Rap Drummer Kiran Gandhi Runs London Marathon Without Tampon

She's a drummer with the rap performer M.I.A. Her about page is here.

I first saw this story last weekend on Twitter, at People Magazine, "Woman Runs London Marathon Without a Tampon, Bleeds Freely to Raise Awareness."

I showed my mom and my sister, and they were both all *SMH*. Definitely bizarre.

More here, "Runner Defends Letting Period Bleed Freely at London Marathon: 'Women's Bodies Don't Exist for Public Consumption'."

There's an interview at Dazed, "Why I ran for 26 miles on my period."

But see especially James Delingpole, at the Spectator UK, "Free bleeding’ and the stupidly clever feminists who fell for it: A ludicrous hoax trend that almost makes me pity its enthusiasts":

This week, the story broke in a media starved of anything else to write in the silly season. Most outlets had nothing but praise for Kiran’s principled stance against panty pad-related oppression. ‘Bring on the menstruation revolution: “Donald Trump is going to bloody love it”’, crowed the Guardian. ‘26-year-old woman bleeds proudly through her first marathon,’ exulted Cosmo, having apparently mistaken her for someone who’d climbed Everest blindfolded, with a shark strapped to her back. Better still, perhaps, from Kiran’s point of view, the right-wing media wrinkled its nose in typical phallocentric disgust. ‘Latest feminist craze: free bleeding’, thundered the US website Infowars.

But the readers of these publications — not even the righteous, socially conscious ones — weren’t quite so sure. ‘I’m a girl and even I find that what this woman did is just gross,’ said one. ‘Get a grip love,’ said another. ‘I’m going to do a marathon on Viagra to highlight the fact that some people with penile dysfunction don’t have access to the diamond blue wonder drug,’ quipped an unhelpful male.

Then the sorry truth emerged. Poor Kiran, and the liberal outlets which had applauded her gesture, were the victims of a cruel hoax. It originated last year on a mildly notorious website called 4chan — an internet chatroom favoured by the kind of irreverent pranksters and cynical youths who take unseemly delight in countering the pieties of the ‘social justice warriors’ of the earnest new left.

Already, these hoaxers had enjoyed some success with an earlier campaign, designed to cause division within the new feminist movement by trying to pit girls with skinny, attractive fit bodies against less conventionally beautiful diehards. They invented a concept called ‘bikini bridge’ — the phenomenon where bikini bottoms are suspended between a slim woman’s hipbones causing a dangerously revealing gap. ‘If your girlfriend doesn’t have a bikini bridge, why are you with her?’ asked the caption to a fake advert showing a seductive skinny model. Sure enough, this major new threat to the sensitivities of women worried about their bodies received widespread coverage from the Sydney Morning Herald to the New York Daily News.

So in 2014 — inspired by some crazy idea they’d read somewhere on the internet — the pranksters decided to fake an even more ludicrous trend designed to discredit the radical feminist movement. ‘What is free bleeding? It consists of us womyn bleeding with no restriction … Being able to menstruate is something that is a [sic] undeniably female characteristic. How DARE they try and oppress it,’ read their working notes.

A few helpful tweets later from fake Twitter accounts and ‘free bleeding’ had become an urgent new cause of radical feminism. Eventually word got out among some women’s interest websites that they’d all been had: ‘Free bleeding is not a thing,’ warned one. But it appears the memo didn’t get through to everyone. Hence Kiran Gandhi’s marathon protest.

Does this mean we should all feel terribly outraged on behalf of Kiran? Well up to a point, I’d say. Stripped of its broader social context, her humiliation — even though it wasn’t deliberately inflicted on her personally — does seem a bit ugly and callous and deserving of our pity. But then you ask yourself: ‘Hang on, this girl has got a Harvard MBA, so she’s not exactly thick. Can she really not work out the logic of why it is that over the years we’ve developed certain conventions about the public display of bodily fluids and functions? Has she not considered that these might have been designed at least as much for the comfort of women as men?’

The bigger problem is this: even at Ivy League universities — indeed, perhaps especially at Ivy League universities, not to mention Oxford and Cambridge — the lunatic preoccupations of the radical feminists and social justice warriors, from ‘rape culture’ to ‘intersectionality’, have become so fashion-able and all-consuming that stupid has become the new clever.