a day off for the first day of their periods. I didn’t take this idea seriously when I first heard it. It seemed like the self-indulgent mumbo-jumbo of so-called post-feminists. To my shock, the issue has become a major point of discussion. One media outlet has even adopted this harebrained policy for its female employees.

“First-day period leave” may be dressed up as progressive, but it actually trivializes the feminist agenda for equal opportunity, especially in male-dominated professions. Worse, it reaffirms that there is a biological determinism to the lives of women, a construct that women of my generation have spent years challenging. Remember all those dumb jokes by male colleagues about “that time of the month” or PMS? Well, this idea only serves to emphasize that there is something spectacularly otherworldly about a bodily function.