INSPIRED BY A COMMENT OVERHEARD IN MY CLASSROOM

Written in 2012; never published.

 

I realize that you live with women, many of whom are menstruating.  The women who are your family members — mothers, sisters, aunts — you have most likely established a…distant? detached?…relationship with these women.  You have placed them in a particular mental category, completely separate and distinct from women friends or potential romantic partners.

 

But one day,  you will find yourself in close relationship with a woman — and these days, this will happen several times over the course of a heterosexual male’s life before marrying, perhaps multiple times — and these women are menstruating human beings.

 

And I have never in my life heard a woman praise or appreciate a funny little bleeding joke, along the lines of “something must be wrong with me. Do men have cycles? I’m not bleeding anywhere.”

 

And I DON’T mean that women take their menstruation completely seriously, that it’s some kind of sacred cow that we cannot discuss or joke about.  Obviously, it’s a fact of life, and subject to foibles and jokes.  But really, I just have never heard a guy pull one off…these jokes, even when they are not cruel or misogynistic, are generally clueless.

 

Younger women, too, are less experienced, and sometimes less comfortable with this biological reality.  Women, even in these relatively enlightened times, have been told that this is “the curse,” some kind of awful inconvenience, gross, disgusting, unclean (thank you, sacred books), and especially when we are young, the boys we are crushing on are not supposed to really KNOW or TALK about this with us.  Sex and body talk get easier with time and experience…but at 17, 18, 19, 20?

 

You take a risk by making those kinds of comments.  You need to hear them the way a very young woman might, and she will not see it as loving or sweet, along the lines of “Oh, gosh, he really does value and understand me and I know that because of this funny little bleeding joke he just made.”

 

And by the way, men DO also experience mood swings ties to hormonal fluctuations.  It’s not so weird.

 

Finally, just a point of clarification:  it’s not the bleeding that creates tension and moodiness.  Tension and moodiness are pre-menstrual tension, which varies widely among women, and month to month…some months are good and easy, while some months it is very intense — all tied to rest, exercise, nutrition, general stress levels and overall well being. Speaking from experience, I thought it was all just talk until I got into my 30s.  It has grown more intense through the years, so women do not go through this is any standardized way, not even within their own lifetime.  But once the bleeding commences, lots of that tension dissipates and from then on it’s just a few days of heightened personal hygiene.  Feminist spirituality studies had us look at other things tied to the cycle and that our dominant male social constructions have deemed to be the “feminine” realms — things like intuition, relational thinking, and empathetic responses.  The more human and humane parts of menstrual cycles are generally not discussed or celebrated, this “thinning of the veil” between the spiritual and material realms, and instead, there’s this weird stigma still attached to a normal biological process that more than 50% of the human population just takes in stride.  But like anything, there is a ton of good writing and thinking about this.  One positive sign in the culture that I see is all of that “Hail to the V” stuff tied to, what else?  Feminine hygiene products.  It’s a little over the top, but certainly a better, more female positive message than anything I grew up with.