Funny

Mansplainer Gets Absolutely Demolished For Calling Period Poverty ‘Nonsense’

Sanitary products are going to be free in all schools in England, a measure the UK government has taken as a step to ending the country’s period poverty. The free products will reportedly benefit one in 10 girls who are not currently able to buy them on their own, which can result in girls missing class (up to 12 percent) when they’re on their period.

England isn’t the only place with period poverty, though—far from it. Here in the United States, 14 percent of girls and women live beneath the poverty line, compared to 11 percent of boys and men.

And sanitary products are not cheap (as this man learned when he tried to mansplain women’s periods and tampons to them). When girls and women are forced to go without tampons, pads, or menstrual cups, they have to do things like roll up bundles of toilet paper to put in their underwear, which, as anyone who has tried this makeshift hack will tell you, really doesn’t work.

So when “journalist and property developer with plenty to say!” (taken from his Twitter bio), Marcus Stead,tweeted a ridiculously insensitive and misinformed statement, he was doomed to get chewed up and spit out for his bad take.

Quote-tweeting a BBC article about the plan to provide sanitary products for free at English schools, Stead (who does have a lot to say, clearly) wrote, “Can we please stop all this nonsense about people not being able to ‘afford’ to give their children breakfast or sanitary products? A bag of porridge to feed a family for a week costs £1. 3 packs of sanitary towels cost £1 in Home Bargains.”

WOW. Talk about unsympathetic and also, completely wrong. Not about the cost of the items at stores, probably, but about it being “nonsense” that some people really can’t afford to give the kids the things they need.

And people from Twitter jumped in to ever so kindly let the man know what a complete dolt he was being. (Porridge? How many times has he watched Oliver Twist??)

Some people suggested poor families just subsist on porridge, leading to such malnutrition that any females of menstruating age would eventually stop. Problem solved, right?

A few people pointed out that the quality of the cheap products is very sorely lacking.

Someone brought up the fact that people living in poverty don’t often have the luxury of shopping around for the best prices.

Women obviously loooooved being told how to handle their periods by a man.

Of course, a few people had to be self-righteous about the whole thing, as though their circumstances perfectly reflect everyone else’s. They got shot down, too.

Ol’ Marcus hasn’t deletedhis tweet yet, because he seems like the kind of dude who would never admit to making a mistake. But that’s fine, that just gives more people a chance to jump in and tell him what an idiot he is.

h/t: PaperMag




Jessie Dean Altman

Dean Altman is a writer living in NYC.