To not accept that there is 'period poverty' in the UK.....?

[rosetree7]

Fully expecting to be told I am BU, but I genuinely do not get this 'period poverty' malarkey.

Some reports say periods cost £42-45 a month (£500 a year.) Never in my life have I - or anyone else I know - spent £42-45 a MONTH on their period. Not even a tenth of that actually.

Some of the things they (supposedly) spend money on are tampons and STs (obviously...) You can get a pack of sanitary towels for less than a pound. Less than 50p in some shops!

And also mooncups.

Although mooncups cost £16 to £22, most mooncups will last 10 years, so you'd only buy 3 or 4 in your lifetime!!! And they also spend on pain relief - but paracetamol and ibuprofen are 16 to 26p a packet from Wilkos. And plenty of other shops sell them for a similar price!

Oh and apparently, they have to keep spending money on new underwear every month. What a load of shit.. I have bought 18 pairs of underpants in 5 years, (at a cost of around £25 for the entire 5 years!) 5 pairs of them are dark coloured - and I wear them for my periods. Never in my life have I bought new underpants for every new period.

So what is this all about? And how on earth are they coming up with such a ludicrous figure as £42-45 a month?! I mean, some girls are apparently using toilet roll as they 'can't afford' sanitary towels? In most cases, toilet roll is more expensive than sanitary towels FGS!

We didn't have a school nurse so there was no one to ask. I did try talking to my social worker when I was fostered but they never actually had a single conversation with me about anything including the fact I wasn't being looked after. Some of us have no one to talk to, no one who cares enough to help.

There seem to be a lot of new posters with very aggressive posting styles that have signed up in the last few days. Coincidence?

Savy
You picked up on that but obviously have no answer for the fact that people have no money for food so how the hell do they pay for san pro for themselves and thier daughters?

Not every school has a nurse and, of the schools that do have one, not every nurse keeps a stock of sanitary towels.

As for reusable pads, they still need to be washed which again requires water/gas/electricity/detergent and somewhere to dry them. You also have to carry around the dirty towels in a wet bag which isn't that big of a deal with you're in your 20s/30s/40s and comfortable in your own skin but when you're 13 or 14 and learning to get to grips with periods it can be a bit much, and the worries of what if someone looks in your bag and sees the wet bag, the self-consciousness of it. Mooncups need to be emptied and rinsed, not all school toilets have a drink in the cubicle and some school toilets have seperate cubicles for girls/boys but shared hand washing facilities in an open cloakroom area. You also need to learn how to use it, I've had mine for eight months and I still think it's shit, it's no better than a tampon and certainly isn't any easier or convenient.

SavvySaver24
Why dont you read my post. 7 years ago i struggled. Because i struggled at 19 doesnt mean i couldbt afford my kids. Get your head out of your arse will you. People struggle at different times in their lives for differenr reasons.
That doesnt mesn they always struggke.

Some schools don' have school nurses. DD's doesn't. But there does seem to be unspoken agreement between the girls that they'll help each other each if they're caught short or can't afford sanpro.

I found out when I asked why she had a selection of sanpro and painkillers in her school bag no matter if she was due on or not. If you can afford it, you're supposed to carry a few extras for those who can't afford it. All the girls in her year do it. We're still mostly skint but I can afford sanpro and can afford to give a pad or two away every month.

It just highlights how many people are living lifestyles or having children they can't afford if purchasing pain killers and tampons is beyond the budget.

How anyone could let their child go without is beyond me. I'd do anything to ensure my child had a roof, food and the necessary medical items they needed. Children can't change their own situation but maybe the will make better parents when it's their turn.

Of course YABU.

Just because you’ve never experienced period poverty doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Not everyone has cheap supermarkets with value products at the end of the road; millions of people don’t have that 50p going spare. I’ve personally never had to choose between feeding my kids and buying sanitary protection, but I count myself damn grateful for my good fortune and do what I can via food bank donations.

It’s yet another example of the way society disadvantages women and girls - cut funding for reproductive health , leave lone parents (often mothers) poverty stricken and with limited access to affordable shops, leave neglected teenage girls to fend for themselves, and then call women liars or hysterical when they give the facts about their own situation.

YABVVVU and your attitude is condescending at best.

Do other posters find it interesting that the OP, in what seems to be their first post, is using terms like ‘hysteria’ and phrases like ‘calm down’? Have to say associate these with male speakers seeking to silence women. Also, for some strange reason some articles I read describing ‘blood hounds’ and menstruation fetishists suddenly came to mind i.e. the men turned on by women on their periods or talking about their periods.

Whatever this OP may be looking to achieve, they have succeeded in providing a hole for the ill-informed ‘benefits bashers’ to crawl out of, those who will presumably not be happy until poor people are lining the streets as they do in places like Mumbai. It would seem if you’re poor and you have more than a cardboard box to your name then you are still doing too well for some people!

But perhaps the benefit bashers and misogynists (and you can be one even if you're female) would prefer that we sterilized the poor? Or maybe even that will not be enough for these people, perhaps what they would really like is blanket hysterectomies for any female on minimum wage or less. Then at least they can be sure that the poor won't have the audacity to reproduce.

Back in the realm of the civilised and the practical would also like to add the following:

Mooncups – apart from upfront price, it should be noted that the average age for start of menses in the UK is 12 and a half, many start at 8. What a wonderful idea then all these children and young girls, most with intact hymens, trying to work out how to insert a mooncup. Then in their shared school toilets, taking it out, and all the while still bleeding, rinsing it out in the shared sinks, to go back to the loo and reinsert it. Nothing awkward, embarrassing or difficult there!

Cost – there are reports that the costs of a period vary, as other posters demonstrate, but even if it’s £5 a month, if it’s £5 you don’t have then it’s still too much.

Forgot to add that one of the lowest points I had to take a week (5 days) off work unpaid as I went to walk into work and flooded horrendously, covered work clothes and my work shoes. I couldn't hardly stand up without being dizzy & leaking everywhere. Because I was short on wages our bills got behind and it took a while to catch up. Periods are hell and cannot wait to see the back of them

As a general rule, just because something is one way for you, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the same way everyone experiences it.

I thought it was law that a school has to have a nurse. That's bonkers.
Ours was a grammar school in a deprived area and she'd shell them out like there was no tomorrow. I can't believe that some girls can't access this! 😱😱

Eivissa how nice for you. Nearest Poundland to where I grew up was around 20 Miles. Nearest supermarket was 12.

I lived extremely rurally. I'm not the only one who ever did that.

For the last 5 years that I had periods, I just kept on flooding and I had to buy Always Ultra for nights, anything else and blood would be all over my knickers and jeans. I could never cope with tampons. My DH is on a good salary so the cost wasn't excessive for me, but I can definitely imagine that for someone on a low income or on benefits it would be very hard to afford it.

It was an absolutely miserable time, though. Following investigations, they discovered that I had a fibroid and I was offered a D&C, which I had 4 years ago, and I've had no bleeding since.

Can I just point out that if you have a retroverted uterus you can't use a moon cup. So that's one in five women.

Plus if you have fibroids you will go through multiple packs of sanitary towels, the 50p packs of towels are going to do fuck all. Always night time ones plus tampons or something similar that is £3/£4 per pack... at least 2 packs plus a box of tampons. About £10 in total.

Starting 2 days before period start taking ibuprofen. (This reduces the prostaglandins produced so that you don't bleed so heavily that you need to go to A&E.) so a couple of packs of that per period. Many women need a prescription meds too. Another cost, £8 per script. It starts to build up.

When your cycle is only 22 days apart then your costs are higher.

Women in menopause can have periods that go on for many weeks at a time.

Yes, I do think period poverty is real.

As a teenager in the 80's I had a week off school,every month,due to poverty.

I was never bought sanpro, only had 4pair of knickers, lived in a house with no washing machine and rarely any washing powder.

It was truly awful.

I always donate sanpro to food banks and although I no longer need to use it , I always have some in the bathroom incase a visitor needs it

@SavvySaver24 I could afford all my kids when they were born. Then disability happened.

Circumstances change or are you too thick to imagine that?

It just highlights how many people are living lifestyles or having children they can't afford if purchasing pain killers and tampons is beyond the budget.

Never heard of anyone losing their job and not being able to afford things after that? No because clearly you prefer to live in a fantasy world in which the poor are always other than you and did it to themselves.

It just highlights how many people are living lifestyles or having children they can't afford if purchasing pain killers and tampons is beyond the budget.

People's circumstances change - husbands leave, jobs end, illness occurs, a child is disabled, redundancy, accident, death of a spouse. You could have the best life and a few years lateryou could have absolutely nothing, life is shitty like that.

I did wander if the 45 pounds included time off work for period pain.

Oh and @BoxsetsAndPopcorn my last post is also aimed firmly at you.

School budgets are cut to the bone. If you have 50 families in poverty in a school do you really expect them to pay for all those products every month and what happens when the kid goes home? They still have nothing. I would have been mortified having to go to a school nurse not that we had one anyway every month for the amount of stuff i needed just to get through the day never mind 2 weeks!
Many school nurses are spread between several schools they are not always there anyway these days i know ours isnt.

If you're buying the 50p sanitary towels and have anything other than the lightest of periods then at some point you're going to stain your underwear and, depending on the washing facilities available to you, you may well then require to replace it.

It's also not just sanitary towels - it's painkillers and heat patches if your pain is bad. It's sanitary towels AND tampons if you bleed heavily and need to double up at night.

I have very heavy periods. I now use a mooncup but used to have to have a tampon and towel on all the time, and would change every 2 - 3 hours during the day (by which time the tampon would be soaked through and the towel bloody). I would get through. That's about 16 tampons and 12 pads a day, which is about £3 per day. My periods last around 6/7 days so that's £18/21 per period on sanitary products alone. A box of paracetamol and a box of ibuprofen each is about another £1.20. That's us up to £22.50. Now say I stain my underwear because I can't change my tampon every 2 hours overnight - that's another £3 at least, assuming I replace them with something cheap.

I can see how it happens that people find these costs impossible to meet. And if you can't, maybe you should acknowledge that that's because of how lucky you are. Maybe you'll be grateful that it seems ludicrous to you when while across the country girls miss school and women bleed through their clothes and stuff their underwear with cheap loo roll in public toilets. Think about that - and chuck some tampax in the food bank boxes at your local supermarket when you're in next.

Ok I'll bite.

I have a gyny issue that the nhs are doing their best to ignore. When I'm bleeding I bleed for months and months. The last time I bled for 16 months straight. It would go from heavy to light and back again constantly. On bad heavy days I could not move let alone work. I had numerous drugs on prescription- I would have to use incontinence disposable pads because sanitary towels would leak after 20 mins or so.

Here's a rough break down of my monthly costs when I'm on!!!

4 x 12 pack of ladies incontinence pants £8 per pack = £32
Nhs prepaid prescription card £10.40
Paracetamol x 10 @ 0.5 = £5

So what ££47.40 at least!!!

Plus laundry from the inevitable leaks not to mention hospital parking when I would end up in A&E.

It's not that that periods need to be hard on the average budget, which I assume is your baseline/reference point - it's that economic inequality in the UK is a reality, and so therefore fewer people have access to the average budget. Periods are then relatively extremely expensive for the growing demographic in the UK living in general poverty and having to worry about food plus 'non-essentials' such as fit-for-purpose toiletries like tampons. It's the fact that a significant number of women can't find the fiver a month they need to hygienically cope with their biological realities that constitutes 'period poverty in the UK'.

I have a bit of insight into this wrt another similarly wealthy Euro country - I had a self-imposed non-food budget of around £8 cash/week in one of the world's most expensive cities for a while last year (in order to save - yes I realise doesn't mean I have any idea what poverty is really like) - if that is how much you have to spend on everything including transport, socialising you can't get out of, emergencies, prescriptions, slips of discipline, even running out of shampoo unexpectedly early, when you're rationing loo roll, I was using sellotape as plasters at one point because the cheapest box was £3...affording protection is a real issue.
And period poverty doesn't just mean not being able to chuck stuff into the trolley with abandon. It's leaving tampons in for much longer than recommended, with the health risks that accompany that. If you have a particularly heavy flow one month you're left short the next. If your friend asks you for a spare tampon you have to say yes and give them the one that was earmarked for tomorrow. If you leak in bed do you have enough washing powder to last you till the end of the month and do an extra wash? In short maybe having just enough for a 'lucky' light period, but crossing your fingers that everything will go to plan. It's the worry and also the never being able to deviate from the plan that is miserable.