About one act into the new Indian movie Pad Man,?? ??? ?? a man experiences a brutal, mortifying pad leak.
The man in question is Lakshmi Chauhan (Akshay Kumar), testing a homemade sanitary pad he made for his wife. Needless to say, it's not effective, and the scarlet specter leaves Lakshmi dripping goat's blood off his bicycle until he abandons it and jumps into the river (honestly, same).
Pad Manis based on the true story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, a South Indian man who made it his mission to create affordable, hygienic period protection for women around India. In the film, as in real life, he learns that his wife is using a dirty cloth to stem her menses, and that many women in rural India do the same or worse out of deeply internalized shame.
"It bewilders me that a simple function of the human body can be so widely condemned and stigmatized," executive producer Twinkle Khanna told Mashablevia email. According to Khanna, 20 percent of girls in India drop out of school once they start menstruating simply because they lack access to effective feminine products.
SEE ALSO: Bodyform's latest ad shows a menstruating woman and it's about bloody time"Anyone can go to work having woken up late and not had time to shave, but I challenge you to do the same when uncontrollably leaking blood without anything to keep it in check!"
Khanna first heard of Muruganantham – who Kumar calls "a true patriot" – while researching menstrual hygiene and immediately knew that she wanted to share his story. His desire to remove menstrual stigma and promote hygiene made him an accidental entrepreneur who now teaches women across India how to make and sell their own pads for about two rupees each (roughly one-sixth of their commercial price).
"Here was a real-life tale of a man from a humble background who risked everything for the empowerment of women, overcoming the odds to make ground-breaking strides in the realms of female rights," Khanna said.
It's no small detail that the key player in this story is a man. The platform for deconstructing India's period stigma is privilege; Murugananthan is a man who was able to procure the means for making sanitary pads, while Khanna and Kumar, a married couple, have been power players in the Indian film industry for decades. Much like the Time's Up movement, it takes more than women alone to elevate an omnipresent gender issue.
"It is the men who can initiate change in a male-dominated society," Kumar said. "It is shocking to see the suffering that women go through when they are on their periods, and men must play their part to end the taboo. One victory forPad Manso far is that men have started discussing periods."
Kumar said he learned a lot from working with Murugananthan, who was initially reluctant to speak with him because men "aren't usually the most understanding." In the film, that manifests as women largely eschewing Lakshmi when he tries to sell them pads or get their feedback.
"I loved his phrase ‘Woman strong will make country strong!’ which makes it into the film," Kumar said. "Clearly we men have to buck up our ideas!"
Khanna said reception for the film has been positive so far. Indian audiences love a controversy – as with the much-blustered about release of Padmaavatin January – but for Pad Manthe most hubbub has been Men Online™ asking why pads aren't taxed the way razors are. Khanna scoffs at that critique.
"Anyone can go to work having woken up late and not had time to shave, but I challenge you to do the same when uncontrollably leaking blood without anything to keep it in check!" she said.
She added: "There has not been a single woman who has questioned the film, and why would there be?" Many women responded to the film by starting conversations they feared before. The Pad ManChallenge has Indian celebrities and citizens fighting the stigma on social media, which is exactly what Kumar and Khanna want.
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"Women have already started sharing their experiences, and I hope the conversations continue as a result, online and in households," Khanna said. "I also hope that men feel brave enough to join the conversation, because their opinions and attitudes are just as important!"
Kumar agrees, and if he's feeling ambitious, he would like the film to lead to sanitary pad access for all women in India. An oft-cited statistic which also appears in Pad Mansays that only 12 percent of Indian women use pads (to say nothing of tampons). That study may or may not exist, but regional statistics show that not more than 65 percent of Indian women in most states use pads, and those who don't risk resorting to unsanitary alternatives.
Pad Manhas started a dialogue, in India and beyond, and opened the door for conversations about menstruation and women's health and comfort. The villages in Pad Manare worlds away from what we recognize as Western feminism, yet the women are tied to us – on a biological level.
"With menstrual hygiene being a global issue, I hope it becomes a part of the wider international discourse too," Khanna said. "There is no limit to what this film can achieve if it reaches the right eyes."
Pad Manis now playing in select international theaters.
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