Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/01/japanese-store-rethinks-ba.html
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What the [insert expletive of choice] ?
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My thoughts exactly.
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That is almost what I was going to say.
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Next up badge that indicate if employees have an erection.
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I’ll just drop this and see myself out.
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Just give the employees loose sweatpants. No badge needed.
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So it was originally framed as something positive and supportive. But you know how that goes.
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Proof that no women are involved at that level of decision-making in the company.
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The guys get them to but they just wear them all month.
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Characterizing Daimaru’s position as “rethinking” implies that some thought was given to this incredibly terrible idea in the first place. I don’t believe that’s the case.
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Or rather, they attempted to frame it as something positive and supportive of women, instead of supportive of men in a really condescending and misogynist way.
Because yes, some women have terrible periods that leave them exhausted and/or in pain. But for the most of us, we’re having our periods, not having a temporary disability that necessitates special treatment. It’s the men who tend to treat menstruation as something mysterious and dangerous, like “uh-oh, I should avoid Suzuki-san this week, it’s that time of the month.”
The extra terrible thing is, though, that I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the dudes behind this idea actually, honestly believed that they were doing a positive thing. Menstruation is something that a lot of men are honestly confused by (many of them proudly so), and middle-aged/elderly Japanese men is definitely not a group where awareness of women’s physical and mental states is particularly widespread.
ETA: Checking the Twitter link in the article, I see a lot of people going “what the everloving f—” and “how about just be a decent person and be considerate with someone who looks under the weather, whether it’s because of their period or no” and saying that making employees wear it is both sexual harrassment and power harrassment… Some people are even suggesting that openly announcing that you’re on your period would just help perverts, stalkers, rapists to gain more info on their target.
But also, it appears that the badge features a character from a popular* manga that was recently turned into a movie. So I think it’s a very likely factor that the management wanted to do a collab to ride the hype, which is why they’re “reconsidering” instead of just going “OK, right, this was a bad idea.”
*“Popular” as in, it was turned into a movie so I guess it had an audience? These pieces call every manga a “popular manga”, every entertainer a “popular entertainer”, etc. I never heard of Seiri-chan before.
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I worked at a company that used the “traffic light cones” system to display your mood, indicating how busy/receptive you are at the moment to human contact. Red = don’t bug me, yellow = be careful, green = everything’s cool.
It was a stupid idea of course and went away quickly since no one wanted to do it. Amazingly, taking a similar system and adding a menstruation angle also did not catch on.
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Not a ton of Abrahamic religious nut types in Japan. 
I would just leave it on all the time so my coworkers think I’m in permanent menstruation, thus I get permanently longer breaks and lighter duties.
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Japan is a totally MCP nation, though not quite as bad as India.
You know, I can kind of understand the idea that “Hey, maybe this is a good time to let employees going through this have some extra time if needed due to pain of cramps or whatever.”
Only there is generally a negative stigma to periods… (I don’t think Japan is any different than most other places.) so I am not sure who would want their status called out like that.
Then again maybe stuff like this would normalize it and remove the stigma??
