Last year Russian lawmaker and LDPR party member Mikhail Degtyaryov proposed that women have two days paid leave from their work when they are menstruating.

“During that period [of menstruation], most women experience psychological and physiological discomfort,” said Degtyaryov.

He also argued that pain from menstruation causes heightened fatigue, reduced memory and efficiency at work, and emotional discomfort.

NBC, amongst other sources, reported this news as a sign of Russia’s move towards more conservative social politics.

“Scientists and gynecologists look on difficult menstruation not only as a medical, but also a social problem,” Degtyaryov explained.

Responses to this across feminist media and others ranged from shocked to outraged.

I argue in my book ‘Sweetening the Pill’ that the emphasis on constant and consistent productivity and on quantity over quality of work is hard on everyone, not just women, and not just when they’re menstruating. As technology makes it so we can be available at all times, we therefore have to be available at all times. Dave Eggers’ novel ‘The Circle’ satirizes this pressure to be “on” brilliantly, making for an exhausting read in itself.

Our desire to miss out on the time when we might be pre-disposed to slow down – our period – by taking drugs that let us keep up the consistency in all ways is symptomatic of a wider cultural emphasis on inhuman work expectations.

SMCR’s own Margaret Stubbs pointed out in an interview with Yahoo! Shine – why can’t women just take sick days when they’re menstruating, if they want?

However, most US employers do not provide paid sick days, and those that do limit the number significantly. A sick day often needs to be used for a doctor’s appointment, a family emergency, or just to catch up on myriad other duties. A policy that attributes additional sick days (and if we’re talking two days per month that means A LOT of additional sick days) doesn’t seem such a bad idea to me at this point.

There was something of an echo of the Cold War in the reaction to this news. It was partly America’s faith in work as a cure-all that positioned it in opposition to the communists.

Yes, menstrual leave is not entirely unproblematic as a proposal, within the context. Apparently, according to Wikipedia at least, the LDPR party is worryingly nationalistic (any Russian readers please feel free to correct me on this). But some of the reactions suggested a pride in the American way of long hours and little vacation time. As I find myself saying at least once a week as a British person living in Los Angeles – take a look at the economically solid, recession-surviving countries like Germany and Australia for some good reasons why that pride is misplaced.

Sometimes it seems many women are so busy establishing the lack of difference between themselves and men that they find it hard to be truly honest about the experience – possibly painful, possibly tiring – that they are going through when they get their period. See Chris Bobel’s great post about suffering in silence for more on this. She suggests that discomfort during menstruation should indeed be a “social problem” of a kind.

If we are only valued for our productive output then menstrual leave will always be seen as dead time. It will then be more about getting women out of the office when their productivity is low and they may become a burden, than it is about valuing the potential benefits of the leave for the woman.

I admit that this is old news, and well-discussed elsewhere, but what prompted me to write a post is the desire to share more widely this great piece of writing over at the Irish Feminist Network by Barbara Scully. She discusses a BBC documentary that showed a British woman’s experience of a menstrual hut in a tribal community. Just as the capitalists saw the communists as backward, we sometimes too willingly believe our way of organizing things is the most progressive, most modern, most sophisticated. Perhaps we’re not always right.