Watch Jen Gunter’s incredible TED Talk which asks why we can’t talk about periods

By Edaein OConnell
23rd Jan 2020

Watch Jen Gunter’s incredible TED Talk which asks why we can’t talk about periods

Gynaecologist Jen Gunter blew the audience away with her TED Talk which asked why we can’t talk about periods. Watch the full video below

“It shouldn’t be an act of feminism to know how your body works.”

This line was spoken by Jen Gunter – a gynaecologist who specialises in pain medicine – in her December 2019 Ted Talk which focused on why we can’t talk about our periods.

She explains how menstrual shame silences and represses, thus leading to misinformation surrounding periods and the mismanagement of pain.

Her speech begins by looking at the history of women and menstruation and how during the 1920s and 1930s, many thought women could wilt flowers by walking past them while they were menstruating.

Taboos

She speaks of common taboos surrounding periods such as period diarrhoea, which affects many women but is something rarely discussed.

Throughout the speech, she drops enlightening information to describe the severity of the pain women experience each month, saying that the pressure which is released in the uterus is the same “amount of pressure that’s generated during the second stage of labour when you are pushing”.

She delves into the world of pain management and other issues such as endometriosis but her closing lines are what will stick in the mind.

“The era of menstrual taboos is over. The only curse here is the ability to convince half the population that the very biological machinery that perpetuates the species, that gives everything that we have, is somehow dirty or toxic. And I’m not going to stand for it.”

This is most definitely a must-watch.