THIS week I watched an advert about blood and got excited. A video surfaced in my news feed featuring women exercising and bleeding. There was a ballet dancer with mashed up toes, a rugby player with a cut temple, a mountain biker with a weeping thigh to name just a few.

This is an advert about periods that actually mentions blood. There was no vial of mysterious blue gloop – and there wasn’t a rollerblader, sky-diver or floaty fabric in sight. The new Bodyform (of woah! fame) advert is a radical departure from the usual hush-hush attitude that all talk of the P-word hides behind. This advert, part of the Red.Fit campaign tackling the perception of periods and sport, viscerally and unabashedly connects the dots: women bleed. We all know it – so why can’t we just talk about it?

Few things in a woman’s life evoke more flowery euphemisms than periods. Anything connected to our reproductive systems comes with a string of gentle allusions, or hides behind stiff medical language. Quite frankly, it’s nonsense. I for one am very glad to see that the media have started to cotton on to this absurdity – either that or they’ve finally run out of nicknames and frou-frou metaphors.

Thankfully, as a young woman growing up in the UK, I was spared the imprint of religious tradition and cultural taboo, so I arrived at adolescence at least knowing what a period was. I’d read “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret” — Judy Bloom’s famous novel about teen girls and periods. I’d been to sleepovers where girls redistributed their salacious misinformation. I’d secretly examined the thick, nappy-like towels my mum had hidden in the bathroom cabinet. I’d once even stuck one on and gone about my important business of being a bike-riding, tree-climbing ten-year old – completely missing that the wings were supposed to stick to my pants, and not my thighs.

But this vague, misinformed awareness of The Great Menarche hardly did me any favours. Periods were something talked about in whispers by a nurse, in second year of high school. The boys were ushered away to the English department to watch a film, whilst a hundred girls were herded into the assembly hall, and frightened for two hours. In this country, vaginas are like Lord Voldemort – she who must not be named. Especially in the presence of boys. This made for the world’s most awkward PowerPoint presentation. The combination of medical terminology, and frank discussion about how to use a tampon actually caused one girl to faint. It was too much information, with no preparation for it: welcome to womanhood: it’s terrifying. And no amount of secret talks or line-drawn uteri on the pages of well-thumbed textbooks could have prepared me for the reality of a bulldozer in the gut.

The way we talk about periods impacts how we feel about our bodies. This is a tremendously important thing we’ve spent a frightening amount of time botching. We deal in half-truths, science and fluffy words. Because we can’t talk about it honestly, we perpetuate the myths that people see our gender through. Just last week I had a grown man – who without a trace of irony – tell me “some women become total psychos on their period” as a counter point to victim blaming.

Tides are changing, though. Women, at least, are getting fatigued with the same fairy stories that flutter around our biology. A few years ago FemFresh suffered a backlash against their inability to use the word vagina about it’s range of vaginal hygiene products. It’s refreshing to watch how we talk about women’s bodies evolve, and the media take note. But there’s a long way to go in breaking down these barriers globally.

Thinx, the company who make leak-proof period pants had their New York subway ads vetoed. They featured women in turtle necks and pants beside segmented grapefruits and shelled eggs. Dripping yolks and the word “period” were too suggestive. Too suggestive, even though the subway had no problems with women in underwear, holding grapefruits promoting breast augmentation, or women in bikinis advertising fad diets. The message in the media is still one of women’s bodies as objects: used to represent something which is done to it. It’s still a taboo to mention things that originate from our own bodies.

The way we talk about periods affects the way we talk about women. It imposes limitations on us, be it from men or from our own self-imposition. The fact that we make menstruation into this clandestine, shameful thing is outrageous – without this incredible feat of biology none of us would be here. Every woman experiences this, and has done since the dawn of humanity. We should be a lot further forward than euphemistic discourse when it comes to our most essential biological functions. Shame still clings to menstruation, and is ratified in the round from every angle – personal, social, societal. Add this to the fact periods begin in adolescence, and you have a perfect starter kit for low self-esteem and poor body confidence. I am all for disrupting that norm.

In this country, the reality of a teen period was awkward: sneaking out of class, Tampax up my sleeve, or avoiding PE and fibbing to my teacher because I was in pain or scared of leaking. That’s a far cry from the experience of many girls outside of the western world.

One in three girls in India have no awareness of periods before their periods start. Many girls and women are prohibited from participating in certain every day activities when they’re menstruating. Girls drop out of education at an alarming rate when their periods start. Many women and girls don’t have access to simple, hygienic period management, resorting to rags, leaves and even mattress stuffing to control it. Every day girls get sick because they don’t have access to safe period solutions. In a world where you can fire atoms at each other underneath countries, why is this the case? Why can’t we talk openly about women’s bodies and blood in the same sentence? Why haven’t we normalised the one thing that happens to every woman?

I’m encouraged that my daughter is growing up in a world where fourth-wave feminist thought is gaining mainstream ground. We might be a million miles away from making things equal for all girls everywhere, but at least now we’re starting to be able to say women and blood in the same sentence. I’m thankful that her world is one that won’t be so full of sanitised second hand information because of those who are speaking out now.

I dream of a day when women’s lives and opportunities aren’t stymied by their biology. Changing how we talk about our bodies is the first step to making that a reality for women everywhere. The girls who grow up unashamed of their bodies will be the ones who lead the rest of the world into a more equal future.