Menstrual Stigma, Free Period Products, and Femtech Data Privacy (Episode 431)

Full Transcript: Episode 431

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Welcome to the Fertility Friday podcast, your source for information about the Fertility Awareness Method and all things fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of the fifth vital sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Journal. I’m a certified Fertility Awareness Educator and Holistic Reproductive Health Practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I teach women’s health professionals how to utilize the menstrual cycle as a vital sign in their practices and I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know, I’m a busy girl, but I managed to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health. And I’m so excited that you’re here with me today.

Today I’m sharing a brand new podcast episode with Laura Owen. If you are not familiar with Laura’s work, I have interviewed her on the podcast before. Back in episode 173, we talked about her book, Her Blood is Gold, and the topic of reclaiming menstruation and the wisdom and power of your menstrual cycle. In today’s episode, we’re talking about menstruation again, and it is really just a fascinating conversation around the different aspects of menstruation and how it has been stigmatized and also some of the progress that has been made in recent years. For anyone who is in my age range, so I was a high school student in the late 90s, from that perspective 20 years of kind of observing the landscape with regards to menstruation, there are a lot of changes. I mean, I feel like we can talk about it more openly. There’s a lot more conversations happening about endometriosis and the pain women experience. And I think women are starting to step up and demand better and really push for the treatment that they need or for the time off that they need to deal with their periods, and I feel like we’re moving away from the whole concept of suffering in silence. And so many of these themes come out in today’s conversation. We also talked a little bit about apps and just that whole concept of apps collecting your data and, you know, is it a good thing? Is it not a good thing? I mean, lots of great research is coming out of it, but do women really know that these apps are taking their information, you know, so there’s so many great topics that we discuss today.

Before we jump into today’s episode, I will just share a little bit about Laura. Dr. Laura Owen is an author, academic, and consultant focused on the ideas and practices that surround menstruation. She holds a PhD on menstrual organization from Monash Business School in Australia, and has been a research fellow on menstrual stigma and sustainability at the University of St. Andrews in the UK. Laura’s bestselling book Her Blood is Gold investigated the influence of culture on menstrual experience and explored ways to honor the menstrual cycle. And her next book to be published by Oxford University Press analyzes the impact of new methods of organizing menstruation on individuals and society. And she recently launched a year-long master’s level course in contemporary menstrual studies. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode with Laura.

And I’m really excited to be here once again with Laura Owen. And today we’re going to be talking about menstruation. So I of course love that topic and I especially love talking about that topic with you. So welcome to the show.

Dr. Lara Owen: Thanks Lisa, it’s great to be here.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, thank you for coming back and I guess I just always like to kind of share that we did meet in person many years ago. It’s actually kind of it’s crazy how fast time flies. I don’t know how many years ago it was now.

Dr. Lara Owen: Four and a half, I think. Yeah. August 2017, Vancouver Island.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, so four and a half years. Yes. And so that was the first time we had met. And I’m not sure if I had, if I was familiar with your work before that time. And I remember, I think I bought your book from you, Her Blood is Gold, and you did this incredible presentation. I don’t remember if it was one or several, around menstruation. And it was just such a refreshing way to talk about it. And so I think that might be just a great place to start. There’s so many different ways that people can talk about menstruation, whether we’re talking about the lived experience and the physicality of it, whether we’re talking about potential spiritual meanings of it and all of those things, or whether we’re talking about the commodification of menstruation and how companies are making money creating different products around it. So maybe just share — maybe a good place to start would be what brought you into this particular field at an academic level, to be specializing in researching the area of menstruation?

Dr. Lara Owen: What brought me into menstruation? Oh goodness. Well I was interested in it from a really young age. I found my periods very mysterious when I was a teenager. They would sometimes be heavy, sometimes light. Nobody seemed to be able to explain it. I used to get a lot of pain and people you say, oh you’ll grow out of it when you have your first child, but when you’re 15 or 16 that seems a long way off so it wasn’t very helpful even if it was true or not. And then I went on the pill and I got anxious and depressed on the pill and I took myself off it just in case, just to see what happened. And about two weeks after I came off it I had this thought that I felt like myself again. And I thought, huh, that’s really interesting. What does that mean to feel like myself? And how did being on the pill stop that? So I just started really sort of listening to my body and following it. And I remember I had, I started making charts to chart my cycle and I had no idea how to do that. I didn’t know if there were any systems. I mean this was in the 70s. And so I would just make up these charts with the day and how I felt and what day of my cycle it was and just trying to figure it out. So it started really young.

And then in my 20s I was, I studied traditional Chinese medicine. I was an acupuncturist. That was my first career. And menstruation is conceptualized very differently in traditional Asian medicine, as you know. So it’s seen more as, you know, as part of a cycle and at that part of the cycle you should rest rather than try and push through through it. So I started doing that and my symptoms got a lot better. So again I thought, huh, that’s interesting. So it was just sort of a process over a long period of time of noticing where the prevailing ideas in the culture I was living in just were not helpful in terms of understanding my menstruating body, and that the more I looked to other cultures for information and followed my own body, the better I became physically and emotionally. And I discovered all kinds of things. So that went into my first book, which came out when I was in my early 30s. And so that was in 1993, it was published.

And then after that I carried on doing bits of work with menstruation here and there, giving talks and sometimes being invited to advise on something. I consulted on various projects in various fields, but nothing really solid, no way of really making a living from it shall we say, or being involved in it full-time until around 2010–2011, which as we all know is when things started to change in terms of menstruation and it really began to generate some capital of its own. So it started to become possible to actually be paid for doing things. I mean, I had been paid for bits I’d done before, but not consistently. I was always having to do other work to make a living. And then I got invited to go to Australia and head up a pretty large research project for a couple of years. And when I was doing that, I met some academics at a big university there and really liked them a lot and had some great conversations with them. And then one day I said, I think I probably should do a PhD because I tried to do one before but I could never find that magic combination of an institution and supervisors who knew anything about it. And they’d just done a lot of research on menopause so they were pretty clued up. But they were in a business school. So it was this big sort of surprise to me that I would end up in a business school because it was the last place I would ever thought I’d have been. I mean I had a history — my first degree was in history. And so I found myself doing a discipline called organization studies which is actually absolutely fascinating and starting to explore menstruation from a socioeconomic point of view, which is really what made up a lot of that talk that you saw in 2017. It was really about menstruation as a part of life which has very little capital and why is that and what the effect that has on women’s lives. And then since then I’ve been working full-time, so really for the last 10 years I’ve been working full-time on menstruation and it’s just such a fascinating topic. It’s so rich and so understudied, there’s so much work still needs to be done.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I remember — it’s been several years — but I feel like some of the concepts that I still remember to this day from your talk were when you were talking about reproductive labor, and just this whole idea of the unpaid work that’s happening related to reproduction that women are having to deal with. And I’ve had, there’s an organization in Toronto, I believe it’s called the Period Purse. And I think one of their main focuses is on making menstrual products accessible to women who have no income or low income, such as women who are incarcerated, homeless women, and just these issues that you don’t think about until you think about it. And then you realize, well, if you’re homeless, there’s no free pads anywhere. And so literally what do you do? Maybe talk a little bit about the economic implications of menstruation and what you’ve found in your research around some of those types of issues.

Dr. Lara Owen: Oh, there’s so much to talk about in this terrain. I mean, yes, there’s the big picture of reproductive labor being unpaid in our society. And women suffer an economic burden because of that. And that’s one of the main reasons why women have smaller pensions than men and generally throughout their lifespan have less money than men do. Even though they’re often working a full-time job, being pregnant, having periods, lactating, nursing children, going through menopause — and all of these things constitute reproductive labor because without them we would have no human race. And they themselves take a lot of work, take a lot of energy, take a lot of time, and we have to do this extra shift, if you like, on top of everything else. Plus, women usually do more of the domestic labor than men do. In most developed countries, it’s between two-thirds and three-quarters of the domestic labor in a home that is done by the woman. So that’s iniquitous to start with.

But then when you look at people who are disadvantaged, who really have perhaps mental health problems, physical health problems, they may be having a run of bad luck, they may have been being abused — there’s all kinds of reasons that see people kind of hit the bottom and not be able to afford to live. And then to have the indignity of not being able to afford tampons or pads is just awful. So it’s great that quite a lot of countries are now addressing this issue and for the last two years I’ve been involved in a research project on the period products bill in Scotland, which was passed a year ago, which enshrines in law the right of everybody to have access to period products for free. Everyone — everyone in Scotland. So in Scotland, the local councils provide products for schools and hospitals and in public toilets you’ll find free products and anybody who wants them can ask for them to be sent to them as well. So that, apart from the fact that it resolves a financial issue for some women, it also is just a big signal that you should not be penalized for having a period and as a society we will support you in having your period and that this isn’t something to be ashamed of or that you have to hide. We’ve discussed it in the Houses of Parliament — we talked about it in the Scottish Parliament anyway — and they made a unanimous decision. Nobody objected to this new law.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I’m curious, were they the first country officially to do this? And was this a hard thing for it to come to pass? What had to happen in the background for this to take place?

Dr. Lara Owen: I think it took about two or three years from when the idea first came up. And there were certain stumbling blocks, like issues around — or what about people who don’t actually live here? Would people come over the border from England and sort of raid public toilets to take the menstrual products back? But generally it was adopted with a great deal of goodwill and positivity and an understanding that menstrual stigma is a real thing that blights women’s lives and that a progressive country should do everything they can to try and ameliorate that.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: You mentioned that it was cheap — that it was not this thing that required a lot of money to basically completely change the lives of many women who wouldn’t necessarily have access to menstrual products. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Lara Owen: What I meant was that it’s a relatively cheap way to shift your reputation. So what happens to a country if they say all the women get free period products is they get a lot of goodwill from women constituents. Politicians look progressive, they look woman-friendly, they look thoughtful. And the other thing that happened in Scotland which is really interesting — some of my colleagues have done detailed work on the language used in the Bill and in the conversations in parliament. It has also been used as a way to separate Scotland from England because England doesn’t have a service like this. So Scotland looks better vis-à-vis its neighbor, and that’s a big thing at the moment because of Scottish independence. It wasn’t a Scottish nationalist MP who brought the Act forward — it was a Labour MP actually — but one of the reasons the Parliament was unanimous about voting for this Act was yes, it protects and helps women and menstruators, but it also enhances Scotland’s reputation. And Scotland is feeling itself more and more as a nation that might be going to separate from England. So you start to see these interesting conversations about national identity and what it means to be Scottish being allied to this idea about period products. And part of that idea about being Scottish is being innovative and being the first to do something, being a pioneering country that’s special and ahead of the curve. And they were also very smart and they allied with small Scottish startup companies who were creating organic or sustainable products. So they didn’t go to the big multinationals like Procter & Gamble and Kimberly Clark. They went to local companies that were employing local people and making products sustainably.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That’s really interesting. I feel like this topic kind of then leads us into talking about the way that the menstrual cycle is commodified. From my perspective as a fertility awareness educator, over the past 20 years it’s been really interesting to see the ways that tech companies are kind of capitalizing on the cycle. So when I first started charting, there were no apps. My phone had like a green screen, there were no smartphones. To see going from a very modest Excel spreadsheet that I printed on my own printer to hundreds if not thousands of period tracking apps and devices and thermometers. So maybe share your thoughts on this industry — is it good or bad that they’re trying to make money off of this stuff?

Dr. Lara Owen: I mean, there’s so much to say here. I suppose the part of this that I have studied the most is how stigma nonetheless gets reproduced. So there may be the best of intentions, but if you’re not really aware of how menstrual stigma works, it’s very easy to reproduce it through these various femtech solutions. So there’s quite a lot of that. For example, the word “sanitary” is still used a lot. You still find new companies that think they’re doing something really hip and great and they’re still calling menstrual products sanitary products. They’re still sometimes talking about hygiene. And it seems quite slow, really, for that understanding to catch on — that the term sanitary and hygiene being attached to menstrual products is a direct result of the stigma surrounding menstrual blood and the idea that menstrual blood is somehow dirtier than any other kind of blood or bodily fluid. And then this translates into various other things — even the word “period.” The Scottish Act is called the Period Products Act. And the Act itself only contains, I think, the word menstruation once and the word menstrual once, and all the rest of the time it’s “period.” And of course “period” is itself a euphemism. So we’ve totally normalized it now, and it seems, why would you object to the word “period”? But the word “period” is also applicable to something else. It’s not a distinct word for menstruation. And why can’t we actually use the word menstruation or menstrual, why not? Because it’s stigmatized and people are uncomfortable with the word. So “period” is easier to say. And then you see an actual Act of Parliament doing the same thing. So this is very slippery, this stuff. But menstrual stigma itself is very sticky. It stays. You have to work really hard to dismantle it.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I feel like that’s a really interesting observation because typically when you think of tech, you think of it being advanced and cutting edge. And I suppose that’s one of my critiques with some of the tech, because from my perspective, looking at the menstrual cycle from the fertility awareness angle, when I look at these period tracker apps, they have rebranded the rhythm method. Because instead of teaching women about the cycle, they basically bring her into — okay, we’re just going to calculate the average of your ovulation and predictions. They’re calculating it and they’re telling her when she’s going to be fertile instead of actually getting the right information from her. And there’s positives to that, in the sense that for many women this is the first introduction to this language. But there’s still that piece of it that’s there where it’s simply kind of highlighting the stereotypes that were already there instead of breaking them or challenging them.

Dr. Lara Owen: Yep, that’s right. And they might be getting advice, but they themselves aren’t menstrual researchers or particularly knowledgeable necessarily about this kind of stuff. What was the actual motivation for making these products? They were asked to do it. I mean, Apple, for example, on their health app — you could track all kinds of things, but you couldn’t track your period. And women did say, hey, hang on a minute, this isn’t right. So they were asked for it. There’s been quite a lot of concern about the way that information could be used, whether it could be used by right-wing jurisdictions who want to know when a woman’s missed a period and did that mean she was pregnant and then, you know, did she do something about it. I mean, there’s some very scary new laws, like in Texas for example at the moment. So there’s been concerns about that. There’s a sort of Handmaid’s Tale kind of element to it about big brother knowing what’s happening with your menstrual cycle. And then the other thing is, it makes people use their phone more. And anything that makes you use your phone more is an advantage to that whole industry. The phones are incredibly successful at getting us to be addicted to them. One thing I do know is that autocorrect still won’t spell “menstrual” or “menstruation.” I still have to write them out every time. And a lot of words related to women just aren’t in autocorrect. So that’s either deliberate or just an omission due to ignorance.

Dr. Lara Owen: There’s a lot that’s happening in the menstrual sphere at the moment which is really paradoxical, and this is one of those areas. My research on menstrual cups — I found this really paradoxical finding, which was that during the day, the women who used the menstrual cups who I studied really found that they didn’t have to think about their period all day, because for most of them they could go all day with the cup without having to change it. So once they learned how to put the cup in so it was comfortable, they would not feel the cup all day. They wouldn’t have to carry any products with them when they had their period. And while they were out at work, most of them said it’s like I don’t have a period — which is fantastic. So there’s this desire, which is very common across society in developed countries, to minimize the experience of menstruation. The best thing is if you can imagine you’re not having a period when you are having a period. So you kind of disappear the period.

But then when they got home and they took the cup out, then they had a more direct encounter with their menstrual blood because it had been kept in an anaerobic environment. So it’s not like blood on a tampon or a pad, which is dried and some oxygen has got to it. Because of the suction of the cup, it’s kept completely pristine in its original state, so they would see their blood and in a way be kind of faced with looking at their own vital fluid — what was inside their body — shown to them exactly as it was inside, but it’s in this cup that they’re holding in their hand, and then they’re pouring it away. And that encounter with the blood when they got home at night was much, much more vivid than any encounter with a tampon or a pad. So it became this really interesting experience where during the day it’s like there’s no period — they would describe it as so fantastic, so convenient, as if I’m not having my period — but then get home, deal with the cup. Oh my god, I’m not just having a period, there’s this incredible bright red blood. So I thought that was really fascinating in various ways. And I think the same thing is happening in a sense through the apps, which is that you input your information into an app or the app calculates and spits it back to you and says you are going to be fertile on, you know, the 20th and 21st of March or whatever. So in a sense, you’ve outsourced your own body awareness to an app. The app now knows more about you than you do. And of course it may be accurate, it may not be, but it’s probably doing quite a good job because the menstrual cycle is reasonably predictable if you’ve mapped it over a period of time. So in a sense you’ve outsourced it — which is again this kind of minimization. It’s the convenience. Someone else is tracking your cycle for you, in this case an app. But in another sense, because you’ve got that information, you actually are more in touch with the cycle and with the process.

And in a sense, women’s reproductive system is not individual — it’s collective. We are a human race, we’re a species of mammal, and we reproduce through women’s bodies. And so the act of reproducing and all of the things that go along with it, which includes having a period, is not only individual, it is also collective. And in a way the apps sort of make that very visible because women are giving that data and it actually is contributing to more collective knowledge about menstruation and fertility.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: For you, when you mentioned that things had really changed — what do you think changed around that time?

Dr. Lara Owen: I think there are three main reasons. One is social media and the technology that goes along with it. The smartphone came in around 2010–2012. We already had social media booming by that point. And when the global financial crisis happened in 2007–2008 and ran until about 2010, that highlighted inequalities and it gave a lot of people the impetus to become activists of one sort or another. So you got the Occupy movement, and there was an Occupy Menstruation actually that was going on for a while. And so when you put those two things together — this new impetus for activism and social media meaning that activists can organize themselves much more effectively — you also had the thing that neoliberal capitalism loves to break taboos. Because when you break a taboo, you enable a new market. And so menstruation is actually just another of those things. By the time people started talking about, “we’re smashing the taboo” — it was like, oh yeah, it’s just another taboo we’ll just smash it, because that’s what we do now, because if we do that then we’ll find a way to make money from it.

And do you think we’re in a better place now with menstruation? I think we’re in a much better place, but the reason I think we’re in a much better place is not because we’ve enabled new markets and smashed a taboo or whatever. I think we’re in a better place because the taboo has been being dismantled. We’ve got a lot more academic research happening. From 2010, academic research on menstruation doubled from everything that had been done before. And we now know a lot more about menstrual symptoms like endometriosis. There’s still a lot more that we need to understand, but there’s so much more interest and awareness now that fewer women are suffering in silence. And that’s the big win. But what is missing perhaps is the idea that the slowing down that naturally happens is actually a good thing and something to embrace rather than to try and get around in some way. That internal experience, those really interesting states of mind that can come with your period when you do slow down — that’s all really, really precious. And I think that’s getting very little attention at the moment, because it doesn’t fit the mainstream idea of what a successful life is like, which is being constantly on and constantly doing.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: There’s one more question I want to ask you before we start wrapping up and talking a little bit about your course. One of the things that you said that was really interesting in our pre-chat was something about the Red Tent and kind of this fantasy world around menstruation that doesn’t necessarily match the reality. I remember in my 20s reading that book, The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, and falling into this fantasy. So yeah, I’m really curious to hear your thoughts around that.

Dr. Lara Owen: There are two main strands to my thinking around it. One is that in certain circles, the fantasy of the Red Tent is very powerful and people want to believe that there was a time when women used to go to literal red tents. There’s no historical evidence of this, but it’s a beautiful symbol. And what’s happening now is really interesting — women are gathering in red tents, they’re creating red tents, and these are nurturing spaces for women to gather and talk not only about their periods but also to work on lots of issues like domestic abuse and PTSD and various other things. And I know of communities where the red tent has become like a community resource where people support each other, particularly around women’s issues. So that’s really lovely. What I find a bit troubling — because I’m a bit of a history nerd — is that people think that they’re doing something that was done hundreds of years ago in a very literal sense. We haven’t revived them, actually. We’ve created them. Anita Diamant thought up the idea of the Red Tent, and this is very much a contemporary phenomenon. And I think it’s beautiful. You don’t have to believe in a glorious, distant past that we somehow lost in order to experience what’s happening in the present.

What I’m interested in is not having that be a distraction — oh there was this lovely time in the past, we have to try and get a little piece of that now in order to feel a bit more balanced. But instead to really think about, okay, what are the ways in which we’re collectively living and expecting each other to live that actually don’t allow us to experience a red tent now? And part of it is this addiction to perfection, whether it’s our bodies or our actions or whatever. We expect so much of ourselves in a way that’s just really unhealthy. And a lot of the stress that people experience is very much related to that. So the romanticization around the Red Tent — we have to watch that a bit because that can become another thing that we sort of detach from reality around.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I just want to congratulate you on your new course. Contemporary Menstrual Studies: An Interdisciplinary Foundation Year for Advanced Study and Practice. You’ve created a master’s-level course on menstruation. Maybe tell us a little bit about what inspired you to create this course, who would be a good fit to take it, and what your intended students will be learning and how it would benefit them.

Dr. Lara Owen: The inspiration to create the course was people started asking me to do it, basically. I do mentor people working in the field of menstruation and a couple of people said that they wanted to know more about what I knew. I knew that I’d done an enormous amount of study in the last few years and nobody needs to reinvent that wheel every time, so I could help people learn that faster than it took me. And also I have a passion for wanting to professionalize the field. I could see that there were people working in business, in healthcare, in menstrual activism who didn’t know some of the information that actually is available. There was a bit of a gap between the academic research and what was happening in the field more broadly. And so I wanted to bridge that gap. And I also wanted to bring in a more holistic aspect of menstruation too, because that I thought was also getting left out.

The people who are joining the course are people who are planning on doing PhDs but they’re not sure what they want their topic to be, so they’re doing it as a preparatory course. People who work in menstrual activism, whether it’s for NGOs or for different kinds of organizations, who want to be more knowledgeable and become better communicators. People who have studied in the menstruality movement and who are working as menstrual educators and advisors and menstrual coaches but who realize that there’s a whole big chunk of information that they just don’t have. One of the things I’m doing is teaching people who haven’t necessarily had an academic education beyond an undergraduate degree, so they don’t really know about research methods and theories that are used in menstrual studies, so that they can get to the point where they can read an academic paper and really understand where it sits in the canon, what it’s actually doing, what it’s contributing to, how good the research is, whether it’s reliable or not. Just really to raise the level of knowledge in the field.

There’s no course like this being taught anywhere in the world as far as I know. I’ve designed it like a university course — two semesters, there are assignments, there are lectures, there are tutorials, all being taught online. And the first assignment is to start your journal for the course, which is something that often gets missed out of traditional education — really bringing the whole person into the education. You should be studying yourself so that you find out what am I really fascinated by, what do I find easy, what’s difficult, what really grabs me and that I might want to stick with later on, what confuses me. And then later on there’ll be an assignment about the journals, because that’s a really important part of integrating your learning. Otherwise it’s quite easy to take a course and go, oh that was interesting at the time, but have I really integrated it?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you so much for telling us a little bit about it. I’ll be sure to link the details in the show notes page. Laura, thank you so much for being here today. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you as always. And I’m excited to hear more about your book when that comes out.

Dr. Lara Owen: Okay, great, fantastic. Thanks, Lisa, take care.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you for listening. You’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/431. I hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Laura as much as I did. I always love it when I have an opportunity to talk to Laura. Her perspective on menstruation is so interesting. She just brings so much experience and obviously research as well into this topic and really delves into it in a scholarly way. I think that as women, managing menstruation is a huge part of our lives — and whether you are cycling, not on contraceptives and using something like fertility awareness to track your cycle or the apps that we were talking about, or whether you have chosen to use a contraceptive option to suppress menstruation, you’re still having to deal with it regardless. And even the most basic concession that I think should be made for women all over the world is that I do believe that menstrual products should be free and available in public washrooms just like toilet paper. And I’ve been saying this for probably about 20 years. Because it’s a normal bodily function. Half the population experiences it. So why wouldn’t we just have it in the bathroom? So with that said, I hope you have a wonderful week, and of course as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.