"Take off your pants for an examination to prove you are on your period"—when this trending topic suddenly flooded the internet, the surveillance footage from a university dormitory coldly reflected the living dilemmas of contemporary women. A girl curled up with a hot water bottle at three in the morning, a cleaning lady wiping blood stains in the corridor alone at four, and a long queue outside the dormitory supervisor's office at five silently accuse how these invisible menstrual humiliations are turning contemporary universities into a surreal reality.
In this era that champions gender equality, we can still smell the bloody remnants of feudalism in school regulations: some administrators regard women's menstrual periods as original sin, using the humiliating process of "publicly taking off outer pants" to alienate a natural physiological phenomenon into something that needs to be self-justified as heretical.
From a certain southwestern university's "menstrual pad archival system" to a coastal school's "menstrual leave reporting system," the common directors of these absurd dramas are pre-modern ghosts in the modern educational system. Administrators use the cover of "anti-cheating" to mask their ignorance and arrogance regarding women's bodies within the design of the system. When a medical professor pointed out in a report published in The Lancet that nearly 12% of women worldwide lose educational opportunities due to menstrual discrimination.
However, Generation Z girls are clearly unwilling to cooperate in this absurd drama—within the online space, the medical student who flaunts bloodstained school uniform pants, the women's basketball team captain who initiates the "no leave challenge during periods," and the art student who covers the professor's office door with pink rights protection notes are using their bodies to narrate and reconstruct women's discourse power. When they turn sanitary pads into protest badges and put menstrual app data on the blockchain as evidence for rights protection, the contrast between traditional disciplinary systems and the resistance of digital natives forms a glaring disparity.
It is worth pondering that in these suffocating news corners, a flicker of hope always shines. Just like the "menstrual leave stamp" set up by a university in Nanjing—by leaving a special symbol with a custom stamp on a card, one can obtain the right to take leave without reason. This creative idea, printed with blood-red flowers, dignifies the traditional registration system in the digital age. It proves that institutional design can completely find a balance between humanistic care and procedural justice, and the key lies in whether one is willing to bend down and listen to the voices of 200 million girls' bodies.