There might just be someone with a glimmer of sense in this debate. Finally:
Proposals to provide free period products in all public buildings have been rejected by a Holyrood committee because nobody knows how much it will cost.
The answer would be, of course, lots and lots and lots. Because demand for what is free is a great deal less constrained than the demand for things which people must pay for out of pocket.
This then giving us our solution to this claimed problem of period poverty. Not that we around here believe in the existence of a problem in the first place. A month’s supply of suitable – not necessarily wholly desired but good enough – products costs, on average, £1. For that is the price of a box of discount tampons. We refuse to believe that this is a sum beyond the pocketbooks – perhaps purses – of the women of the nation.
But OK, let us say that it exists. What should our response be then? What would a perfect world look like?
We would have vast barns across the country. Stocked full to the brim with all of the variants. With and without wings, pads and insertables and liners and biggies and small and – well, every variation that industry and caprice have invented.
We would also insist that all women – yea including those who may or may not need such products – be granted free access to those barns. Where they could load up with whatever variation took their fancy. We’d also issue some sort of chitty so that it would indeed be women who desired such gaining access to them. The taxpayer doesn’t want nor need to pay for teenage boys – and there are always teenage boys – to pick up a few boxes to litter with.
That is, we ensure availability and also that all women have the resources necessary to gain full access.
Good.
So, our barns are called shops and we have an excess of those, this is why 20% of all shops in the country are empty. The chitties are called money. And if the women of the country don’t have enough of that why not simply give each and every one of them £1 a month to go and spend in our extant barns?
Presumably we don’t do that because it would entirely solve the problem which isn’t the point at all. For solving things isn’t the point of politics, constant alarums is.
It was Scottish Labour MP Danielle Rowley who claimed (Hansard 28/06/18) that the average annual cost of periods in the UK was £500.
Applying a touch of O-Level maths to this average expenditure, it may be estimated that the average person could be replacing tampons approximately every 19 minutes, night and day, during the relevant time period.
Never mind anything else – I simply can’t afford the time to transition……
;¬)
“It was Scottish Labour MP Danielle Rowley who claimed (Hansard 28/06/18) that the average annual cost of periods in the UK was £500.”
That was a reference to a study that included chocolate and women’s magazines as being important while dealing with period stress, and therefore they are, effectively, period products. Rounded up to include a kitchen sink too, I expect.
I am entirely at a loss to understand why what is necessary to cope with periods should be free, but what is necessary to cope with hunger should not? Or heating? Or my occasional requirement for a plaster or an aspirin?
The issue is that minors get periods, and even £1 may be out of the reach of a teenager with no source of income and deadbeat parents. Whereas parents that don’t feed their children tend to have them taken away, no-one likes to talk about tampons and their cost seems trivial which makes their lack seem like a trivial problem. But if you have literally no money and no tampons, then a trivial problem it is not. The kinds of teenagers that can’t just-get tampons are also the kinds of teenagers who have no discretionary spending at all, because (surprisingly)… Read more »
Just put the cheapest tampons available in school bathrooms,
While we’re talking about the cheapest solution, who should do this? The government, charity, or caring individuals. We’re looking for the cheapest option, right?
>While we’re talking about having schools at all, who should do this? The government, charity, or caring individuals. We’re looking for the cheapest option, right?
I don’t see how you can argue against one without the same argument applying to the other. Not having to be covered in one’s own filth is surely as much a human right as an education is.
“Not having to be covered in one’s own filth is surely as much a human right as an education”
You have the right to remove the filth from your own body – you do not have the right to force someone else to do it for you.
If your ‘right’ requires someone else to fund it, then its not a right, its an imposition.
>You have the right to learn – you do not have the right to force someone else to teach you. >If your ‘right’ requires someone else to fund it, then its not a right, its an imposition. Grand. If we accept this for sake of argument, what imposition do children have to education? Most people would accept that children should get educated, even if it requires someone else to fund it. Can you make an argument against schools providing tampons the way they provide toilet paper, drinking water, heat, light, etc. that isn’t also an argument against *having schools*? Or… Read more »
Have you ever been in an office where someone asked if you had some paracetamol. or sellotape, or just change from a tenner on you.
At least we’ve established after two goes that you think the State should provide the tampons through the school facilities budget, rather than charities or individuals. Can we approve stopping getting the State to provide them through sock puppet charities now.
The basic point is not what you claim. For you to have a right to have an education, you have to have the right to force someone to give you one. Not money, but an actual person. A teacher.
You think you have rights that mean you can force other people to do things for you? You have no human right that requires the coercion of somebody else. By definition, you would then be taking away at least one of their actual human rights.
Um. This sounds confusing, and circular. To have a right you have to have a right? My understanding is that ‘rights’ are a concept derived from bargaining. To have a right to something you owe a duty in return. So, if we make a bargain and I agree to buy your lawnmower, I give you money and I expect to be given a lawnmower in return. i have a ‘right’ to that lawn mower once I have paid you the agreed sum. ‘Human rights’ is a meaningless term. Where is the bargain? Who is it who owes the duty in… Read more »
If people consider it necessary, would they then not be willing to pay for it?
No need to force it through violence.
It’s not “filth” is it? It’s discarded endometrium. And since it’s yours, I’m not sure why it’s somebody else’s obligation to solve the problem? TO cal it a human right is plain bonkers. We have had periods as a species for hundreds of thousands of years, and tampons for a few decades.
If it’s a human right, it must be due from, and granted by, our creator, God.
So get the churches to fund the provision…
And the scale of this issue is what exactly? As for not talking about tampons that is a bizarre claim. We have been talking about them non-stop. As for your claimed correlation, that looks like your assumption. The idea that all children should get free stuff because a very, very small number have an issue is absurd.
Rags & old newspapers in school toilets solves problem – free from reuse/recycling bins
I used to bang on and on about the inequity of sanitary protection costing THREE WHOLE PENCE per towel, yes THREE PENNIES! by referencing a 30-pack at Asda for a quid.
Such is the inequity of the free market, that Tesco now do more than 40 for a quid. Won’t somebody think of the children!!!!
This one I can vote up.