Period poverty is a recently coined term, designed to capture the phenomenon of women not being able to afford sanitary products. And by the looks of it, it is a serious problem: almost two thirds of women affected say they lack confidence because of bullies at school, while 39 per cent now suffer from anxiety or depression. They find it hard to socialise, perform worse in school, and in general have harder lives than the population as a whole. In a BBC interview a woman claimed that period poverty had resulted in her becoming homeless.
Proposals to address the problem range from exempting sanitary products from VAT all the way to making them freely available on the NHS. But is this a real problem? And what does it tell us about the mentality of people living in a modern welfare state?
Firstly, let’s examine the facts. According to the Huffington Post, the average woman spends $492 every year on products related to their periods. But that cost includes £186 on “chocolate/sweets/crisps” and “magazines/toiletries/DVDs”. Let’s just pause there for a second. Is it really reasonable to include the cost of Hello Magazine in the cost of a having your period? Or an extra bag of crisps? No, of course not, and this leaves the real cost (which includes replacement of underwear) at £306, or 84p per day. But the Huffington Post reached that figure by simply asking women what they spend, and it turns out that there is a high element of personal choice involved: according to The Guardian, there are many ways to save money, for example, by using menstrual sponges, made of natural sponge and costing 77p per cycle. It is, put simply, not true that you need to feel financially constrained by the cost of menstrual sanitation. There is a cost, yes, but it takes very special circumstances to not be able to make sacrifices in your discretionary spending to be able to find room for what only needs to be £10 or £20 per year.
Secondly, what about those awful consequences of period poverty? If we, for the time being, accept that period poverty exists, is it really reasonable to ascribe serious social problems – homelessness, for example – to the phenomenon? To end up living on the streets is undoubtably devastating, but it is the result of a multitude of circumstances, most of these the result of personal choices. To identify, in a complex myriad of factors leading to your finding yourself in a particular situation, the lack of public funding for menstrual sanitation as the main culprit seems farfetched. It looks a lot more like disowning of personal responsibility.
Thirdly, the solutions are ill thought through and have serious secondary consequences. Ok, we can all back exempting products from VAT, although doing it selectively distorts relative value between various goods. But making sanitary products freely available will, unless accompanied by a massive bureaucracy to assess eligibility, just mean that anyone will have access, whether affected by “period poverty” or not. Taxpayers will simply be funding a government program of providing all women with free sanitation. Not a good idea on its own, and certainly not a good idea when you consider where that path leads: which group will be the next to complain and demand special privileges?
We, as a society, need to emphasize personal responsibility as the means to address personal problems. Blaming your misfortune on the fact that other people didn’t pay for your tampons is not only a huge distortion of reality, but this type of narrative allows individuals who have fallen on hard times to exempt themselves of responsibility for their own situation. We should not, as a first resort, externalise the responsibility for our problems; rather, we should look at what we can do to help ourselves. “Period poverty” is just another victim narrative; popular and politically convenient to the left who want us all dependent on the state; but hugely damaging to the moral fabric of a free society which relies on us being able to rely on ourselves.