Different sayings, which, as it turns out, are loved and accepted as being embossed in the subconscious as \u201cundisputed gems of thought,\u201d being completely unfamiliar to me, often gave rise to many questions. <\/p>\n
I recall that in one of the elementary school classes, during the lesson, they called the teacher from the half-opened door.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am going to the teacher\u2019s room, and you will sit quietly. Don\u2019t make any noise,\u201d said the teacher. Our feeble response didn\u2019t seem to convince the teacher, and she decided to pose a question, \u201cDo I have your gentleman\u2019s word that you won\u2019t make any noise?\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time I could roll my eyes, 30 enthusiastic \u201cyes\u2019\u201d drowned out my quiet question, but why should I give a gentleman\u2019s word? I was especially confused when everyone unanimously accepted the \u201cchallenge\u201d of being a man, and only I questioned it.<\/p>\n
I, the youngest of three sisters and having grown up in the stead of the \u201cson of the house,\u201d was fond of playing soccer with the boys in the yard, but I did not understand who that man was, whose promise was supposed to be stronger than mine. Perhaps I was strange, and everyone else was normal.<\/p>\n
\nI did not remember this episode for many years, until I began to look back and analyze my conflict with similar sayings.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Another episode was from a more \u201cmature\u201d literary coding, which, to put it mildly, demanded a lot of effort from me. After running a little while in the yard with friends, when I suggested a new game, one of the girls refused to join, saying that she had to go home since \u201cher aunt had come.\u201d I did not understand why my friend thought that I knew all of her aunts, especially this particular one, and thought, maybe I wasn’t remembering something well, \u201cwhich aunt?\u201d \u201cWell, you know\u2026 the one with the red hair.\u201d<\/p>\n
I imagined a red-haired, chubby aunt in a robe. But no, I didn\u2019t know her. \u201cWell that <\/em>thing, for goodness sake, don\u2019t you know that that\u2019s what they call it?\u201d “Ooooh, thaaat\u2026” At the time I wasn\u2019t familiar with the women\u2019s code for menstrual cycle.<\/p>\n
With time, age and education, I understood why a fair amount of resentment arose from the requirement to give a \u201cman\u2019s word,\u201d and why a \u201cred-haired aunt\u201d seemed like a ridiculous allegory.<\/p>\n
I realized that my perceptions, probably because of my family, did not go through traditional seals, that who I am and what\u2019s going on with me is a natural and correct in it of itself and is not open to interpretation.<\/p>\n
\nMy experience has been assimilated into a general picture of reality, where the manifestations of man-woman are (un)equally numerous and versatile.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It is well-known that in Armenia the number of gender-based abortions is horrible, with records being broken in some provinces such as Gegharkunik.<\/p>\n
I realized that the shame that is a direct consequence of the culture of violence and customs are reasonably seated in our linguistic thinking, that we have a complex and rooted marking system acquired by today\u2019s silent bilateral agreement, which perhaps makes for very rich material for studying the nation\u2019s psychology.<\/p>\n
While the \u201cman\u2019s word,\u201d emphasizing the patriarchal power, is a sign of respect and honor, the natural biological state of the woman, \u201cmenstruation,\u201d is shameful and taboo.<\/p>\n
I also faced it many years ago when a friend and I translated an Indian-Canadian poet, Rupi Kuar\u2019s manifesto about menstruation, removing it from the shadow of shame, in the light of the meaning of humanity\u2019s continuity, the beginning of life. The Armenian text was either loved or criticized on the web, whereas the poet had made it the basis for her visual artwork and presented it in many countries around the world.<\/p>\n
A few days ago, I watched the Oscar awards at 6 am amidst these topics of deliberation.<\/p>\n
The winner of the best short documentary was the film \u201cPeriod. End of Sentence.\u201d This is a play on words which has been translated into Armenian as \u201cPunctuation. The End of The Sentence.\u201d The director and the creative team, all women, are on the stage and say, \u201cI\u2019m crying, not because I\u2019m on my period,\u201d which is being heard being said by Armenian TV hosts, \u201cI\u2019m crying, not because\u2026 I am very excited.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then the director exclaims, \u201cI can\u2019t believe a movie about menstruation just won an Oscar,\u201d and here the translator hinted that \u201ceverything has been understood,\u201d but of course, they wouldn\u2019t say that WORD, \u201cI can\u2019t believe that the a film about such an interesting subject just won an Oscar.\u201d<\/p>\n
In another part, when talking about menstrual equality (menstrual equality, which relates to access to hygiene items related to menstruation), our female host had translated it to the equality of women.<\/p>\n
\nAt the end, the other hostess noticed that an interesting play on words was made. And the three of them, likely held their breaths, because they had not been forced to pronounce that shameful, disgraceful word.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I immediately entered Netflix and found the movie, the girls and boys, women and men wrapped in the slopes of India\u2019s poor suburbs are turning red and looking at the walls when they are asked what menstruation is. <\/p>\n
In fact, the written or unwritten \u201ccensorship\u201d of our Public Television does not differ from the uneducated Indian mentality.<\/p>\n
I wrote about this on my Facebook page, and interestingly, the post got a great deal of feedback, many girls began sharing and writing stories about menstrual word games.<\/p>\n
I was very happy to see that many boys also responded and gave their assessment on the culture of \u201cshame.\u201d<\/p>\n
While three educated and mature people, two men and one woman, tried to bypass the word \u201cmenstruation\u201d on air, laugh and call it an \u201cinteresting topic,\u201d many simply reminded them of their 8th grade subject of anatomy \u201cthose\u201d lessons, when they separated the boys from the girls and the teacher in a quiet voice explained part of the very important lessons of sexual peculiarities, while pictures regarding the subject in the textbooks had of course disappeared.<\/p>\n
I thought there would not be a new surprise on this subject until the end of the article, but the Minister of Defense, Davit Tonoyan, just gave a new gift, promising the \u201cbeautiful sex\u201d appropriate conditions.<\/p>\n
\nFrom Public TV to the National Assembly, the natural physiological processes taking place with the body of the woman, from menstruation to birth are labeled \u201cinteresting\u201d and \u201cbeautiful.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
No, ladies and gentleman, the word is about a real and natural phenomenon, our essence and existence, irrespective of beauty and ugliness, without any mitigating or colorful adjectives.<\/p>\n
This is how we are, and when speaking about equality, both men and women stand on the scale against their own spiritual, social and physiological whole.<\/p>\n
When the school and the TV is silent, the street comes to help with its coded language, and the internet with its irregular flows of information, and the dialogue turns into a whisper, a secret laugh or vice versa.<\/p>\n
And in fact, it is only necessary to break the taboo so loudly so that it can exist as a condition, in the case of menstruation, as a condition which is guaranteed of its existence. <\/p>\n
Only then will that silent discrimination that is embedded in our thinking, the limitations we inherit and transmit without understanding and evaluating it, become apparent.<\/p>\n
I remember when we were little we would say a riddle, \u201cWhen you speak loudly, I no longer exist. Who am I?\u201d The answer was silence.<\/p>\n
Seda Grigoryan
\nFilm Director<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Different sayings, which, as it turns out, are loved and accepted as being embossed in the subconscious as \u201cundisputed gems of thought,\u201d being completely unfamiliar to me, often gave rise to many questions. I recall that in one of the elementary school classes, during the lesson, they called the teacher from the half-opened door. Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":11181,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vox-populi-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}