Originally published at: Idaho Republicans block free tampons for public school students | Boing Boing
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It would help women get a better education, and better education leads to more independence and fewer children, both of which are unacceptable outcomes. Almost like making them fully realized human beings! We just cannot allow such things in our schools! (/sssss)
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Would it somehow be a terrible thing if schools DID make deodorant available to adolescent students who didn’t have any? I mean, nobody complains about the free soap and toilet paper in the restooms…
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Don’t give them ideas-few enough wash their hands as it is!
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If you do that, next thing they’ll demand is clean running water. Hot water, even.
I hope the protest involves leaving drops of suspicious red liquid throughout the politician’s men’s rooms.
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Is this the same state that now has no maternity doctors?
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If we don’t allow girls to have menstrual cycles then there won’t be any need to provide maternity care to teenage mothers. Problem solved!
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Apparently many men think menstruation is voluntary and controllable. Therefore, the girls just need to hold it in until it’s convenient. This would be a great time for some manufacturer to set up a campaign of donating supplies to the schools. They also seem to think that pregnancy will only happen when a person wants a baby, so if a person gets pregnant because of being raped, it must mean they really wanted it.
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To make it worse, 10 women–all Republicans–had voted against it.
The entire Idaho chapter of the Phyllis Schlafly Admiration Society.
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All part of the 4 Step process to force girls out of school.
Step 1: Ban distribution of free tampons in schools. Check!
Step 2: Ban the use of tampons in schools.
Step 3: Ban attendance at schools while menstruating.
Step 4: Ban attendance at schools at any time due to the threat of menstruating.
Mission accomplished! /ss
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You jest, but that was the whole mindset behind “legitimate rape” and that nonsense from back in the day.
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Wasn’t really a jest-I was thinking of the lawmaker who said that “a woman’s body will just shut that down”.
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As always, the cruelty is the point.
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You use a sarcasm tag, yet this is pretty much exactly what the whole biblical/religious “women are ‘unclean’ around menstruation” is about. I’m pretty sure that there are any number of societies that would like to go back to the Moses-era laws, force women to take a week off every month so they can’t contaminate the men around them:
19When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening.
Anything she lies on during her period will be unclean, and anything she sits on will be unclean.
21Whoever touches her bed must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening.
22 Whoever touches anything she sits on must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening.
23Whether it is the bed or anything she was sitting on, when anyone touches it, he will be unclean till evening.
24If a man lies with her and her monthly flow touches him, he will be unclean for seven days; any bed he lies on will be unclean.
25When a woman has a discharge of blood for many days at a time other than her monthly period or has a discharge that continues beyond her period, she will be unclean as long as she has the discharge, just as in the days of her period.
26Any bed she lies on while her discharge continues will be unclean, as is her bed during her monthly period, and anything she sits on will be unclean, as during her period.
27Whoever touches them will be unclean; he must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening.
28When she is cleansed from her discharge, she must count off seven days, and after that she will be ceremonially clean."
Leviticus 15. Just in case you’re wondering where all this hate for women and anything regarding their bodies came from.
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I saw the results of a poll recently where an astonishing percentage (i.e. > 0) of Americans agreed with the whole ‘body shuts down’ thing. So, it’s not just the opinion of a single wackjob politician.
I just read part of a “what do you wish you’d learned in sex ed?” thread on Reddit. Based on that, I’m not surprised by this level of ignorance.
ETA:
Part of the thread was on some people’s belief that ‘virgins’ shouldn’t use tampons. Is that part of what happened in Idaho?
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“Well, what about sweat?” she asked. “We can’t help but sweat. So are the schools now going to be providing deodorant for these kids?”
Occasionally I would forget deodorant in the morning, and I went to school with people who either forgot or didn’t use it.
So, fuck yeah, make those little travel ones available at the very least!
I swear to god, try to give one red cent to someone who didn’t “earn” it, and half the country loses their god damn minds.
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Then if it’s just from judaism, can you explain misogyny in places that primarily follow the dharmic faiths?
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Idahoan here. Our state legislature genuinely hates the people of Idaho. We’ve dropped this, They’re refusing literally free federal money for schools (because education is bad, mmkay?), they’ve already drop-kicked abortion, they’re trying to outlaw mRNA vaccines as a concept, there are several local groups trying to eliminate public libraries, and the state leg is also trying to make it next to impossible for voter initiatives to get on the ballot.
Oh, and con artists are collecting money from these idiots to try to get the most rural, conservative, poor, and parasitic parts of Oregon to split off & become part of the state.
All you other states, please go back to sending your dumbest, most hateful nutjobs to Florida. We’re already drowning in right wing suicide here.
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My point is that Judaism did not invent misogyny, as it’s a pretty near universal phenomenon. Yes, it’s true that these particular people are most likely Christian, there are also plenty of Christians who are not misogynistic or icked out by menstruation.
And yes, I’m guessing that there are indeed Hindu and Buddhist republicans in America who hold similar misogynistic attitudes towards women’s menstrual cycles. MANY men, whatever their political orientation or religious faith are icked out by menstruation, not because they are told to be by a book, but because hatred and misinformation about women are fucking rampant in this stupid country…
[ETA] Also, I’m gonna add here that in this particular case, this seems driven not by a specific prohibition on supposed impurity of women’s menstruation, but since it’s aimed at banning free tampons in public school, this comes straight out of the modern “purity culture” of some right wing Christian Dominionists (not really known for their careful reading of or adherence to this kind of scripture), which assumes that something like a tampon is a gateway to pre-martial sex. It’s not a bronze age view of women’s impurity, but rather a modern view of what they view should be women’s proper role in a “post-feminist” world in a “traditional” household. So, it really has nothing to do with this set of laws in the Old Testament. 
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