Bloody aliens, women embracing ibruprofen, begging for ice cream and choclate, and of course the hot water bottle. Search for the hashtag #LiveTweetYourPeriod and you see that women all over the world share their periodprobs. BuzzFeed employee Tracy Clayton began the hashtag #LiveTweetYourPeriod in May to share the monthly shit-show women go through. But when journalist Jenna Wortham praised it in The New York Times Magazine, the hashtag saw something of a resurgence.

Microprotest

‘On the surface, this seems like little more than communal commiseration, but to me, it felt like something bigger: a microprotest against a modern paradox,’ Wortham wrote. ‘Social media is saturated with images of hypersexualized women, but these are rarely considered as scandalous as content that dares to reveal how a woman’s body actually functions. The hashtag came to my attention a few weeks after Rupi Kaur, an artist and poet, posted images on Instagram of a woman, fully clothed, with what appear to be menstrual stains on her pants. Soon an Instagram user or moderator flagged it as objectionable, and the post was quietly deleted. To activists, such double standards reinforce the notion that women’s bodies are primarily sexual objects and that very little has changed since the days of old media.’

This double standard has amazed the editors of Period! for over more than a year. Our favorite slogan:

‘Don’t trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die’

Read also:
The period annual review
Leak chic
Not on Instagram