This week, after losing a match at the Australian Open, tennis player Heather Watson alluded in an interview that she was having her period, which had a negative effect on her performance. People. Were. Shocked.
Almost all women experience 12-13 periods a year for something like thirty years of their lives. In developing nations, lack of access to menstrual supplies and cultural taboo play an important role in the continued subjugation of women. So why is it still such a big freaking deal to talk about it? And why can't we admit that, yeah, our periods affect our lives?
I've never understood the weird way that our culture thinks about and reacts to menstruation. How many times have you heard/seen the dumb trope about a dude who's embarrassed to go buy brand new, wrapped in plastic, unused, sanitized pads or tampons? How many of us, as girls and women, have felt embarrassed ourselves about having our periods, terrified that someone might see we've pulled a tampon out of our bag before headed to the bathroom? It's ridiculous! It's insane!
And the cramps? The headaches? The crying? Please! It's the worst. After starting my period at 10, I was blessed with cramps that would keep me on the couch for days, unable to move. I'd get clammy and pale, looking like I had the flu. My dad, being obviously concerned, took me to my pediatrician one month. "It's just cramps. Some girls have periods like this. Take Tylenol and drink water. Some women find that exercise helps," she told me. Just cramps?!??! Exercise?!? I can't even stand up, lady! Thankfully, my parents are rational people who allowed me to go on birth control to take care of it. By the time I stopped taking the pill years later, my period had apparently settled down and I was no longer laid up for 5+ days every month.
I was lucky. But what of the women for whom the debilitating pain never ceases? Those who can't just go on the pill to make it better. Those for whom the pill doesn't even work? How do we acknowledge their very real suffering and move to fix it without accidentally making the case that women are by nature of biology physically inferior to men? If we're out of commission once a month for thirty years, how can we be expected to hold positions of power?
Obviously, this is untrue. Women are equally capable of leading, period or not. But it's one of the reasons I think we're afraid to talk about menstruation on a broader, more visible scale. Admitting that periods suck and that they can affect other aspects of our lives seems almost like a betrayal. We've spent so many decades fighting to prove that our uteruses don't make us second class, unfit weirdos that saying out loud that, hey, actually sometimes our uteruses are totally shitty, feels an awful lot like womanly treason.
All of this circles back to an idea that has been very present in my life recently. I mentioned it in my previous post about cohabitating with my boyfriend: sometimes "fair" and "equal" are two different things. We do have different anatomy than men. That fact doesn't indicate anything more than just that. Our bodies are different, and sometimes we need different stuff to get us to an even playing field. Call it genital affirmative action, if you will (which you won't, because that's a terrible joke). I don't know what that looks like in practice, but I do know that we've been playing the game under men's rules for far too long. As long as maleness is considered the default, we'll be struggling to catch up. The cards are stacked against our bodies, because our bodies have long been considered deviant. So I say it's time to lift the veil around menstruation. Our bodies and experiences are valid, true, and important. Period.
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