Senator Gloria Orwoba was asked to leave the Senate chambers on February 14, 2023, as a result of a red stain in the groin area of her white pants.
While Speaker Amason Kingi’s reason for asking the nominated Senator to leave was so that she can change, remarks from other members of the House did not contain the same amount of sympathy as that of the speaker, with Senator Enoch Wambua saying that “what Senator Orwoba has done to this House today is disgraceful and shameful.”
In lieu of providing a counterpoint to Sen. Orwoba’s actions, Sen. Wambua’s words seemed to have exemplified the point, that Kenya has an issue of period shaming that it needs to solve.
Read:Parliament Postpones Cytonn CEO’s Invitation to Parliament
“The first thing that we have been taught is that periods are dirty and shouldn’t be seen,” said Sen. Orwoba, adding, “period shaming starts with the man and the boy because they have been brought up to believe that if a woman happens to have a stain, it’s an appropriate response to laugh at, or castigate her – and then the woman has been taught that they need to go into hiding. That’s the unlearning that we need to do.”
The controversy surrounding the stain on Sen. Orwoba’s trousers also undermined the most important part of her protest, which did not involve her dressing, but her words inside the Senate chambers, “this is the period stigma that is making our girls kill themselves.”
When you point a finger, there are three fingers pointing back at you. When we castigate and ridicule the actions of Sen. Orwoba, especially as men, we are castigating the result of our complacency and ignorance because even as what Sen. Orwoba did in the Senate House on Valentine’s Day has been deemed “disgraceful and shameful”, those actions would not have had to be undertaken in the first place if period shaming and period poverty were not issues in the first place, underlining the true irony of the situation.
Email your news TIPS to editor@thesharpdaily.com
