Title from a Henry Higgins quote in My Fair Lady
By Matt K
Sometimes on our travels across the far reaches of cyberspace, we chance upon a story that encapsulates the very essence of what we are trying to say. Here is such a story. It is, perhaps, the single best possible rebuttal against feminist claims that the reason that almost everything around us was invented by men is due to women having been discriminated against:
According to a study* by AC Nielsen, 70% of women in India just can’t afford sanitary napkins and resort to using dirty rags, newspapers, dried leaves, and even ashes during their periods. Now you would have thought that there were few areas of life, if any, where women had a stronger incentive to invent a solution, of a problem common so many women and having existed for so long as to provide a huge pool of potential inventors, or which, except in the most indirect way, men could, if they chose, ignore, or where women’s direct and recurrent experience, and their ability to talk to other ‘sufferers’ about such a sensitive matter gave them a greater headstart over men, and yet despite all these advantages, it took not a women but a man to solve the problem. A man, I might add, whose sisters refused to help him, whose wife abandoned him (…until he became successful/famous of course), and even whose own mother left him, but who still persevered. This story really does have it all.
Gentlemen, from Fast Company magazine:
An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry
* According to “Sanitation protection: Every Women’s Health Right,” a study by AC Nielsen
