Artist Rupi Kaur's period 'belfie' was censored by Instagram in March - twice. She said: "I will not apologise for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear but not be okay with a small leak."

Headlines this year have been dominated by the refugee crisis, Fifa corruption, and Caitlyn Jenner. The TPPA threatened democracy as we knew it. David Cameron may or may not have defiled an innocent pig.

Our own prime minister was unable to resist yanking a wayward ponytail, and a stream of B-list royals traipsed dutifully through our islands. Babies were born into Houses of Cambridge and Kardashian-West, and cats were jerks on YouTube.

But in the midst of this maelstrom of scandal, triumph, defeat, and glory, another topic infiltrated the mainstream media this year: menstruation.

It began in April, when New Yorker Kiran Gandhi ran the London Marathon on the first day of her period, without wearing any sanitary products.

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She did it, she said, to highlight the plight of those women who lack access to tampons, or have to suffer pain and inconvenience in silence because the topic is taboo.

"I was going through all these crazy thoughts and analysing whether I was ether a) a crazy chick who needs to just calm down and reach for an effing tampon, or b) a liberated boss madame who loved her own body, was running an effing marathon and was not in the mood for being oppressed that day," she wrote.

"While I am not advocating for free-bleeding, I am advocating for it to be ok for women to speak comfortably and honestly about their own periods."

SUPPLIED Michèle A'Court has written about menstrual injustices in her weekly column for Fairfax Media.

Photographs posted subsequently on Gandhi's website show the 26-year-old clad in orange running tights darkened with blood. And just like that, a movement was born.

"Free bleeding" entered common vernacular. The term had been coined in 2014, as a hoax "trend" on anonymous online message board 4chan (they of the nude celebrity photograph leaks).



But soon women were foregoing sanitary products to protest everything from the tampon tax to Donald Trump. (Suspiciously, the movement coincided with this year's white jeans trend.)

And it worked. A bodily function experienced by half the world's population since the dawn of time was finally deemed newsworthy. Overnight, the phenomenon crept out of our knickers and into the headlines.



Michèle A'Court, one of New Zealand's most decorated comedians, suspects the flood of menstrual news relates to the growing awareness of the how much it costs to be a female.

"We used to talk about... how we feel about sexism, but now we're looking at the dollar value of it," she says.



In March, A'Court wrote that not only do women earn less than men, they also incur unavoidable, gendered costs.



"Menstruation isn't a choice, it's a biological imperative," she wrote.

A'Court went on to estimate the average cost of tampons over a woman's lifetime at more than $4500 – "roughly the price of a 2005 Toyota Rav4 with 140,000km on the clock."

"This is, of course, not counting related costs - panty-liners, painkillers, doctors' visits, antibiotics, probiotics, medication for cystitis and thrush, chocolate, hot-water bottles and comforting DVDs," she added.

"Nobody needs to say, 'women have periods' – we're all aware of that – but it's saying, 'this is how much they cost', and it's a cost women have to bear that men don't."

While Instagram remains as squeamish about menstruation as it is about female nipples, other media outlets such as BuzzFeed have gone beyond reporting to trialling menstruation accessories. On video.

DAVID UNWIN/FAIRFAX NZ Hana Tawhai used menstrual blood in her exhibition "Blood Money".

Art made from menstrual blood has also made an unlikely comeback.

In September, Palmerston North artist Hana Tawhai used her own menstrual blood in a series of paintings, which also included animal remains and human teeth.

"It's a really special thing but it shouldn't be hidden because society says it's yucky and gross," Tawhai said at the time.

"It's sacred, it's ours, it's tapu."