Living in a society in which the respectability of a family revolves around avoiding 'shame', and where the standard of this shame is based primarily around the behaviour of women, places an insurmountable level of pressure on men to control women. When the perception of men depends on the actions of the women in their family, it means that any social change for women cannot occur without their cooperation. This applies to menstruation as well. Such is the stigma of menstruation that the wife and mother of sanitary pad machine inventor Arunachalam Muruganantham once left him because of his work, which earned him allegations of perversion and mental illness.