Stupid Arguments for the Impurity of Women during Menstruation

Last week the Navratri celebrations had its peak. Religious Hindus celebrate nine goddesses on nine consequent days. This worship of the female aspect of god sparked some thoughts that I wanted to share with you.

During the nine days of Navratri, religious families see small girls as symbols of the goddess and invite them for food. They feed them and give them some money. Who is a ‘small girl’ though? Every girl whose period has not started yet. Once their period has started, these girls are not considered as the goddess anymore. Of course a lot of boys and older girls also come to eat and they, too, get food but the worship in that time is for the goddess and that is only seen in small girls before they have started menstruation.

From that first time on, a girl learns that the time of menstruation is something that makes her inauspicious. She learns that during that time she is impure. She cannot enter the kitchen or touch any food because anything what she touches will become impure, uneatable for anybody else. Even when she is a married woman, she won’t wash any clothes while she is menstruating because they would get impure by her touch, regardless how much soap and water she uses. She is not allowed to go to the temple or even get close to the altar of their home. She will have her food separately of anybody else. The menstruation thus degrades her from being the goddess to someone similar to an outcast.

So I just had to ask all religious people on my facebook page a bit more in detail about their goddess: Doesn’t she get menstruation? She is like a human in so many ways, doesn’t she have her period, too? And if she does, does she become inauspicious, too? Have you ever heard someone say ‘At the moment our goddess has menstruation, so we will not worship her for the coming days’?

On that remark I seriously received an answer by a religious person who explained: “While menstruating, women have a negative, electric energy radiating from them. That is why, if a menstruating woman touches any food or clothes, she transmits it and it gets negative, too. That is the reason for such traditions’.

This man honestly believes this nonsense. Religion makes people so blind that they start inventing their own scientific proof – based on no research at all – and believing in it so that they can keep their superstition. I asked him in which laboratory he had measured those negative electric waves.

This foolish kind of belief is responsible for the current situation of women in India’s society and religion is at its root. This tradition of separating women during their time of menstruation is commonly practiced all over India. How come a girl or a woman can be considered inauspicious due to the natural cycle of her body which gives her the ability to become a mother?

I want to end this entry with the words of a female friend who suggested I should ask this man whether his mother had breastfed him while she was menstruating – if so, he should be seen as inauspicious now, too, and should be expelled from society.

But we all know that religion is not that consistent in its rules and traditions.