"It is important that sport understands and is sensitive to the potential impacts of the menstrual cycle for female athletes.
Yet nearly all advertising for sanitary products encourages us to hide this chunk of our lives – three thousand days for most women – by preventing leaks that might embarrass us and everyone else; by ensuring we don't, God forbid, smell of menstrual blood; by putting menstruation behind locked doors and safely enclosed in euphemism.
She is currently completing a series of photographs featuring women wearing their menstrual blood as lipstick.
Earlier this year, Jyoti Sanghera, chief of the UN Human Rights Office on Economic and Social Issues, called the stigma around menstrual hygiene "a violation of several human rights, most importantly the right to human dignity".
(Charities have picked up some of the slack in rural communities across the world – companies like LunaPads, for example, launched Pads4Girls, a program that provides in-kind donations of menstrual products.
An accompanying survey of 2,000 people found that 78% thought the world of sport would change if men had periods; a quarter thought white sportswear would be banned and that men would brag about their periods; 21% thought that bookmakers would factor menstrual cycles into their odds.
Many women love menstrual sex – and, even if they don't, the controversy over its omission in the movie testifies to its power on women's imagination.
He found that perceptions of masculinity altered across the menstrual cycle, with "a preference for more masculine faces when women are fertile".
As a player, Croft herself never cited her menstrual cycle in a postmatch interview.
Within the security of such luxury, it's easy to laugh at Menstrual Hygiene Day But the films are still powerful, not least because they make me think about things nearer to home, where I do have a toilet, and always have had, and have always been able to buy sanitary pads or tampons – though they are, ridiculously, taxed, while disposable razors are not.
In a survey carried out by the UN's sanitation agency WSSCC, almost a third of women and girls had known nothing about periods, and over 70% thought menstrual blood was dirty.
