Women’s intimate health issues: lets get talking!!

Note – Originally, the blog was published on August 25, 2012. This was my first blogging win ever and I still feel so proud about writing this. The topic was “Women’s intimate health, should the issues remain hushed or is it time we speak about them?” And my winning entry is below. 

It was my gang of class IX 3 gals and 4 guys..An excerpt of our gossip during recess…

One of the guys says…. ‘Mrs Sharma’s perioddddssss are so boring yaar, I can’t tolerate them, those 40 mins seem like hours of torture.’

It was a general statement and obviously he was talking about her classes but there was a hidden word which was a taboo for conversations in the society. The guys realised it soon and had a shameless giggle on their faces and the fairer sex was embarrassed and did go speechless.

Some words like above, ring a bell in each one’s mind but they are interpreted by the two genders of the society quite differently… double meanings and double standards go hand in hand.
 

The laughter went missing and the gang dispersed in few seconds. Later we girls had our share of hoos and haaws but somewhere within I felt a pity for us. The world was insensitive to our problems and even the mention of it was enough to trigger embarrassment and shame.

Where does the problem begin?

At home. school and then society!! Some issues have always been talked in a hush-hush way in our society but if you give it a thought, its mostly the women issues. There is no room for them neither at home, nor at school. Its not just one but several health problems women undergo with the reasons and symptoms, known solely to them. 
 

Women are a vital part of our society. There presence is so important in each one’s of our life but on the other hand they are the most neglected one’s. In fact quite a some are killed even before they open their eyes.- a petty state but the lucky ones are treated no better. The most educated amongst us would also not know much about our own health problems forget about the guys and there’s an universal reason for the same- our society prevents us from talking about it.

A woman is vulnerable and her body goes through many changes with age. Hence she needs the understanding heart, a concerned mind and a caring hand. But on the contrary, most of them are trained since childhood to keep their problems known only to themselves and in the worse case, talk it out only with their mothers or the ladies in the family. And now we have all learnt to live with this.

Issue give birth to further issues

I strongly believe that this has given birth to several myths related to the health problems. In fact now the presence of gynaecologists has somewhat wished away a few of them but still a large part of the population lives with them.

Even if I have lived in one of the metro cities for most of my life, I feel an awkwardness in discussing my problems even with my doctor. And some of my trivial issues, I simply ignore because I have no one to talk about them. Thanks to Google now! Is my society that I live into, which claims to have the best engineers and doctors and entrepreneurs really educated in the real sense? Not really!

The empathy is missing and that cannot be developed overnight. The truth is we are still not ready to discuss women’s intimate health issues because we are shy. We fear what will people think because we know people make fun. But irrespective of what others make of it, we need to identify our own health problems, take them seriously and make others aware of it too. The people around us will take us seriously only when we are confident of our our body and ourselves. Slowly and steadily the new generation must be taught sex education to know the issues and be able to talk about it comfortably. We must talk about it in the family and accept it, encouraging a comfort zone so that the lady in the family can talk about her problems. Talking out aloud on speakers is not the suggestion but spreading the awareness will definitely serve the cause.  Its high time, we get talking about our needs and concerns and platforms to discuss like this are definitely welcome.