Tunisia: when women wear panties
Ordinary Tunisian women posing in washable menstrual panties to raise awareness of the precariousness of menstruation: this is the shock campaign of the Tunisian association Wallah We Can.
Always have a black bag or a small opaque cardboard box with you when shopping to discreetly slip in the menstrual pads after going to the checkout. Like many Tunisians, Sabrine Boukatfa knows this classic. “In my entourage, the rules were a taboo. Every time they started, it was stress: do I have towels? Am I going to stain my pants? recalls the literature student.
This feeling of embarrassment persists in Eya Zaouga, to the point that the teacher did not dare to tell her mother why she had an appointment, this December 19, in a photographic studio in Tunis.
Shooting
The two young Tunisians pose in their underwear for Ecolibree, a project to raise awareness of menstrual poverty. By the end of 2022, the Wallah We Can association hopes to distribute 100,000 kits of three washable menstrual panties to women in need: students from modest backgrounds (menstrual poverty is a major cause of school dropouts), prisoners, etc.
To publicize the project, the association opened the promotion shoot to all Tunisian volunteers. Sabrine Boukatfa had never previously posed in front of a lens, but "it [her] seemed natural to do so because [it] concerns all [women]".
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Ons Nagati is a model by profession: the long photo shoot in the cold in undress, she knows, but it is as a woman and not as a professional that she accepted: "Because I am a model, people think that I am necessarily comfortable with my body, all the time. But it's wrong. Like everyone, I have my problems, I particularly suffer from eating disorders, I am here to represent those who suffer in silence. »
The young woman finds the product “brilliant and ideal”. Designed to last three to four years, the briefs are easy to care for, cheaper than disposable pads and less harmful to the environment.
“To varying degrees, periods are taboo around the world. Even in France, some students suffer from menstrual precariousness. This awareness campaign is a matter of pride, because it is the first of its kind in an Arab country,” says Saja Najar, member of Ecolibree. The campaign, which will begin on December 27 on social networks, has the slogan "It's me who wears the panties".
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Lotfi Hamadi, founder of Wallah We Can, dreams of seeing the campaign spread out on billboards in 4×3 meters across the country. For the moment, a display advertising company has agreed to broadcast the slogan, but it still reserves its answer on the display of the photos.
Sensitization
“Many local media refused to broadcast the campaign because of the word panties,” explains the association manager.
It was during a visit to the boarding school in Maktar (south-west of Tunis, in the rural region of Siliana) that Lotfi Hamadi had the idea for the project in 2015: "The association took care of rehabilitation of the establishment. We realized that the foam in the mattresses of the girls' dormitories had been torn off. They used it as intimate protection, because of the lack of money and [lack of] awareness of the issue. »
To finance the project, Wallah We Can sells the panty kits to international institutions. For each kit sold, three will be distributed in Tunisia. Wallah We Can will sign a contract at the beginning of the year with Doctors of the World – Belgium, which should buy around a hundred kits, which will allow around 900 to be distributed in Tunisia, and in particular in the Maktar boarding school to begin with.
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The European NGO has also undertaken to carry out an awareness campaign in schools. Wallah We Can is also in discussion with a French institution. Paris recently promised free protection for female students.
The panties are currently manufactured by the French brand Chantelle, some factories of which are located in Tunisia. “But the objective is for Ecolibree to become, within two years, a real company, which manufactures its own panties to sell them all over the world”, asserts Imène Majed, coordinator of Ecolibree.
