I want to start by stating that I do really appreciate the movement toward having more free access to menstrual products around campus. As a woman, I find people aren’t talking about how hard it can be to continually have access to menstrual products due to things like price barriers or transportation access. So when I saw that some bathrooms across Bradley’s campus began to have free menstrual products, I was both pleasantly shocked and relatively excited. However, then I noticed that only some of the bathrooms have free access to these products.
I completely understand needing to start somewhere to ensure that people are actually going to use it, so I’m not trying to sound ungrateful for the beginning of this change at all. However, it feels like it’s so limited on where the products actually are.
One of my biggest questions regarding the entire thing is why the menstrual products are not readily available to the women who are living in dorms. I understand that the public won’t be able to be in awe of it if it’s in the private dorm bathrooms. There would be no way for Bradley to show off that they’re doing this if it’s somewhere the public can’t go. However I would argue that a lot of the women in dorms would be grateful to have access to it. Even if you can afford to buy your own products, there are always times when your period comes when you least expect it, and you have no products on your person at that point. Having access to the free products, even if it’s just to use long enough to get your personal products, would be extremely beneficial.
Along with that, I don’t understand why some floors of certain buildings have free access but others don’t. The biggest one that comes to mind when I say this is the library. I noticed this toward the end of last semester when I was holed up in the basement trying to get through a million final papers. There were signs indicating that if you need the free products, you have to go to the main floor of the library to the specific bathroom in order to get them. It’s slightly confusing to me, as well as extremely inconvenient, to think that you have to go to a different floor and find that specific bathroom in order to get what you need.
If it were an emergency, the last thing I would want to do is go up a flight of stairs and wander around until I found the right bathroom. Of course, some people do study on the main level and are aware of where the bathrooms are and everything, but a large majority of people do not stay on the main level and will instead move to other floors to either talk with their friends or have a silent floor. Regardless of where you set up base to study at the library, I believe you should have equal access to products for your period.
When you’re in the bathroom, you can scan a QR code to request a refill of products — which I have an unbelievable amount of comments about. Why are you not just regularly checking it when you should be cleaning these bathrooms? It shows you a list of every product station that they have on campus. It includes the following five buildings: Student Center (twice), BECC, Bradley Hall, Westlake and the Library (twice). Five out of our 20+ buildings have free access to these products, which is only about 21% of the buildings. That doesn’t even take into account that only certain floors have access while others do not. That number is way too low.
In my opinion, if you’re going to have access in certain buildings, it should be consistent. Having them in the high traffic buildings, even just on the one floor as they are now, would bring up that percentage a large amount. For example, these are not in all of the academic buildings. There are tons of students and professors going through those buildings daily, and yet only three of the buildings have this access. When you think about the placements now, you realize it’s only on the first floor of the main buildings that people interested in the school will go to. If you ask me, it feels a bit like Bradley is only doing it to check a box with the public eye rather than caring about women’s menstrual health.
Like I said before, I’m not trying to sound ungrateful for the beginning of this change. I’m extremely happy that women’s bodies are beginning to be considered more in a respectful way. However, even when I asked people on Instagram about their experiences with the products, I got responses that weren’t as happy as they could be. While 21 of the 25 people that responded said they were aware that these products were around campus, there was feedback about the items being misused or stolen and the containers are often empty. There was also no indication that these were also available in the men’s restrooms. This is not inclusive, especially for those that may need these products while not identifying as a woman, or not being comfortable enough to use the women’s restrooms while having periods.
Overall, I think the beginning of the change is fantastic, and there is a lot of praise about the quality of the actual products. However, I think we’re a long way from being where we could be with things like this. The next step, in my opinion, would be to promote them more and have them be in more buildings and restrooms. I am interested in seeing where the school goes next with this.