The language used to talk about menstruation is rarely neutral. Across cultures, fiction, law, and marketing, it is often coded, euphemised, and entangled in myths of impurity, shame, and secrecy. This language doesn’t just describe menstruation—it shapes how menstruators think about themselves. It becomes a way to regulate what can be said about women’s bodies, and, ultimately, a tool of control over women themselves.
I first became aware of this coded speech growing up in Nairobi in a Kenyan-Asian family. We spoke a fluid mix of Kiswahili, English, and Gujarati—shifting between languages without needing to translate. Words like mboga (vegetables), muiko (wooden spoon), bakuli (bowl), and ndizi (banana) passed easily from one tongue to another. But one day, when I was about ten, I overheard my aunt say to my mother, “Mgeni aiva che” or “The visitors are here.” I looked around. There were no visitors. Years later, I understood. It was a euphemism for menstruation. A quiet signal passed between women in a world where even naming the experience was unacceptable.
That silence stayed with me. It was not just a linguistic choice but a reflection of how menstruation is spoken about, if at all, and who gets to define its terms. My sisters and I have worked for over a decade to help alleviate period poverty in Kenya through our campaign Panties with Purpose, raising awareness and distributing underwear in schools. This work sharpened my awareness of how language influences our understanding of menstruation, as something private, hidden, even shameful.
It led me to write an essay in 2019 on menstruation in literature. What I found was striking. Male authors often describe menstruation in grotesque, objectifying ways that estrange and dehumanise their female characters. Female writers treat the subject with care and contextual nuance, reflecting the lived realities of women navigating their menstrual cycles in a world that sees them as impure.
In The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980), female writer Shashi Deshpande’s protagonist Saru is rendered untouchable during her period—denied entry to the kitchen and puja room, fed on a straw mat from her own plate, and filled with shame. She resents the way her body marks her as a woman, and worse, as her mother’s daughter. The language is melodramatic because the emotion is—this is not just about menstruation, but about rejecting the model of femininity imposed on her.
In The Maid from Lalapanzi (2009), another female author, Pettinah Gappah’s character Chenai is told she is now “in Geneva” when her period arrives—a cold, distant metaphor for a state of exile. Johnson & Johnson representatives separate the girls from the boys to whisper secrets about their bodies. Menstruation is called “unsanitary,” and the girls are handed an “arsenal” of “sanitary” products, militarised and sanitised language repackaged as feminine care. It is all so matter-of-fact, and that is the point: menstrual shame is embedded, normalised, unquestioned.
However, in Written on the Body (1992), queer writer Jeanette Winterson renders menstruation as disturbing and taboo. Writing from an ambiguous gendered perspective, she uses metaphors like “iron in her soul” and “smells like a gun,” infusing the menstruating body with violence and masculinity.
In contrast, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being compares Tereza’s menstruation to her dog’s, concluding that dogs were “never expelled from Paradise.” For Tereza, menstruation marks her as fallen and filthy, less than even a dog.
Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal (2002) is more visceral still. A male character watches his lover’s blood run down her legs, then licks it off. Menstrual blood becomes a fetishised substance for male pleasure, and the woman, Consuela, is reduced to a body—a site for male consumption. The menstruating body is not hers but his, and what should be a moment of personal experience becomes an object of voyeuristic desire.
These portrayals, especially by male authors, reinforce the notion that menstruation is aberrant, grotesque, and in need of concealment. Even the publishing world reflects this discomfort. My essay on the menstrual gaze was rejected by an American journal on the grounds that it was “not in their interest to see popular, well-loved male authors criticised.” This was a reminder: language is policed, and those who control publishing are gatekeepers of what is deemed “acceptable.”
While I was writing Period Matters, a man asked me about the book. When I said “menstruation,” he paused, then asked, “Is it for adults only?” As if the word itself were indecent. In that moment, menstruation wasn’t just a topic—it became something obscene, forbidden, almost pornographic. Simply naming the experience provoked discomfort, and highlighted how language continues to police the boundaries of what is acceptable to say in public.
But the language of menstruation is shaped beyond literature. It is ever-present in marketing, health education, and the digital sphere. Menstrual products are marketed using words like “sanitary” “hygienic,” “odour-free,” normalise the myths that menstruation is dirty, and smelly. Brand names like Whisper, Stay Free and Sofy, reinforce the taboo, and the idea that menstruation constrains. In the commercialisation of menstrual care, words like “organic” and “biodegradable” are often stripped of substance and repurposed for profit. The rhetoric of cleanliness, purity, and discretion serves to keep menstruation veiled.
Even our datafied digital spaces are not neutral. Period-tracking apps or PTAs, do not just collect data, they manipulate. They shape in sinister and subtle ways how app users perceive their own bodies. Through purposeful language, including images, words and phrases related to the menstrual cycle, hormones, and symptoms, PTAs promote a normative and normal notion of menstruation, when there is none. At the same time, they also frame menstruation as an ‘unhealthy state,’ or medical condition which ought to be cleansed, managed, monitored, and pathologised. Alongside this, PTAs also take the opportunity to advertise related products which app users ‘need’ to feel better, and mine users’ data. The data shared by PTAs includes personal information about menstruators’ health, moods, and sexual activity. In this way the app producers have access to market-segmented information and can target viable consumers.
Equally frightening is how through language, PTAs also extract data to limit and erode the reproductive autonomy and privacy of users. The data derived from PTAs can be used to identify and prosecute users seeking to terminate a pregnancy. Reproductive health data, including menstrual blood data, has become particularly sensitive following the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion and President Trump’s ‘global gag order’ on all abortion related medical support. In a digital economy, privacy of information is a relegated concern. Through PTAs, and their language of extraction, menstruators’ data becomes everybody’s data. Most app users freely relinquish their personal data so they can receive personalized information about their body and themselves. App users tend not to see volunteering personal information as problematic because the PTA promises to deliver new insights about a ‘freer’ better ‘managed’ and ‘improved’ self.
The politics of naming and language are also deeply local and contextual. In Bengali, menstruation is called shorir kharap, meaning “being unwell,” which implies illness and weakness. But in Jharkhand, the Santals call it hormo baha or “flower of the body.” Words matter. They change how we see ourselves. In Gujarati, there is no word for menopause. The absence itself is telling. It suggests that once women stop menstruating, their bodily experiences no longer warrant a name. The unspoken implication is that they cease to be relevant, their transitions not worth noting. This erasure keeps the experience invisible and invalidates the reality of women’s aging bodies; another form of control over the conversation.
For trans and non-binary people, language has its own terrain of violence and exclusion. A Pakistani trans person I interviewed, Javed, explained how colonialism imposed gender binaries where none existed. In Punjabi and Urdu, gendered pronouns are more fluid, but colonial mimicry introduced rigid male-female distinctions. “Everyone wants to be a kala Angrez,” Javed said, “or a dark-skinned Englishman.” In this mimicry, the transgender body became “other,” marked, excluded from the language of legitimacy.
What happens when we reclaim this language? What if we stopped whispering and started telling fuller, messier, more honest stories? That idea became Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia. The anthology brings together fifty voices from across the region. Buddhist nuns in Bhutan, trans activists in Pakistan, refugees in Sri Lanka, factory workers in Bangladesh, and schoolgirls in India, all share their realities. These stories explore shame and ritual, but also creativity, resistance, and renewal. It offers an intersectional understanding of menstruation and how it is shaped by language, culture, gender, class, caste, religion, and geography.
Through this work, I’ve come to see how language is not just a tool of control, but also one of liberation. When we speak, write, and publish boldly, we begin to dismantle silence. When we understand language and translation, we open space for dignity and complexity. We can move menstruation from being whispered about, to something spoken of with truth, creativity, and power.