The Minister for Women, Gender and Diversity, Ayelén Mazzina, and authorities from the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Economy, the National Agency for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development and Innovation (R+D+i Agency) and from the Télam National News Agency participated this Tuesday in the awards ceremony of the Equal Access to Menstrual Health Communication Contest.
The federal initiative was carried out with the objective of contributing to the communication of Equal Access to Menstrual Health, revaluing the work in gender and communication of each one of the communities that make up Argentina, placing the axis on the taboos around menstruationthe importance of sustainability in the use of menstrual management products (PGM) and the need to achieve the necessary economic equality that allows access to the PGM for all women and menstruating people.
The meeting that took place in the Hall of Argentine Women of the Bicentennial in Casa Rosada awarded communication pieces in three categories: graphic, audio and audiovisual that cash prizes will be distributed and will be disseminated through the different public media platforms.
“Women do not face our periods in the same way, we have more facilities or more impediments and starting to talk about it is the first step to tear down these borders”Bernarda Llorente
During the award ceremony, Mazzina stated that she believes “in communication as a transformation tool, information is power and that power serves to break down all the myths and taboos on this subject.”
The official assured that menstrual management “has to be on the public and political agenda of the States” and considered that “menstrual health has a lot of inequalities, we touch on economic, health, and environmental issues.”
As a consequence of work carried out in the province of San Luis on menstrual managementMezzina pointed out that by carrying out different operations to address the issue “we detected different types of violence, sexual abuse, intra-family abuse, we were able to get into homes and make a link with health and the environment and we changed the lives of thousands of girls and menstruating bodies”.
“Menstrual health has a lot of inequalities, we touch on economic issues, health, environmental issues”Ayelen Mazzina
For her part, Bernarda Llorente, president of the Télam National News Agency, assured that the contest for which she was a jury “is very important in symbolic terms” and that it represents “the advancement of all of us as women and of a society and of a State that supports us”.
“Many prejudices and taboos with which we have been formed and built are being demolished. Menstruation has always been a taboo subject and it remained a private, almost intimate subject and intimate subjects are not socialized, but remain one, as if it were an individual and not a collective issue,” Llorente pointed out.
And he continued: “Our problems, however private or intimate they may seem, are always crossed by social issues and, in this case, not only by gender issues but also by class issues; women do not face our menstruations in the same way, we have more facilities or more impediments and starting to talk about it is the first step to tear down these borders”.
Finally, the head of the national news agency considered that “those who make the content” for this contest “are precisely those who experience the situation” and that “Women in general and the different diversities have been interpreted by hegemonic and patriarchal discourses” for this reason “it is important to recover the voices, to recover our bodies, our sensations and our desires”.
During the ceremony, the head of the Communication Unit of the Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers, Valeria Zapesochny; the national director of Parliamentary Relations, Nicolás Tereschuk, the president of the R+D+i Agency, Fernando Peirano, and representatives of the different areas of government involved in the initiative.
