The long, harsh Fimbul winter is not a myth
Probably half of Norway and Sweden’s population died. Researchers now know more and more about the catastrophic year of 536.

The Fenris wolf swallows the sun. The climate disaster that began the year 536 was surely the most dramatic cooling of the Earth that humans, animals and plants have experienced in the last two thousand years. It was likely due to two large volcanic explosions, which every few years sent huge amounts of fine dust high into the atmosphere. There was dust for several years. The sun disappeared. This became another story in the imagination and myths of men. (Drawing: Louis Moe)

Bård Amundsen JOURNALIST

Nancy Bazilchuk ENGLISH VERSION

https://sciencenorway.no/
Tuesday 24. december 2019 -

"First came the Fimbul winter that lasted three years. This was a warning of the coming of Ragnarok, when everything living on Earth came to an end. "

This is how the story of the long harsh winter, called the Fimbul winter in Norwegian, begins, both in Norse mythology and in the Finnish national work of epic poetry, the Kalevala.

But why are stories that warn of a frozen end-time found in Nordic mythologies?

In recent years, researchers in Norway and Sweden have found increasingly clear evidence of a disaster that struck the planet 1500 years ago.

The disaster must have hit Norwegians and Swedes extremely hard — as hard as the Black Death. The same may have happened in the Baltics, Poland and northern Germany.

The moss scientist’s theory

In 1910, the Swedish geographer and reseacher of moss Rutger Sernander first launched the theory that the Fimbul winter may have been a real event in the Nordic countries. His hypothesis was that this was due to a climate disaster between 2000 and 2500 years ago.

For a few years, people listened to Sernander and his ideas. Then came the doubt, because archaeologists couldn’t find traces of such an ancient disaster.

We now know however, that a climate disaster struck the world — and especially the Nordic countries — just 1500 years ago.

And we know that it may have been followed by another disaster. Which might have been just as big.

NASA and a Swedish archaeologist

The new hunt for the Fimbul winter began with the US space agency NASA, in 1983.

“The winter called the Fimbul winter is coming. Snow flies from everywhere. There are strong, cold and sharp winds. No living thing enjoys the sun. There are three such winters — without summers in between,” Snorre writes in his book Edda. The Fimbul winter (fimbulvetr) was a warning that Ragnarok, the end of the world, was coming. Many have wondered if the myth of the Fimbul winter could be based on something that really happened. Now scientists know that this is the case.

 (The picture of the Fimbul winter was drawn by Louis Moe in 1929.)

At this time, two NASA scientists, Richard Stothers and Michael Rampino, published a scientific overview of known volcanic eruptions back in time. Much of their work was based on ice cores taken from ancient inland glacier ice on Greenland.

Archaeologists read the article. They understood that something very dramatic may have happened in the year 536.

Central to the new hunt for the Fimbul winter was Bo Gräslund, now a retired professor of archaeology at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Gräslund was first to suggest that the Fimbul winter was a real event, and that it took place in the years after 536. He also pointed out that the 13th century Icelandic historian Snorre in his book Edda was not only concerned that it was very cold and the winters were snowy — Snorre was also concerned because there were no summers for several years in a row.

Bo Gräslund is professor emeritus in archaeology at Uppsala University in Sweden. He was the first to suggest that the Fimbul winter may have been a climate disaster in the 500s. (Image from YouTube)

Several years with no summer

The Fimbul winter then, meant several years in succession without a summer — which would have consequences about which we can only speculate for people who lived in the far north 1500 years ago.

Gräslund was also the first to estimate that the population of Sweden was halved in the 500s.

In the early years, many did not believe Gräslund's hypothesis.

In 2007 he publishes the article “Fimbulvintern, Ragnarök och klimatkrisen år 536–537 e. Kr.” (Fimbulvintern, Ragnarök and the climate crisis in the year 536–537 AD) in the Swedish journal Saga och sed.

After that, researchers began their hunt for the Fimbul winter in earnest.
Natural scientists and archaeologists make discoveries

In recent years, many discoveries have been made that clearly suggest that Bo Gräslund is right.

In Norway, pollen has been found deep in several bogs, evidence of a dramatic event that clearly changed the cultural landscape for a long time afterwards.

Tree rings from old trees provide another important clue.

Now that archaeologists know what to look for, these scientists are also finding more and more clues in their material. Today, archaeologists see that something dramatic happened to the farmsteads in Norway and Sweden 1500 years ago.

People moved. Or they disappeared. There are almost no grave finds from this period. Fine jewellery was no longer made. Beautiful pottery traditions in western Norway ceased.

Life seems miserable.

Also, more gold was sacrificed to the gods.
People left the mountains

Per Sjögren works as a paleoecologist at the Tromsø University Museum. He specializes in looking for clues about life from the past.

It was during his work on a major research project that examined changes in the Norwegian mountain cultural landscape that Sjögren and colleagues came on the trail of the Fimbul winter in Norway.

In pollen samples taken from boggy soil in the mountains, they saw clear traces of a dramatic climate event 1500 years ago.

“We found the first traces of the Fimbul winter in northern Norway. Eventually we found the same thing in southern Norway,” Sjögren says.

“We see that the landscape has grown back. That people and animals must have left the cultural landscapes they had used in the mountains,” he says.

Who left Storesætra in Stryn?

Kari Loe Hjelle is professor of natural history at the University of Bergen. She is interested in what pollen and other evidence from the past can tell us about people's lives — at a time when there are no written sources about life in Norway.

Hjelle describes a diagram that was created by paleoecologists when they examined the amounts of grass and tree pollen deep in the soil at Storesætra in Stryn. This was a sæter, or summer farm, just below Jostedalsbreen, in an area that people have used since the Stone Age.

The diagram clearly shows how people used this landscape between year 0 and year 500. The pollen record shows lots of grass and smaller trees.

Then something happens in the 500s. Grass pollen decreases dramatically. The trees were coming back.

Coal dust is another indication that people are using a landscape. This also disappears from Storesætra in Stryn in the 500s.

Storesætra in Stryn (Sogn og Fjordane) as it looks today. People have been using this landscape ever since the Stone Age. The pollen samples were taken from the hill in the middle of the summer farm. 

(Photo: Kari Hjelle)

Massive devastation of farms in Norway

Frode Iversen is Professor of Archaeology at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo.

“From the 1960s, it has been known among archaeologists in Norway that there was a massive devastation of farms in Norway from the mid-500s. This is a known phenomenon, especially in Rogaland County,” he says.

But why were the farms ruined and abandoned?

It has been speculated that the Justinian plague that struck the world at that time also came all the way to Norway.

“There was a lot of attention to this among Norwegian archaeologists decades ago. Since then, we haven’t thought about it much, until it again became topical because of Bo Gräslund’s new theory on the Fimbul winter,” he says.

Now Iversen and colleagues have summarized much of what they know about the Fimbul winter in Norway in some of the chapters in their book "The Agrarian Life of the North 2000 BC – AD 1000". It is available (in English) free of charge as a PDF book at Cappelen Damm here.

Frode Iversen is an archaeologist at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, and is one of the researchers who has been most interested in the theory of the Fimbul winter in Norway. (Photo: UiO)

“We see a very sharp decline in activity in Norway in the 500s,” Iversen says.

Nearly 90 per cent fewer discoveries

Morten Vetrhus wrote his master’s thesis at the University of Bergen on what happened during the transition from the Migration Period to Merovingian Period — in other words, before and after about 550.

He reports a sharp decline in the number of sites where archaeologists found something interesting. The decline in discovery sites was as much as 70 per cent.

Even greater was the decline in the number of archaeological finds in Rogaland from the Migration Period to the Merovingian Period. This decline was 87 per cent.

This despite the fact that the Merovingian Period lasted a hundred years longer than the Migration Period. Even in a fertile area like Jæren, parts of the landscape was completely emptied of people.

“This is a very strong decline. What happened to these people? Why do we stop finding evidence of them?” Iversen asks.

Smaller farms abandoned

The village of Landa in Forsand in Rogaland was continuously settled for more than 2,000 years — both during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age — right up to the time of the disaster in 536. Most people lived here during the Migration Period, just before people disappeared. The Bronze Age house in the picture dates from 1500 years before the disaster. But the building practices did not change much at this time. 

(Photo: Hallvard Nygård / Wikimedia Commons)

Iversen believes a strategy people used to face the crisis was to abandon the small and least productive farms. Larger and more centrally located lands were instead divided into smaller production units.

A lack of labour made it difficult to maintain farm operations in Rogaland and likely in the rest of Norway at the levels it had been at before the disaster in the mid-500s.

Iversen also wonders if the mass death caused more land to be available for people who survived. This may explain why archaeologists find traces of agriculture in Norway in the latter part of the 500s that reflects more animal husbandry. This is something similar to what other historians believe happened after the Black Death around 1350.

There are also some examples of new power centres being established in Norway after the disaster.

Raknehaugen in Romerike — the largest burial mound in the Nordic countries — probably reflects this. There were fewer powerful people left in the country, but those who remained might have had greater control and were even more powerful than before the disaster. Archaeologists have found evidence of the same in Sweden.

Raknehaugen in Romerike is the largest burial mound in the Nordic region. Inside the mound were logs that were probably cut in the year 551. The white lines show the annual ring from the year 536. Notice how narrow the rings are that extend further out towards the outside of the tree after this date. The photo was taken by researcher H. Roll-Hansen in 1941. Iversen, PhD candidate Josh Bostic and several colleagues have started to study the timber from Raknehaugen again, this time with completely modern methods. They hope to establish what the temperatures were — week by week — in the year 536 and in subsequent years.

Iversen has no doubt that the disaster must also have had a major impact on social structures in Scandinavia.

His theory is that the disaster hit the upper and lower layers of society the hardest.

As a consequence, after the disaster, a "middle class" grew larger. And with this, a society where people were more equal than before.
The art of goldsmithing disappears

Ingunn Røstad, also a researcher at the Museum of Cultural History, has shown that the clothes and jewellery used by the Iron Age people in the 600s and 700s were of simpler quality than from before the early 500s.

“Fine gold and silver jewellery were less common,” says Iversen.

“The jewellery that was made became simpler. It almost looks ‘homemade’.”

Climate or plague?

Iversen now wonders if it was the climate disaster alone that destroyed the population.

Or was it — as more and more scientists are tending to believe— a combination of climate and a serious epidemic?

The Justinian plague hit Southern Europe in the year 541.

There’s no evidence that it also reached all the way to the Nordic countries. But researchers who have opened graves have recently been able to establish that the plague came to Germany. That makes it not unlikely that it also hit Norway.

The bacterium from the 500s — Yersina pestis — is the same that hit Europe during the Black Death in the 1300s.

In the vast city of Constantinople, it is estimated that about 40 per cent of the inhabitants died during the Justinian plague in the years 541 and 542.

The Justinian plague in northern Norway?

One of the world's foremost research communities on plague is found today at the University of Oslo under the leadership of Professor Nils Christian Stenseth.

Researchers there have determined that the plague bacterium must have been imported into Europe time and again. They also see that climate has a lot to do with the development of plagues. As the climate became colder, the rats died. Then the fleas that carried the plague shifted to people.

"If we are going to find traces of plague on people from as far back as the 500s, my tip is that we investigate skeletons in northern Norway," Iversen said.

The climate is cooler in northern Norway and skeletons are better preserved. In addition, some bone remnants in northern Norway are found in calcareous shell sand.

Iversen warns that scientists will need a lot of luck to find plague bacteria in people who lived 1500 years ago.
The entire Norrland depopulated

To find more pieces of the puzzle surrounding the Fimbul winter, we now travel to Sweden.

In recent years, several researchers have taken an interest in what Swedish scientists now commonly call "the incident in 536".

Now that Swedish archaeologists know what to look for from this time period, they, like their Norwegian counterparts, they find evidence of the disaster.

Archaeologists see that a large number of Swedish farms were abandoned in the mid-500s. Large areas where animals had grazed are being repopulated by trees — just like in Norway.

The northern part of Sweden — Norrland — may have been completely depopulated.

Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist is both a historian and climate scientist at Stockholm University. He is particularly interested in the volcanic explosions he believes must have taken place in the years 536 and 540. Ljungqvist has recently published a popular science book on how people through history have been affected by the climate. (Photo: Private)

Half of Swedish farms abandoned

Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist is both a historian and climate scientist at Stockholm University.

“It is now clear from Swedish archaeological research that perhaps as much as 50 per cent of the population disappeared from Mälardalen, Öland and Gotland. Almost half of all buildings were abandoned,” he says.

Climate scientists believe there must have been a huge volcanic eruption in the year 536.

“It probably happened somewhere in the non-tropical part of the northern hemisphere. The outbreak caused large quantities of aerosols (tiny particles) to be sent high into the atmosphere,” he said.

This was followed by an even bigger volcanic disaster in the year 540.

“This must have happened somewhere near the Equator. Maybe it was El Chichón volcano in southern Mexico,” he said.

The tiny particles from the two volcanic eruptions remained in the atmosphere for several years, leading to strong cooling in the northern hemisphere. Ljungqvist points out that there are now a number of studies of annual rings in old trees that confirm this.

He points out that the cumulative effect of two huge volcanic eruptions in the years 536 and 540 was what made this cooling quite exceptional and very long lasting.

“Today we know that this is probably the most severe cooling the Earth has experienced in more than 2000 years,” says Ljungqvist.
Frost in trees in the middle of summer

It was so cold that frost formed inside trees in the middle of summer.

Traces of this have been found in Russia, among other places. It is very rare for trees to freeze internally during the summer.

“The cooling may have been 3-4 degrees on average in the summer of 536 and somewhat less the years that followed. About the same time, the cooling resumed in the year 540. It may not sound like much. But the cold was hardly spread evenly throughout the summer. Certain periods in the summer were probably extra cold, while other parts of the summer probably had normal temperatures,” Ljungqvist says.

Another issue was the low sunlight. Sunlight was unable to penetrate the ash layer in the atmosphere. Without sunlight, plants failed. People were not able to grow food. They couldn’t grow hay for their animals.

Ljungqvist notes that the cold summers after 536 in some places seem to have experienced heavy rainfall.

Grain matured, but rotted.

Then came the plague

There are no written sources from the Nordic countries from as early as the 500s.

But in Italy, historian Flavius Cassidorus in 536 reports a sky full of dark clouds and sunlight lasting just a few hours a day.

In Constantinople, the historian Prokopios writes of a constant solar eclipse.

From Ireland there are depictions of famine.

From China there are written sources that speak of snow in the middle of summer.

Then — in the year 541 — the Justinian plague comes to Europe.

“In southern Europe we know this plague epidemic was as brutal as the Black Death 800 years later. There is a lot of evidence that the plague in the 500s also reached Northern Europe, although we do not have written sources that describe it,” says Ljungqvist.

In 2013, German scientists were able to confirm that three people buried in today's Germany were infected by the pest bacterium Yersina pestis during this period.

If the plague reached north of the Alps, Ljungqvist considers it likely that it also reached Scandinavia.

“Together, the dramatic cooling of the climate and the Justinian plague may have created a disaster for people that was even greater than the Black Death,” Ljungqvist thinks. He has published a popular science book in Sweden, Klimatet och männskan under 12000 år, (Climate and Man over 12,000 Years).

Ljungqvist also co-authored a research article in 2016 in the journal Nature Geoscience. Here the researchers used the name Late Antique Little Ice Age to describe the period from 536 to 660.

A dramatic transition

In Norway, the centuries before the year 550 are called the Migration Period. The time after 550 and up to the year 800 is called the Merovingian Period. Then comes the Viking Age.

The transition from the Migration Period to the Merovingian Period around the year 550 also marks the transition from the older Iron Age to the younger Iron Age.

The catastrophe thus occurred in the transition between the Migration Period and the Merovingian Period, and in the transition from older to younger Iron Age.

This is transition where researchers — as you probably already have understood —have suspected for some time that something dramatic must have happened.

Now we know what this dramatic happening was.

A typical Scandinavian gold braided bracteate with a figure of a horse and reverse swastika at the bottom. The runes on the bracteate say Alu. The bracteate is from the time around to the climate disaster. The swastika is an ancient symbol in many cultures, including in Scandinavia. This bracteate was found in Sweden. 

(Photo: Sigune / Wikimedia Commons)

The graves that disappeared

Here are some other indications from Norway of the disaster from 1500 years ago:

In Norway, the number of burial finds at the beginning of the Merovingian Period falls by at least 90 per cent, compared with the number of finds from the Migration Period. To repeat: This was the time before and after the disaster.

This change could certainly be due to new burial customs. But an equally likely cause is the combined effect of the volcanic eruptions in 536 and 540, and the Justinian plague.

In Denmark, archaeologist Morten Axboe found that large quantities of gold and other precious metal jewellery were sacrificed right after the climate shock.

Axboe's theory is that these sacrifices were actions of desperate people. They sought to mollify higher powers and asked them to bring the sun back into the sky.

A strangely quiet time

An article about the Merovingian Period (550-800) on Norgeshistorie.no is entitled “Hundre års tystnad,” which translates as “A hundred years of silence.”

Per Ditlof Fredriksen is an associate professor at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo and authored the article.

Fredriksen calls the first part of this historical period a strangely quiet time in Norway. Like Iversen at the Museum of Cultural History, he points out that from the years 550 to 650 there are very few archaeological finds in Norway.

It’s not just that people stop building houses and burying their dead.

It also looks like people are forgetting how to make important tools. Tools they definitely needed.

It is only beginning around the year 650 that archaeologists see that human life in Norway was once again beginning to return to normal. But then much of the technology was new. A lot of knowledge had obviously disappeared. For example, people started making iron in a whole new way.

In Rogaland and the surrounding areas, until the disaster 1500 years ago, there were many skilled goldsmiths.

Both they and their craft disappeared.

The same thing happened to the many talented potters who had lived in western Norway before the Merovingian Period, from Jæren in the south to Sogn in the north.

It would take another thousand years before equally fine pottery was made in Norway.

Which volcanoes were they?

The clearest indications that there were two different volcanic eruptions in succession that created the Fimbul winter are from ice cores obtained from inland ice sheets on Greenland.

Some researchers have suggested the Ilopango volcano in El Salvador as the cause of the first disaster in 536. Another alternative is Krakatau in Indonesia.

Instead, Ljungqvist thinks El Chichón in southern Mexico was the most likely cause, based on what researchers know today.

In 1982 it turned out that El Chichón is still a deadly volcano. An eruption at that time cost 2000 people their lives. Prior to this, the volcano had not erupted since 1360 and people were not prepared for the sleeping giant to wake up.

There’s little doubt that aerosols released by volcanoes into the atmosphere can affect the Earth's climate today.

The higher in the atmosphere the aerosols reach, the longer the effect will last. What is probably decisive is whether the aerosols reach the stratosphere, or altitudes over 10,000 metres — which is the altitude where most of the air traffic is.

Huge volcanic eruptions are not uncommon

The United Nations Climate Panel (IPCC) wrote in a report from 2013 on how climate change over the last 2000 years may have been affected by volcanoes. Much of the knowledge researchers today have about the effects of volcanic eruptions back in time comes from ice cores gleaned from Greenland and Antarctica.

The researchers behind the IPCC report found that there have only been two or three hundred years since the Viking Age without very large volcanic eruptions that have affected the climate significantly.

The fact that the whole of the last century — the 20th century — was without gigantic volcanic eruptions may have helped make this be something that few of us imagine could happen again.

But it will certainly happen again.

Giant volcanic eruptions that affect the climate over a long period are actually not very rare.

It’s common for the climate and temperature of the Earth to be affected for one to three years after a huge volcanic eruption, depending on the number of aerosols that reach far into the atmosphere.

If several such gigantic volcanic eruptions were to occur in succession — as they probably did in years 536 and 540 — the impact on the climate would be even greater.

If this happens again, there are a lot more people on Earth who will need food.

On the other hand, society is much better prepared for this kind of disaster. We can transport food and mostly everything else we need over long distances. The people who lived in cold Norway 1500 years ago couldn’t do this. They were completely dependent on the food they grew and the animals they raised themselves.

The year 1816 is also called "The Year Without Summer". The reason was the Indonesian volcano Tambora, which during an eruption spewed huge amounts of dust into the atmosphere. In Western Europe and eastern North America, this caused the sunlight to disappear, temperatures became colder and crops failed. The Nordic region was not hit as hard. (Photo: Jialiang Gao / Wikimedia Commons)

1816 was "The Year Without Summer"

The year 1816 has become known as "The Year Without Summer".

It was an unusually cold year in Western Europe and the eastern part of North America. There was also an unusual amount of rain. In the spring after — in 1817 —grain prices in parts of Europe doubled.

The main cause of the unusually cold summer of 1816 was the explosion of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia. But in the years before the Tambora eruption, there had been four other major volcanic eruptions, all of which had spewed a lot of dust into the atmosphere.

The natural disaster in 1816 was hardly of the same magnitude as the disaster of 536. It was nevertheless severe.

It is therefore worth noting that the consequences were not at all the same. Two hundred years ago, the world was becoming modern.

In 1816 there was extensive international trade. Ships could carry a lot of food. People in distress could go to America, and many left. Several countries had a kind of social welfare system in place that could help the very poor. National health care systems and most people had become much better at preventing plague epidemics.

If we are again struck by a disaster like the one that happened in the 500s, we would be much better equipped to face it.

A lot of scientific articles will be written about what happened. Many will write books. Millions will tweet or post on Facebook.

Many of us nevertheless still believe in myths.

But we are unlikely to ever experience a Fimbul winter again.

———

American politicians use the Nordic region as both a role model and a scare tactic
Different groups use the Nordic countries for different rhetorical purposes, one political scientist observes.

Bård Amundsen JOURNALIST
Siw Ellen Jakobsen JOURNALIST
Wednesday 04. november 2020 - 

In the years under President Donald Trump, the Nordic countries have played a more visible role in American politics.

The Nordics are used as a role model — and as a scare tactic — because not everyone agrees that Norway and the Nordic countries allow people to fulfil their dreams.
Obama, Sanders and Trump

“The USA is no longer the country of the future,” states sociology professor Haldor Byrkjeflot from the University of Oslo (UiO).

This harsh reality has caused many Americans to search for alternatives. The search has led to the emergence of the Nordic region as one of the few shining lights in the world.


Former US presidential hopeful and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a "democratic socialist", has referred to Nordic solutions many, many times, citing virtues such as free higher education, parental leave and a health care system for all.

Barack Obama is also very fond of the Nordic countries. He has proposed that Americans consider programmes from the Nordic region as an alternative to a collapsed American dream.

Even Donald Trump has his use for the Nordics.

But not in the same way as Sanders and Obama. Among other things, Trump has used Sweden as an example of how wrong things can go with a country’s handling of the coronavirus. "Sweden is having a terrible time. Sweden is haunted,” he said in June.

Since then, things have gone even worse for Trump and the United States.
The Nordic region as a dream and a nightmare

Trump and his administration have used the Nordic region as a dream or a nightmare, depending on the situation and their need for different arguments, Byrkjeflot said during a meeting on the Nordic region's role in American politics, organized by the major research initiative UiO: Nordic.

Byrkjeflot says that Trump and his advisers probably probably perceived it as a threat when Bernie Sanders initiated a discussion in the United States on the successful Nordic model.

For Trump, this could have been dangerous for his re-election campaign, if it had turned out that the "socialist" Sanders was the Democrats' candidate. Trump and his supporters consequently invoked the very special American fear of socialism that grew out of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and which is still a concern for many adult Americans.

In 2018, the Trump administration came out with its own anti-socialist report examining the disadvantages associated with policies similar to those in Norway and the Nordic countries. A chapter entitled "Socialism costs" says, among other things, that inhabitants of the USA have a 15 per cent higher standard of living compared with the inhabitants of the Nordic countries. This last statement has been soundly refuted by researchers at Statistics Norway (SSB).

Both Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama have been interested in the Nordic model. 

(Photo: Gary Cameron / Reuters / NTB)

Many now find socialism attractive

It appears that the strategy of promoting the Nordic region as scary hasn’t succeeded very well, says Byrkjeflot.

“That Bernie Sanders calls us socialists, not social democrats, is perhaps not unproblematic. But socialism is actually becoming increasingly popular among young people in the United States,” he said during the UiO:Nordic meeting.

Surveys among people under the age of 30 in the United States show that they actually perceive socialism as being as attractive as capitalism, according to a Gallup Poll survey conducted in late 2019.

The now 31-year-old "democratic socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez entered Congress in 2019 with a large majority from New York and as the youngest female representative in the House of Representatives ever. Over a short time, she has established herself as one of the most popular politicians in the United States.
The Nordic region as a progressive ideal

Hilmar Mjelde is a political scientist who studies American politics at the University of Bergen. He believes that left-leaning voters in United States now see the Nordic region as a progressive ideal.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have different ways of using the Nordic region as a scare tactic.

“Different groups use the Nordic countries for different rhetorical purposes,” Mjelde said. “But this is very much an elite discourse. The average American has no relationship whatsoever to the Nordic countries. They aren’t even able to find the Nordic countries on a map.”

Mjelde is also concerned that Americans don’t seem to understand social classes.

When Bernie Sanders didn’t succeed in his bid to become president, it was partly because a group like African Americans— who are the most socially and economically disadvantaged group in all of the United States —think of themselves more as an ethnic group, rather than as a social class.

Sceptical of centralize government

Mjelde also talked about Americans' baked-in scepticism of centralized government.

“The American political system is designed to spread power. This is a mainstay of the system. Consequently, it’s in the very backbone of Americans to be sceptical of anything that has to do with the state,” he said.

In that context, he said, it’s a huge paradox that Americans now seem to have such extreme trust in "the great leader".

"First there was a personality cult around Obama, and now there’s one surrounding Trump."
The United States was a society of equality

Kalle Moene is a social economist at the University of Oslo and is particularly concerned with the United States and the Nordic countries from the perspective of inequality.

He points out that 150 to 200 years ago, the United States was one of the most egalitarian countries in the world. At the same time, Europe was very class-based.

Class never affected how policies were organized in the United States. The United States also never developed a large Social Democratic party. As a result, there was never any pressure to establish the same kinds of welfare schemes that evolved in European countries.

The United States has now become one of the countries with the largest economic disparities in the Western world, according to the OECD.

Developed welfare schemes similar to Europe's

But developments in the United States could have gone differently.

“After the mid-1930s, with the exception of the war, the United States had something that looked a little like what had been developed in the Nordic region,” Moene said. “They had a fairly high percentage of workers who belonged to unions, between 30 and 40 per cent in many sectors. The wage differences were smaller than they had been in a long time,” he said.

At the same time, he said, the US expanded its welfare state schemes in a way that was similar to Europe.

But that all ground to a halt in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nordic model developed over time, not adopted whole cloth

Moene says that what some call the Nordic Model is not something that has been deliberately adopted.

Instead, he says, it is something that has evolved.

“There have been gradual reforms, and trial and error over long periods,” Moene said, adding that many Norwegian union leaders were once very inspired by unions in the United States. They actually travelled to the US to study them.
Could the United States become socialist?

Moene wonders whether the way the Nordic region is organized is perhaps most appropriate for small economies that are open and that compete on the world market.

“The United States is a large and mostly closed economy,” he said.

Perhaps the Nordic model was established over time because of the need to demonstrate competitiveness externally to the world while at the same time striving to promote socialist equality internally. That might have been the pressure that drove Nordic reforms, he said.

If that’s true, then it won’t be easy for other countries, such as the USA, to copy what has been achieved in the Nordic countries.

Moene believes it’s naive to think that one model of society can be exported from one country to another.

But countries can still learn from each other.

“An important lesson for the United States may be that small wage differences and collective insurance schemes can work well with a high degree of market orientation,” he said.

Translated by: Nancy Bazilchuk

NIETZSCHE'S CURSE 

Mercury, bloodletting and animals were weapons in the fight against the shameful epidemic of the 18th century

The disease syphilis and the treatment used for it often had dramatic consequences for the patient. (Photo: St Bartholomew's Hospital Archives & Museum)

Sexually transmitted diseases spread through Norway in the 1700s. But was sex their only means of transmission?

Siw Ellen Jakobsen

JOURNALIST
Monday 19. october 2020 - 13:03

“People at that time had a clear notion that immorality was the root of these diseases,” says Susann Holmberg.

She recently earned her doctorate from the University of Oslo, in which she takes a closer look at the epidemic of the time, then called venereal diseases.

Today we understand these primarily as the sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) syphilis and gonorrhoea.

Was prostitution the cause?

There is no good reason why people should suddenly have started having more sex in the 18th century.

So why did the diseases spread in Norway right at this time, including into rural areas?

In countries like England, France and Germany, prostitution and brothels play an important role in the debate about how sexually transmitted diseases spread.

This was not the case in Norway, where prostitution is not specifically mentioned in the sources related to these diseases like it is on the continent, Holmberg says.

Sexual intercourse before and outside of marriage were considered crimes at the time.

“But even though sexual intercourse before and outside of marriage was forbidden, it doesn’t mean that it didn’t occur. We’ve found evidence of this kind of sexual activity in the form of lawsuits related to infidelity and adultery,” she says.

Susann Holmberg has studied the embarrassing diseases of the 18th century. (Photo: UiO)

Johanne Corina Bergkvist has explored vagrancy cases from 1790-1802 in depth for her master's degree.

“Drunkeness and noise were the reasons why some brothels were referred to in the sources as notorious houses,” she says.

They appear to be pubs where some young women lived. But prostitution wasn’t being prosecuted, so therefore these places were infrequently mentioned in the interrogations.

“We don’t see the term prostitution used in the sources. This makes it difficult to establish how many brothels there were, the number of women who were prostitutes and the conditions they lived in,” says Bergkvist.

Were the diseases transmitted in non-sexual ways?

One theory as to why the diseases spread is that they were not just sexually transmitted.

They could also have been transmitted by sharing eating utensils or by sharing a bed without having sex, Holmberg says.

We now know that "endemic syphilis," which is still found in poor areas in tropical regions today, causes a disease similar to sexually transmitted syphilis.

Even in the 1700s, a distinction was made between those who had been innocently infected and those who were guilty, the researcher says.

A large survey from 1743 is one of many sources Holmberg has used in her research.

The central administration, which was based in Copenhagen at the time, needed more information to understand this country of Norway in the far north that they were to govern.

A long list of questions was sent to all the priests and bishops in Norway.

Holmberg believes this is a good source as to which diseases were wreaking havoc at the time.

“Rade” disease perceived as an epidemic

Later, around 1770, people became very concerned about another disease in Norway.

The illness was called “rade” disease (radesyken), the Norwegian name for “the wicked disease” and it was considered an epidemic.

Those who became sick with the disease got deep sores all over their bodies. The result could be sunken noses and obstruction of the throat.

The disease was perceived by many as being sexually transmitted.

Later, in the 19th century, the disease was considered a form of syphilis. Today, researchers believe that they are different diseases.

Not many doctors available

Around 1750, only five official physicians in Norway and a corresponding number of private practitioners had been trained at the University of Copenhagen.

By the late 18th century, the number of university-educated doctors and surgeons was growing.

In the fight against rade disease and sexually transmitted diseases, 16 hospitals were established in Norway for these patients throughout the 18th century, according to Anne Kveim Lie.

She is a physician and received her doctorate on rade disease in 2008

.
Much of the treatment was similar

The vast majority of patients received treatment from people other than doctors and surgeons, including priests and pharmacists.

In addition, healers included countless wise-women and self-taught travelling "specialists."

But whether you received treatment from a university-educated doctor or just a folk healer, many elements of the treatment were the same, says Lie.

Mercury was the most prevalent method for treating sexually transmitted diseases. Bloodletting was another common method.

Lie believes there was still a quality difference between the practitioners.

“Educated doctors had learned about many different places on the body for bloodletting and employed several different doses of mercury, whereas folk healers would use the same method for everything.

Did mercury have an effect?

By today's medical perspective, little suggests that the 18th-century treatments would have had an effect, Lie believes.

“But patients continued to return to their practitioners, at least those who were locally known, so they must have found that the treatment worked. We see from the hospital records that numerous patients were discharged as healthy,” she says.

Might that have been because the disease was in a non-symptomatic phase? Or was it because small amounts of mercury actually do have an effect on some STDs? Lie believes it’s difficult to know.

“Mercury treatments – in various forms and doses – were in use until the 1920s in Norway,” she says.

Many missing a nose

In the 18th century, a Danish bishop registered that many patients lacked a nose.

That entry triggered an investigation. Doctors thought the reason was because quacks had wrongly treated patients with mercury.

A law against quackery was enacted in 1794, Holmberg says.

Folk healers could still apply to treat people within a geographically limited area, if they could prove their knowledge. But only a few of them, on the other hand, applied for such a license in Norway.

Many doctors in Holmberg’s sources point out that lots of folk healers were still practicing well into the 19th century.

“And the doctors themselves express that they meet a lot of scepticism from the local population, even though their numbers had grown,” she says.

Great shame

Great shame was associated with these diseases, so going to a stranger with such embarrassing and difficult problems was probably not easy.

Holmberg believes this is one of the reasons why wise-women and other folk healers were used for so long, and why the distrust of doctors was so great.

“Besides, if you think that your disorder comes from something supernatural, then you’d probably go to a person who has a lot of insight into these matters to get treatment,” she says.

Sex with innocents

Folk healers often turned to God when they treated patients.

One piece of advice Holmberg came across was to write a message addressed to God that would be placed on the patient's naked body. God would then remove the disease.

Another idea was that disease could be transmitted from a human to an animal, for example through food, such as bread, which contained the sweat of the sick person.

Holmberg came across a recipe for boiled urine, given to an animal that would then become the recipient of the disease. The urine or sweat would pull the disease away from the patient and into the animal.

She also found a lawsuit from the early 1800s in which a child was sexually abused to cleanse the adult man of illness.

Avoid stigmatizing infected patients

Lie believes that knowledge of past infectious diseases can teach us something about the current COVID-19 situation.

“COVID -19 is transmitted differently than STDs are. But for all infectious diseases, the authorities need to have the trust of the population to be able to prevent infection,” says Lie.

“If the disease means that the patients who get it are condemned by society, it makes it much more difficult to admit to being infected and ask to be tested.”

She believes we have to avoid enemy stereotypes and stigmatizing patients in order to fight an epidemic.

Translated by: Ingrid P. Nuse

———

Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no

Menstrual capitalism: A lot of people profit from your monthly menstruation

Products cannot solve all our period problems, warns menstruation researcher Camilla Mørk Røstvik. (Photo: Pixel-Shot / Shutterstock / NTB)

SHARE YOUR SCIENCE: Menstruation presents an endlessly renewed commercial opportunity for period-product manufacturers, who are finding new ways to infiltrate wider markets in an era when taboos are being chipped away. But issues remain that products can’t solve.

Camilla Mørk Røstvik

Thursday 08. october 2020 - 

In recent years period activism has hit the global headlines, busting taboos, driving public policy, and prompting companies to create new products. In some countries, including the US, UK, Canada, India and Australia, menstrual equity – the right to equal access to menstrual products and reproductive education, often with a focus on financial issues such as removing the ‘tampon tax’ – has become big news.

However, activists, academics and indeed many people who experience a menstrual cycle are growing increasingly concerned about corporate influence.

While menstruation is a normal event, it has also, in the last 100 years, become a profitable one.

For monetary capital, the monthly occurrence of blood, especially for young people, presents numerous commercial options for cleaning it up, experimenting with hormonal birth control, and trying to make it, as one business recently put it, “cool”.

"The monthly occurence of blood presents numerous commercial options for cleaning it up, and making it cool", writes researcher Camilla Mørk Røstvik.

 (Photo: Jo Hanely, Wellcome Collection)

 

Let’s talk about menstruation


New types of menstrual products, such as tampons, pads, cups, period pants, vitamins, hormones, teas and foods, and apps to track your cycle, are proliferating as entrepreneurs across the globe are shaking up the market.

A parallel increase is seen in the public interest in the topic. Menstruation is discussed in popular science books and podcasts. Popular culture increasingly depicts menstruation, like for instance the tv-shows ‘Orange is the New Black’, ‘Mad Men’ and more recently ‘I May Destroy You’. In my native country of Norway, the national broadcaster NRK this fall offers its young viewers a show simply called ‘menstruation’ (Mensen).

As images and descriptions of bleeding by artists and writers such as Jen Lewis, Rupi Kaur, and Chella Quint become more mainstream, products aimed at issues other than blood have followed. These include following different skincare routines depending on where you are in your cycle and ‘seed cycling’, which claims that eating specific types of seed before and after ovulation can balance hormones.

Menstruation is everywhere. But while this is mostly a good thing, there is reason for caution. The American lawyer Bridget Crawford, a professor at Pace University in New York, describes what she calls “menstrual capitalism” as: 

“the marketing and selling of menstrual hygiene products by means of feminist messages that attempt to create a public-relations ‘halo effect’ for companies that are, at their core, commercial enterprises”.

Menstruating in the “right way”

For people who menstruate or experience contraceptive-induced withdrawal bleeding, commercial products have for decades been a large part of how to handle symptoms and menstrual blood in “the right way”.

In her book ‘Issues of Blood: The Politics of Menstruation’, feminist activist Sophie Laws describes what she calls “menstrual etiquette”. This is a system that means there is nothing to be gained by being noticeably menstruating.

It may perhaps be ok to buy several menstruation-related products, and go to a mensturation themed vernissage. But is it ok to bleed through your clothes? And do these cultural and commercial solutions help those who can barely move due to the monthly pain their menstruation causes them?

In March 2015, poet Rupi Kaur posted a photo of herself lying on a bed with blood on her trousers and on the sheet. The photo was removed by Instagram and created headlines all over the world. Kaur said she knew the image was provocative, but had not at all expected the furore that followed. Instagram apologized and said the image had been removed by mistake. (Screenshot from artists instagram account)

Historian of science Sharra Vostral argues that people who are menstruating must go through something akin to a “passing process”, where the goal is to always appear non-menstruating.

The promise that a tampon can solve all menstrual-cycle issues is seductive, but not true. This is apparent for instance through Vostrals research on Toxic Shock Syndrom, TSS.

TSS is a rare but serious condition due to toxic substances that can develop in tampons, and that in its most severe cases can lead to death. Today tampon users are warned against this, but it is less known that it was the company Procter & Gamble and their international competitors who created this situation by developing super absorbing tampons like the brand Rely in the 1980s.

TSS is still somehow present as a warning for the big companies, who today are profiting off a much more positive menstruation debate.

Tackling period poverty

Early on, the industry asserted that once a young consumer was hooked on a product, they would stay loyal. Now that entrepreneurs have entered this hitherto stagnant market, even multinational corporations realise that this might no longer be true.

One issue for many people around the world is the cost of sanitary products. Some governments are moving to mitigate this problem: Scotland, for example, is following in the footsteps of Kenya by introducing a policy to provide free products to combat period poverty. Policymakers in the Scottish government are procuring from many brands, including social enterprises, but multinational corporations also take their share of the investment.

In the United Kingdom, US corporation Procter & Gamble, which manufactures sanitary product brands Tampax and Always, and sanitary-bin provider PHS are on the government appointed Period Poverty Taskforce. This was formed in 2019 after activists succeeded in making politicians take notice of the problem of expensive sanitary products among poor people in the UK, especially children.

The inclusion of these companies in the taskforce has raised important questions: Why are the corporations that in part created period poverty through their pricing models now expected to solve the problem? And what will happen to the other issues that activists campaigned on, such as pain or stigma?

Nadya Okamoto founder of PERIOD, an American non-profit organization working for menstrual equity, speaks at the Capitol during a National Period Day rally in Washington. Activism to end period poverty and for period equity has made headlines all over the world in recent years. (Kevin Wolf/AP Images for Seventh Generation)

Sold lower-standard products to African countries

In the global south these same corporations have been donating products to women in developing countries for many years, often in collaboration with policymakers. This has been done to combat the assumed ‘backward’ thinking of people who use cloth or natural materials rather than more ‘modern’ disposable products. A goal is to get women to start using products at a young age, as this makes it more likely they will become loyal consumers.

In her book, The Managed Body, Professor Chris Bobel writes about the problems with such colonizing attitudes, and shows how products – both in the north and the south – rarely lead to the automatic freedom that the companies promise. There is a huge contrast between how big multinational corporations relate to consumers in different parts of the world, insinuating that western corporations are better developed to ‘modernise’ the culture of menstruation internationally.

Paradoxically, people in the West are increasingly turning towards reusables at the same time that folks in the global south are told to embrace disposable ‘feminine hygiene’.

But consumers are increasingly critical of this situation. Kenyans for instance, have boldly discussed the technological failure of Western products in the #MyAlwaysExperience scandal, when a number of people found that Always pads caused a rash. Those complaining on Twitter alleged that Procter & Gamble supplied African countries with lower-standard products than those in the West, which they suggested was the reason for the skin irritation. It turned out they were right – the products sold in African countries were of a lower quality than those sold in for instance Norway.

Also, a UK government report on period-related bullying, and the recent death of a Kenyan girl mocked for menstrual stains make it clear that corporate and governmental efforts to solve period shame through products have not worked.
Back to making and washing sanitary pads?

At the same time, 2018 saw the launch in the US of the reusable Tampax Cup, outfitted with disposable Tampax vaginal wipes. This launch followed the success of smaller companies like DivaCup, Mooncup and Lunette who brought the period cup back to the market in the 2010s. The period cup in itself is a much older 19th century invention.

Even if most people still use sanitary pads and tampons (or skip their menstruation due to hormonal contraceptives), the small increase in sales of alternative products was enough to make the big players like P&G give it a go.

Tampax applicator tampons are one of the oldest and most successful commercial menstrual brands in the world, due in part to their disposability and a structure that makes it unnecessary to touch blood. In contrast to this, the Tampax Cup was not a success.

Menstrual cups, in comparison, have a much longer and unsteady history, for the opposite reasons. They rely on a lot of contact with body and blood (something which may not be possible or ok for many), and they can also be expensive.

Consumers in the 1930s, when the first Tampax came on to the market, preferred disposable doses of menstrual protection to the cup’s hands-on insertion. However, the Tampax Cup exemplifies how the traditional industry is responding to the fact that the great-great-grandchildren of their first consumers are changing habits.

Our grandmothers made their own reusable sanitary pads and washed them in between uses. Today a new generation may not look upon this with aversion, they might find it an attractive option. If so, then disposable sanitary pads and tampons have lasted for around a century, as a typical yet not much discussed example of the 20th centuries throwaway culture.

The small increase in sales of reusable products like the menstrual cup during the past decade was enough for big players like Proctor & Gamble to try and launch their own cup product. (Foto: Olga Pink / Shutterstock / NTB Scanpix)

Going beyond the market

In comparison to what corporations offer, the lived experiences of people who bleed (available through #MyAlwaysExperience and #EndPeriodPoverty, for example), reveal a more complicated set of factors.

Consumers are growing restless, and demanding answers to more questions than “How can I keep my underwear clean?” Menstrual pain, heavy bleeding and endometriosis remain pressing issues for many. At the very least consumers would like to know what ingredients their products are actually made of.

The upside to recent corporate interest is that menstruation is being recognised as important, all over the world. The downside is that this recognition is still mostly driven by the wish to sell more products and, so far, seems to mostly benefit those who sell products. When menstruation now increasingly is a topic of public debate, it’s important to remind ourselves of who is talking, and who has something to profit from upholding ideas of menstruation etiquette.

In the UK, Kenya and the rest of the world, activists continue to fight against period poverty and other menstrual issues that cannot be solved by products. Better menstrual care means going beyond what the market alone can deliver.

———

Camilla Mørk Røstvik

RESEARCHER, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS AND UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS

This article is a reworked version of a text first published in the Wellcome Collection.

Read a Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no
The ScienceNorway Researchers' zone consists of opinions, blogs and popular science pieces written by researchers and scientists from or based in Norway.

Tackling the Menstruation Taboo

Sarah Fourcassier  JUNE 2020  GREEN EUROPEAN JOURNAL 

The fight against single-use plastics has been a key battle for environmentalists in recent years. Yet while items like plastic straws have received much attention, the same cannot be said of disposable menstrual products, though their ecological impact may be much higher. Sarah Fourcassier explores how menstrual capitalism reproduces deeply entrenched taboos to profit at the expense of wellbeing, environment and gender equality. Taking a stand, radical menstrual activism demands fairer, healthier and sustainable practices.

In the last couple of years, the number of ecological alternatives to traditional tampons and sanitary pads has exploded on the femcare market, from menstrual cups and reusable pads to period panties. Most of these products are not innovations. On the contrary, they have long histories and have failed to succeed in the past.

Socio-political structures in Western culture have shaped our perceptions of menstruation to sell products that are harmful to human health and the environment. They have created a system that feeds off and reinforces negative perceptions of menstruation: menstrual capitalism. Looking at the evolution of these perceptions from the 1800s reveals how the menstrual care industry and its marketing strategies are born from the inequalities of patriarchal society.

Menstrual activism highlights the multifaceted problems of this system, both in terms of its gendered and ecological impacts. Radical menstrual activists propose a way forward that puts aside the interests of femcare corporations to instead serve the environment and human health in an inclusive way.

Perceptions of menstruation: a brief history

Nearly every civilisation has socially constructed taboos about menstruation. Prior to the rise of modern science in Western countries during the late 19th century, menstrual blood was shrouded in contradictions based on fear, misunderstanding, and the beliefs of mainly patriarchal religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Such taboos remain current in many parts of the world today. In India, almost 80 per cent of menstruating girls observe religious restrictions, half observe restrictions on touching people or special foods, and a quarter sit or sleep separately from other family members.

Through this education, girls internalise the male gaze attached to feelings of shame and disgust, and the need to hide and conceal menstrual blood.

In the Western world, the medical sciences shifted perceptions of menstruation from pre-modern taboos to medicalisation focused on hygiene. Yet the male-centred view retained its influence. The belief that menstrual blood was toxic and abject persisted in medical sciences through the 20th century but its roots lie in ancient superstition. The Greek physician Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine”, claimed that menstruation served to rid the body of harmful substances. In 1920, Dr Bela Schick coined the term “menotoxin” after concluding that flowers handled by a menstruating nurse wilted more quickly. Menotoxin was thought to be the source of the toxicity of menstrual blood. During the first decades of the 20th century, menstruation was still believed to be a way to get rid of “bad blood”. This theory was only disproved in the late 1950s. More than just blood, the menstruation process as a whole began to be seen as a feminine handicap. Medical texts framing menstruation as dirty and taboo date back to the 13th century, but it was until well into the 20th century that swimming or taking a bath during menstruation was thought to induce illness.

The rise of medical knowledge and its importance in daily life enabled subtle forms of social control over the human body. Today, pubescent girls are instructed on the “proper way” to menstruate and what it means for their body: they are able to procreate. Socially, this rite has often been linked to entering womanhood and perpetuates “feminine” stereotypes such as the “crazy menstruating woman”, or assumptions that all women menstruate. Through this education, girls internalise the male gaze attached to feelings of shame and disgust, and the need to hide and conceal menstrual blood. Because it is mostly women that menstruate, menstruation is associated with inferiority, legitimising women’s oppression.

Corporate control

In the UK, this control most notably plays out through the education system. Femcare companies donate period education lesson plans and product samples to schools. These are branded and point students to the brand’s website for more information (such as Always in the UK and the US). These marketing techniques are disguised as “corporate social responsibility” to improve the school attendance of female pupils. The environmental impacts of the products are ignored and few lesson plans present alternatives to the companies’ single-use products.

While menstrual education and school attendance are important, the need for branded samples and teaching resources is debatable. It is the only school subject reliant on branded materials. Policymakers need to help schools form a curriculum which provides holistic and impartial menstruation education, without the involvement of private interests. Schools should provide unbranded products and make toilets available and clean at all times, with water, dryers, and bins. In the UK, the Period Positive campaign aims to change perceptions of menstruation by developing positive narratives through a menstrual literacy programme for teenagers.

Today, periods are characterised as a shameful hassle, best kept hidden even from the person menstruating. Femcare companies capitalise on this taboo, creating products that will help the menstruator to erase the reality of menstruation. Reminders like stains are markers of the stigmatisation of menstruators as unclean and irrational, and often result in social distancing. Some go to great hygienic lengths, using products and practices such as douching to “pass” as non-bleeders. For some, disposable products are an effective way for women to hide their periods.[1] Yet the promotion of “passing” reinforces the shame associated with this bodily process, a perception handed down to the next generation. Tampax applicator tampons are one of the oldest and most successful products on the global femcare market, in part due to their disposability and a design that makes it unnecessary to touch blood. The success of menstrual cups has been much more unsteady, for precisely the opposite reason. Adverts promote products that can be opened silently, are discreet and easy to dispose of. Brands push “innovative” products at a higher price but these innovations tend to come down to aesthetics: the product may “smell like flowers”, be “odourless”, or have new packaging.


As these corporations spread their products across the world, they spread the ideal of the modern menstruator as discreet, clean, active, female, and white.

Corporations use processes of international development to extend their control over menstruating bodies. Global North-based corporations have long donated menstrual education programmes and products to developing countries, often in collaboration with policymakers. Procter & Gamble, for example, conducts a programme across India’s schools to educate young girls about menstruation and the importance of sanitary products for hygiene. This project is based on a logic assuming that the use of cloth or natural materials rather than disposable products is “backwards”.

As these corporations spread their products across the world, they spread the ideal of the modern menstruator as discreet, clean, active, female, and white. This notionally emancipated and sophisticated Western version of menstruation creates a disparity between individuals who can afford disposable menstrual products and those who cannot. Moreover, the commodification contributes to the increasing flow of wealth to Western countries from less-developed nations.

Another marketing ploy is the appropriation of feminist or environmental messaging. This pink- and green-washing is apparent in Always’ “Always Keeping Girls in School” campaign in Africa or, more globally, Tampax’s organic tampons. Such strategies play on the idea of empowerment through making periods less time-consuming and inconvenient at work. Disposable products are presented as more hygienic, easier, and more comfortable.

The idea of emancipation through the control of menstruation was also promoted by parts of second-wave feminism.[2] Some third-wave feminists, however, distance themselves from this view and criticise it as being manipulated by corporations and blinded by taboo. From this critique, two strands of activism have emerged: feminist spiritualist menstrual activism – focused on challenging the taboo and the denigration of menstruation and the female body – and radical menstruation, which sits at the intersection of third-wave feminism, environmental concern, and consumer rights.

Menstruation as a social concern

The Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS) scandal of the 1980s marks a key moment in the history of menstrual activism. At the time, activism focused on reforms and holding corporations to account. When activists pushed for uniform tampon absorbency ratings, they were trying to improve the existing femcare industry. Health issues associated with tampons (such as micro lacerations of the vaginal wall) are often down to misuse due to a lack of information. Catering to the taboo associated with period blood, menstrual products are made to appear as clean as possible, often using dangerous and toxic products for bleaching. Consumers in the US have demanded more transparency on what is in menstrual products, and the State of New York now requires full disclosure of ingredients on product packaging. Whilst producers now must also mention the risk of toxicity associated with highly absorbent internal products, this is usually not clear enough to customers: many know about TSS but do not link it to the product’s absorbency. In the EU, no specific legislation is in place for menstrual products, which fall under the General Product Safety Directive (only safe products can be placed on the market); producers do not have to disclose what the products are made of.

Aside from human health, the taboos surrounding menstruation also have a negative ecological impact. The chemicals used for bleaching products can damage the environment as well as our bodies. Plastic is another issue, both in terms of production and waste. With the popularisation of plastic wrappers, corporations began to use plastic in all of their products. Tampon applicators, for example, went from being cardboard-based to plastic. Most menstruators are expected to produce around 150 kilograms of waste in their lifetime, of which a significant amount will end up in environmentally sensitive areas such as coastal regions. Today, tampon applicators are the fifth most common item found on European beaches. A report by Zero Waste Europe found that in 2017 the EU-28 generated about 590 000 tonnes of waste from over 49 billion disposable menstrual products.

Most menstruators are expected to produce around 150 kilograms of waste in their lifetime, of which a significant amount will end up in environmentally sensitive areas such as coastal regions.

Just as plastic straws are being progressively banned all over the world, menstrual products should not be excluded from debates about plastic waste. Sanitary pads are composed of up to 90 per cent plastic. The processing of polyethylene used in tampon applicators and pads requires large amounts of fossil fuel-generated energy. Each of those products takes 500 to 1000 years to decompose. Many component chemicals pollute groundwater and soil, while those flushed into the underground water system clog drains and pollute the oceans with microplastics.

Looking to the start of the product lifecycle, the raw materials used in production also create soil and water pollution. Most tampons and pads are made of cotton, or a blend of cotton and rayon. Cotton production degrades soil and uses large amounts of agro-chemicals and water. The production of rayon, a synthetic fibre created from wood pulp, is highly energy- and water-intensive, and causes deforestation and soil impoverishment.

When it comes to carbon footprint, the 46 billion tonnes of menstrual products used yearly in Europe equates to the equivalent of 245 000 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to the annual impact of 52 000 cars. Research has found that using sanitary pads for one year (approximately 240 products) amounts to the equivalent of 8.5 kilograms of CO2 (7.2 kilogrammes for organic pads). The figure falls to 5.3 kilograms for tampons and between 0.02 and 0.04 kilograms for menstrual cups. Environmental impact assessments of reusable menstrual products are currently harder to find but, on the whole, reusable menstrual products are far more environmentally friendly than single-use ones.

The economic dimension of menstruation should also not be overlooked. Buying menstrual products represents a significant cost, especially considering the socio-economic disadvantage already faced by women. This cost is compounded by the “pink tax”. Period products – in countries such as US and UK – are classed as “luxury items” and are taxed at higher rates. The rate applied to menstrual products varies from place to place, from 5 per cent in the UK to up to 27 per cent in Hungary in 2019. The estimated lifetime cost depends on various physiological and social factors but range from 1730 euros according to the BBC in 2017 to an estimated 5360 euros according to NGO Bloody Good Period. Whatever the cost, it is prohibitively high for some, with students and the homeless most affected.

A red warning: menstrual activism

Menstrual activism attributes the harmful environmental, health and economic effects to the corporate and capitalist system, more concerned with profit than ecological concerns or consumer wellbeing.[3] It advocates not reform of the system but its outright rejection, and it challenges the corporate control of the femcare industry over menstruators through their creation of a manufactured dependency on disposable products. Radical menstruation activists oppose the stigma faced by menstruators and the association of menstruation with femininity and womanhood, preferring a more inclusive gender-neutral approach. They recognise the importance of including all genders, specifically trans, non-gender conforming, and non-binary individuals, as well as giving a voice to trans men who menstruate (by putting bins in all bathrooms, for instance) and trans women who do not bleed but still experience a hormonal cycle (through the appearance of certain symptoms). They use the term “menstruators” instead of “women who menstruate” as a strategy to disgender menstruation through language.

Inspired by the punk movement, menstrual activists propose taking power and control over their bodies and menstruation back from corporations. Through shock actions, festivals, and workshops, they present alternatives and deconstruct the “passing” ideal menstruator.

Inspired by the punk movement, menstrual activists propose taking power and control over their bodies and menstruation back from corporations.

The Bloodsisters are widely considered the leaders of the radical menstruation movement.[4] Founded in Montreal in 1995 by Courtney Dailey amongst others, the Bloodsisters fused aesthetic sensibility with political analysis to challenge the status quo on menstruation. Their actions were diverse: zines; activist information networks; graffiti; health, DIY, and self-help workshops; art exhibitions; and industry boycotts. Building on the work of second-wave activists before them (such as the Boston-based women’s collective Our Bodies Ourselves[5]), they rendered the invisible visible, translating menstruation into public actions.

But feminism was not the only movement taking action. The Student Environmental Action Coalition in the US led a campaign in the early 2000s to replace corporate menstrual products. Their Tampaction campaign included traditional workshops and talks but also radical cheerleading.[6] Today, the UK-based Women’s Environmental Network and the NGO Zero Waste Europe have campaigned on the environmental impacts of menstrual products. While the former focuses on education and awareness-raising (through a dedicated “environmenstrual” week), the latter has published reports on the environmental and economic costs of single-use menstrual products and potential solutions, calling for European countries to take action.

In recent years, menstrual activism has made a comeback in the mainstream. In April 2016, the premier news magazine Newsweek ran a feature on menstrual activism. As the movement has grown, it has become more dynamic and difficult to categorise. While their approaches vary, these activists all confront and resist a medical and consumer culture which exploits the menstrual experience for profit and devalues the menstruating body as inferior, dirty, and sick.[7]

The end of menstrual capitalism?

We are still far from having healthier, more inclusive and environmentally friendly menstrual practices and products. Our current habits have emerged from a patriarchal capitalist society and are shaped by increasing commodification. A feminist political ecology approach, which considers the social constructs around menstruation practices as well as economic and environmental considerations, challenges this. It looks at traditional gender roles and perceptions of menstruation as socioecological dimensions of economic processes.

Future generations should understand that periods are not something to be ashamed of and that menstrual practices and choices cannot be separated from the environment or our wider societies.

Menstrual activism frames menstruation and the practices surrounding it as an important factor in decisions concerning environmental and health policy. Recognising this would radically change the way we perceive menstruation. The stigmas around menstruation can be broken, through education and a conscious effort from governments to better promote reusable and toxic-free alternatives, still unknown to the majority of the population. Future generations should understand that periods are not something to be ashamed of and that menstrual practices and choices cannot be separated from the environment or our wider societies.

FOOTNOTES

[1] See for example Sharra Vostral. Under Wraps: a history of menstrual hygiene technology. 2008, Lexington Books.

[2] See for instance the foreword from Judith Lorber in Chris Bobel’s book New blood, third wave feminism and the politics of menstruation (2010).

[3] For more on radical menstruation activism, see Chris Bobel’s book New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation (2010, Rutgers University Press).

[4] While the Bloodsisters are the most well-known menstrual activist group (mainly for their “chocking” actions), individuals have been taking a stand on menstrual products since the 1970s. In 1976, Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth published The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruations, in which the links between environmental degradation and menstrual products were first exposed.

[5] Their book Our Bodies, Ourselves was originally published in 1970. A French version of the book was published in 2020.

[6] Radical cheerleading is a popular third-wave feminist street protest technique. One of the most notorious actions was carried out at the Colorado State University campus, where radical cheerleaders shouted the “Ax Tampax Poem Feministo”, later published in one of the Bloodsisters zines in 2002.

[7] Chris Bobel and Breanne Fahs distinguish four types of menstrual activism: “laughing while bleeding” (such as the UK-based stand-up comedian Chella Quint); “the visual is political” (for example, the 2015 global art show “Widening the Cycle”; “(going back) to Washington”(activism via legal reforms such as the 2017 Menstrual Equity Act); and “access and affordability” (for low-income, homeless and incarcerated menstruators).

Protests erupt in Brazil after supermarket security guards beat Black man to death

Issued on: 21/11/2020 - 

Brazilian police clash with demonstrators outside a Carrefour supermarket, where a black man was beaten to death by security guards, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on November 20, 2020. © Silvio Avila, AFP

Text by:NEWS WIRES|

Video by:Erin Ogunkeye

The death of a black man beaten by white security guards at a supermarket sparked protests across Brazil Friday as the country celebrated Black Consciousness Day.

A video of Thursday night's incident in the southern city of Porto Alegre captured on a witness's mobile phone was broadcast on social networks and Brazilian media.

As the clip went viral, around 1,000 protesters in Sao Paulo marched to a branch of the French-owned Carrefour supermarket chain and stoned the glass storefront before storming the premises, trashing and burning goods, according to an AFP photographer on the scene.

"Carrefour's hands are dirty with black blood," read one banner held up by demonstrators.

Carrefour de Sao Paulo
pic.twitter.com/jYpp23b67l— Rene Silva (@eurenesilva) November 20, 2020

Police in Porto Alegre used tear gas and flash bang grenades to disperse a protest that had formed in front of the supermarket where the death occurred, according to local television


Protests also broke out in the capital Brasilia, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro, where a crowd picketed a Carrefour supermarket to prevent customers from reaching the checkouts.

"Carrefour can close, it has killed our brother, it will not work!" chanted dozens of young people carrying banners and masks with the slogan "Black Lives Matter".

The video on social media shows 40-year-old welder Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas repeatedly being punched in the face and head by a security guard while he is being restrained by another at the supermarket.

A woman stands beside them, filming with her mobile phone.

The military police in Rio Grande do Sul state said the man had threatened a female worker at the supermarket, who called security.

Silveira Freitas lost consciousness during the assault and died on the spot as medics tried to revive him.

'Could not breathe'

A friend of the victim who witnessed the beating told G1 news that as the security guards were hitting him, Silveira Freitas "screamed that he could not breathe," a scene reminiscent of the death of George Floyd, a black man who suffocated beneath the knee of a white US police in Minneapolis last May.

That killing sparked massive protests across the United States.

#USCitizens: Demonstrations against the Carrefour store chain have been reported throughout Brazil after a man was killed by security guards at a Carrefour in Porto Alegre. For your safety, avoid Carrefour locations while protests are ongoing. Monitor local media for updates. pic.twitter.com/qi1VhbgN8z— Embaixada EUA Brasil (@EmbaixadaEUA) November 21, 2020

Both the supermarket security guards were arrested. One of them was identified as a member of the military police who worked part-time at the supermarket.

In a statement, Carrefour's Brazilian subsidiary deplored the "brutal death" of Silveira Freitas and promised to take "appropriate measures to hold accountable those involved in this criminal case."

Carrefour said it would cut ties with the security company that employed the guards.

In a series of tweets in Portuguese, the French head of Carrefour, Alexandre Bompard, expressed his condolences and said the images posted on social media were "unacceptable."

Em primeiro lugar, gostaria de expressar meus profundos sentimentos, após a morte do senhor João Alberto Silveira Freitas. As imagens postadas nas redes sociais são insuportáveis.— Alexandre Bompard (@bompard) November 20, 2020

"Internal measures have immediately been implemented by the Carrefour Group Brazil, principally on the question of security company contracts. These measures are insufficient. My values, and the values of Carrefour, do not allow for racism and violence," he wrote, calling for a complete review of employee training, diversity and intolerance.

Structural racism

The killing sparked outrage on social networks and overshadowed Brazil's Black Consciousness Day, a holiday in several states.

"From one November 20 to another, and every day, the racist structure of this country brings us brutality as a rule," social activist Raull Santiago said on Twitter.

"It seems that we have no way out... not even on Black Consciousness Day," Brazil international footballer Richarlison said.

"In fact, what conscience? They killed a black man, beaten in front of the cameras. They beat him and filmed. Decency and shame have been lost to violence and hatred," the Everton player said on Twitter.

In Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery -- in 1888 -- around 55 percent of the population of 212 million identifies as black or mixed-race.

Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro had not commented directly on the death late Friday, but tweeted that the country's problems "go beyond racial issues" and that the "great evil" of Brazil continues to be "moral, social and political corruption."

- O Brasil tem uma cultura diversa, única entre as nações. Somos um povo miscigenado. Brancos, negros, pardos e índios compõem o corpo e o espírito de um povo rico e maravilhoso. Em uma única família brasileira podemos contemplar uma diversidade maior do que países inteiros.— Jair M. Bolsonaro (@jairbolsonaro) November 21, 2020

"As president, I am colorblind: everyone is the same color. There is no one color [of skin] better than the others. There are good men and bad men," added Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro's vice president Hamilton Mourao called the killing "regrettable."

Mourao said it was the work of "a security agent unprepared for the work" and denied that it was a racist act.

"For me, in Brazil, there is no racism. That is something that they want to import here to Brazil. That does not exist here," said Mourao.

Philosopher Djamila Ribeiro, one of the most influential voices in the fight against racism in Brazil, told AFP that "the naturalization and justification of the death of black people as a result of violence is present in political, legal, business and media discourses."

(AFP)

Rape, abuses in palm oil fields linked to top beauty brands


By MARGIE MASON and ROBIN McDOWELL today

SUMATRA, Indonesia (AP) — With his hand clamped tightly over her mouth, she could not scream, the 16-year-old girl recalls – and no one was around to hear her anyway. She describes how her boss raped her amid the tall trees on an Indonesian palm oil plantation that feeds into some of the world’s best-known cosmetic brands. He then put an ax to her throat and warned her: Do not tell.

At another plantation, a woman named Ola complains of fevers, coughing and nose bleeds after years of spraying dangerous pesticides with no protective gear. Making just $2 a day, with no health benefits, she can’t afford to see a doctor.

Hundreds of miles away, Ita, a young wife, mourns the two babies she lost in the third trimester. She regularly lugged loads several times her weight throughout both pregnancies, fearing she would be fired if she did not.

These are the invisible women of the palm oil industry, among the millions of daughters, mothers and grandmothers who toil on vast plantations across Indonesia and neighboring Malaysia, which together produce 85 percent of the world’s most versatile vegetable oil.

Palm oil is found in everything from potato chips and pills to pet food, and also ends up in the supply chains of some of the biggest names in the $530 billion beauty business, including L’Oréal, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Avon and Johnson & Johnson, helping women around the world feel pampered and beautiful.


This combination of November 2020 photos shows the hands of five generations of women from a family that has worked on the same palm oil plantation since the early 1900s, ranging in age from 6 to 102. They each hold products made by iconic Western companies that source palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia. (AP Photo)



The Associated Press conducted the first comprehensive investigation focusing on the brutal treatment of women in the production of palm oil, including the hidden scourge of sexual abuse, ranging from verbal harassment and threats to rape. It’s part of a larger in-depth look at the industry that exposed widespread abuses in the two countries, including human trafficking, child labor and outright slavery.

Women are burdened with some of the industry’s most difficult and dangerous jobs, spending hours waist-deep in water tainted by chemical runoff and carrying loads so heavy that, over time, their wombs can collapse and protrude. Many are hired by subcontractors on a day-to-day basis without benefits, performing the same jobs for the same companies for years – even decades. They often work without pay to help their husbands meet otherwise impossible daily quotas.

“Almost every plantation has problems related to labor,” said Hotler Parsaoran of the Indonesian nonprofit group Sawit Watch, which has conducted extensive investigations into abuses in the palm oil sector. “But the conditions of female workers are far worse than men.”

Parsaoran said it’s the responsibility of governments, growers, big multinational buyers and banks that help finance plantation expansion to tackle issues related to palm oil, which is listed under more than 200 ingredient names and contained in nearly three out of four personal-care products – everything from mascara and bubble bath to anti-wrinkle creams.

The AP interviewed more than three dozen women and girls from at least 12 companies across Indonesia and Malaysia. Because previous reports have resulted in retaliation against workers, they are being identified only by partial names or nicknames. They met with female AP reporters secretly within their barracks or at hotels, coffee shops or churches, sometimes late at night, usually with no men present so they could speak openly.

A casual worker removes floating aquatic plants from a canal in a palm oil plantation in Sumatra, Indonesia. (AP Photo/Binsar Bakkara)

Female workers carry heavy loads of fertilizer at a palm oil plantation in Sumatra, Indonesia. (AP Photo/Binsar Bakkara)


The Malaysian government said it had received no reports about rapes on plantations, but Indonesia acknowledged physical and sexual abuse appears to be a growing problem, with most victims afraid to speak out. Still, the AP was able to corroborate a number of the women’s stories by reviewing police reports, legal documents, complaints filed with union representatives and local media accounts.

Reporters also interviewed nearly 200 other workers, activists, government officials and lawyers, including some who helped trapped girls and women escape, who confirmed that abuses regularly occur.

___

This story was funded in part by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism

FEATURE LONG READ

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE https://tinyurl.com/y3ywj8j6