In this op-ed, Nadya Okamoto, founder and executive director of PERIOD, explains why a film about menstruation winning an Oscar is a huge milestone for menstrual equity.

On February 24, the Oscar for best documentary short was awarded to Period. End of Sentence, a 26-minute film that follows a group of women in India who make affordable and biodegradable pads. The win might have seemed like just one of many that night, but it actually signified so much more. Activists and academics have been fighting for decades (and probably longer, given that menstruation has existed since the beginning of human life) to destigmatize menstruation — and this Oscar win is a milestone moment in that fight to smash the taboo.

Considering the fact that it's only in the past few decades that we've seen periods talked about openly in mainstream media, this win was big. Menstruation entered the mainstream when period products started to be advertised. Decades ago, period-product advertisements promoted the idea that menstruation is shameful. In pop culture, when menstruation was mentioned, the majority of the time it was in a way that shamed people with periods or PMS in a joking way. It wasn’t until 1985 that the word "period" was uttered in a national commercial, via a Tampax ad starring Courteney Cox.

So when Period. End of Sentence won an Oscar, it showed that periods are not shameful and they don't need to be hidden in the dark. On the biggest stage for the biggest award in Hollywood, this film brought up the topic of menstruation — and its director, Rayka Zehtabchi, exclaimed, “I can’t believe a film about menstruation just won an Oscar!” And with 29.6 million viewers tuning in to the Academy Awards this year, this film fought the stigma surrounding periods and addressed the barrier that menstruation currently represents for girls worldwide, confronting the ceremony's viewers with the reality that so many people across the world face each month. That's why it was so appropriate that producer Melissa Berton ended the acceptance speech with the film’s tagline, “A period should end a sentence — not a girl's education.”

Despite this win, the menstrual movement is still fighting for a number of policies that promote menstrual equity: trying to get period products into more school restrooms, working to repeal the “tampon tax” in the remaining 35 states where tampons are considered nonessential goods, and advocating for programs like food stamps to cover and acknowledge period products as necessities. Worldwide, periods are still a big reason girls miss school in developing countries, and in some countries, a girl’s first period (as shown in this documentary) is often a significant event that leads to dropping out of school. But it's hard to pass any legislation to remedy these issues until we change the culture — we need to show the legislators that this is something constituents care about.

We need to get more people talking about how it is unacceptable that it is already 2019 and people have been menstruating since the beginning of time, and yet periods are still an obstacle to success for more than half of our population, preventing them from achieving their full potential with education and economic mobility.

Sophie Ascheim, a student at Yale University and executive producer of the documentary, said that “our hope in making this documentary was to shine a light on the stigma that keeps girls in the dark about their own bodies, and from here, we really want to continue that work through the nonprofit.” The nonprofit she is referring to is the Pad Project, which Ascheim helped to cofound, and it works to raise money and distribute machines that make biodegradable and affordable pads available to women in rural India.

There is still so much work to be done in the fight for equitable access to menstrual health and hygiene and ending the stigma surrounding periods. This Oscar win is certainly a testament to how far we have come, but it should also act as a launching pad for how far we will go.

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