This week, celebrities, politicians and academics have been attending events within SXSW London. The original SXSW festival started in Texas, but it’s gone international. A few years back, the Duchess of Sussex took part in a SXSW panel at the OG festival in Texas. I’m sure that didn’t factor into this story whatsoever! On Wednesday, fresh from his visit to a London pub (I wish I was joking), Prince William made an appearance at SXSW London for an event around The Diana Award. As he met some Diana Award recipients, William was asked about period stigma and how he plans to talk about menstruation with Princess Charlotte. Everyone got to see period stigma in real time.
Prince William left one recipient of The Diana Legacy Award impressed by his honest answer to her question about menstrual health. The Prince of Wales, 43, took part in a discussion on young people’s issues as part of the SXSW London Festival on Wednesday, June 3, joining two Diana Award legacy winners for the panel.
One was Vivi Lin, the founder of the NGO “With Red” to tackle period stigma and help people understand menstrual issues, who asked the royal heir about how the topic would be handled in his own family.
“I took the courage to ask him a really important question: I asked him, ‘Are you ready to talk to your daughter about periods?’ and how he is preparing,” she tells PEOPLE, referring to William and Kate Middleton’s 11-year-old daughter, Princess Charlotte.
“He answered genuinely and smiled and said, ‘This is a topic I am not familiar with,’ and it was really lovely,” continued Lin, 28. “But he said he knows it is going to be a conversation that he would need to have in the future. He said he will try to do so with the help of his wife.”
“He acknowledged there is still menstrual stigma across the world and a lot of people don’t know about it,” she added. “Coming from Prince William, that he knows he knows he needs to talk to his daughter — and he needs the help of his wife to talk to her about it — will be really important for a lot of dads with daughters because a lot of people are struggling and don’t know how to talk to their daughters about periods.”
The NGO works on “everything about periods, from education to policy,” and Lin says they work to ensure that, from a young age, women know how to use menstrual products and cope with the menstrual cycle.
Lin said the discussion with Prince William also touched on the disconnect in society.
“He mentioned the loss of human connection,” she explains. “We are pretty much online, all generations, and he was saying how important it was to restore that human-to-human connection and having people look at each other in the eyes and having that conversation in person.”
She says she was impressed by Prince William, including his support of how sports clubs in the U.K. are adapting new systems for female athletes to meet their needs. “We have very different biological cycles, and if we are using the same training schedules, that wouldn’t work,” she says. “He spoke about his passion for football and supporting female football players on this.”
I’m really asking: how does Prince William, a man who has been married for fifteen years and who has lived with a woman for two decades, not know anything about menstruation? “This is a topic I am not familiar with…” Like, he’s not familiar with it at all? He wouldn’t have to get into the nitty-gritty of Kate’s menstrual cycle, but the jig is up – Kate is the mother of three, and she’s had a menstrual cycle the entire time she and William have been together. Heterosexual men being clueless dolts about a significant part of their partners’ lives is insane. And he basically said that he’s going to leave it to Kate to talk to Charlotte about her period. The part about women’s football is important too, because William is patron of England Football, and as such, he should be more than aware of the work being done by elite female athletes on period stigma AND their training.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
