Philadelphia

This article is published in number 9 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 2, 2021

Lynette M. says that when you are in dire financial straits, as has happened to her, and you are a woman, and someone reaches out to help you, they usually ask if you need food. He will hardly ask if you need tampons. It is a subject that is not talked about. Once he learned of a girl who, having no money to buy them, used socks. Together with her daughter Nya, Lynette has set up a small collection center for sanitary and hygiene products for women in Philadelphia.

He called it “The Spot Period”. Between crowdfunding on the Net and donations from the community, Lynette’s business grows and has become a point of reference in the city and beyond. At the beginning, when they made the first home deliveries, they chose night hours to respect privacy; now the “assisted” do not shy away from selfies. Also useful to advertise the structure, which in addition to toilets and a computer room offers kits for the first menstruation, seminars on sexual health and a listening desk “for marginalized women fleeing the dangers of the world”. The space is colorful, cheerful, Disney-like. Lynette and Nya wear a headband with Minnie’s ears. During the health crisis, deliveries increased to nearly three hundred a week. Sometimes, they tell the Philadelphia Inquirer, they burst into tears in the car, for the profound poverty they encounter, but also for the gratitude they receive. Theirs is a gentle battle against silence and shame. When a young Indian poet, Rupi Kaur – the eloquent title of the new book is Home Body – posted on Instagram a photograph of him with menstrual blood stained pants, the social media censored it. “But I bleed every month,” she wrote. “It’s as natural as breathing.”

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