I received a stealth surprise lesson in periods by reading The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, because it’s ostensibly a sequel to Harriet the Spy.
It turned out to be about Harriet having her first period, dealing with puberty and having questions about life, religion and sex rather than hijinks about her snooping on people and writing it down in a notebook.
I remember thinking “hey! This supposed Harriet the Spy sequel is really a book about periods!” partway through, then shrugging and finishing it.
Probably good for me to have read it, especially at that age (I was an adolescent myself).
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A very close friend of mine in college used to have a two-hour crying jag every single month, the night before she started menstruating. There was nothing you could do to comfort her, and she could not explain what was happening; completely incoherent. After the second go-round I figured it out, and started marking the calendar.
For the last two years we were together, my ex would start absolutely epic fights in a way that had me utterly convinced that I had started it. Turned out to be PMDD, but it took a long time to get her to realize that I always seemed to start those epic fights the day before her period started, and that that wasn’t entirely coincidental.
oMG. You aren’t a my ex are you???
So smart. You were ladytimer before that was a thing!
I was incapable of dealing with the problem until I understood it, so perhaps not so smart - necessity being a mother and all that! 
But yeah, I guess so.
If she’d been combative or otherwise unreasonable I might not have twigged. But at that time, any woman could make me do anything just by crying… having a woman crying for two hours without wanting me to do anything about it was a new, bewildering and frightening experience.
Here’s something to think about:
We (as a culture) have dirty words for nearly everything. Felching, santorum, and everything else in Urban Dictionary.
There is no dirty word for menstrual blood. It’s that taboo.
we just had a baby.
I’m 42 and never saw a video of a live birth before. when we got home I showed some of it to my 35 year-old wife’s friends (well-educated and worldly) who were SHOCKED at what the umbilical cord looks like.
I find this preposterous.
how is it we don’t know the basics of life?
the West has set individualism and ego-centricism up to such a level that we don’t know our selves or how our bodies work
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I doubt it. You seem capable of insight and suchlike. (Also too, she’d be spending her copious free time on Harry Potter websites, not a place like this.)
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I think a lot of men experience their emotions as fairly steady, so walking in one day and your woman is falling apart for no reason whatsoever - it must hard to grasp what it’s like to be a lady and sometimes just wake up with the blues.
Once I was working with a nutritionist and she said every woman falls off the wagon when they are on their period. She explained that the hormone levels a woman has during her period are more like a man’s normal hormone balance. That was very enlightening to me, because I have noticed a lot of guys seem to always be much quicker to anger than I am, but when I am on my period I just feel mad. It’s weird to me to imagine feeling like that always with no break.
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Yeah, the hormonal balance in a menstruating woman is very similar to the average man’s hormonal balance. It’s a useful fact to keep in mind when misogynists claim women can’t be trusted to make rational decisions because they get “emotional” every month…if women can’t be trusted for 4-5 days every month when they think like men, why can men be trusted any day of the month, right?
But not all women respond to the hormonal tide in the same way. I had a few physical clues (took me years to figure it out), but not emotional ones. Data point of one, but menopause was also not the stereotypical emotional roller coaster you hear about…connected? who knows?
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We’re taught that a man’s emotions should always be firmly under control, at least in Anglo-American and Afro-American culture, and there’s some fairly good reasons for having “steadiness” as a cultural value (think Kipling’s “If” for example). The early conditioning is pretty strong; even if your father doesn’t beat or ridicule you for crying, the other boys certainly will.
And yeah, the chemical/emotional cycles of men tend to be a lot longer than a lunar month - more seasonal, I think. Nearly everybody, male or female, gets the midwinter blahs. That’s presumably why every culture has a midwinter festival of some sort.
Pretty sure I need a culture that has at least three of 'em. Winter is fucking horrible.
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And yet, a lot of trans men talk about how shocking it is for them once they go on testosterone, to feel all these sudden urges: SEX! RAGE! SEX! OGLING! SEX! RAGE! SEX SEX SEX!
This is that thing where men’s emotions aren’t labeled “emotions”.
What I want to talk about is how emotional outbursts typically more
associated with men (shouting, expressing anger openly) are given a pass
in public discourse in a way that emotional outbursts typically more
associated with women (crying, “getting upset”) are stigmatized.
I wish to dispel the notion that women are “more emotional.” I don’t
think we are. I think that the emotions women stereotypically express
are what men call “emotions,” and the emotions that men typically
express are somehow considered by men to be something else.
This is incorrect. Anger? EMOTION. Hate? EMOTION. Resorting to
violence? EMOTIONAL OUTBURST. An irrational need to be correct when all
the evidence is against you? Pretty sure that’s an emotion. Resorting to
shouting really loudly when you don’t like the other person’s point of
view? That’s called “being too emotional to engage in a rational
discussion.”
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If you’re a Unitarian Universalist you are permitted, nay, encouraged to celebrate all the holiday festivals you happen to like. So you can do Divali, Kwanza, Eid, Chanukah, Bodhi day, Winter Solstice, Christmas, and Saturnalia if you want! Might need to lay in a lot of party supplies.
But actually I like winter… I even like sleeping outdoors in winter. Winter camping in deep snow is awesome.
Heresy!!!
You ere so right. My husband amazes me for his lack of emotional awareness sometimes. For example, he will wake up early, travel all day, not have time to eat, come home and start a fight. When I say, “Have you eaten?” and of course that’s a no and then suggest we talk after he eat he gets angry that I suggest that not eating all day is affecting his emotional reactions. How does one get to middle age and not know this? What’s most frustrating is that he won’t after he gets fed and calms down recognize that the fight happened because of his not eating but still see whatever he thought he was angry about as the perfectly legitimate cause of his anger.
It’s also weird to me that he is involved in a career that expects him to be able to respond well in a crisis situation because every time we have been in anything remotely crisis-like he becomes very agitated and makes the worst decisions imaginable. Like, we had our power go out once and immediately he is worrying about the generator and food rations. Meantime, I’m looking up the information for the power company on my phone, I report the outage, and three hours later, boom, we are back in business.
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We have Guy Fawkes Night and Christmas/New Year. We need a third sometime in February.
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Exactly. Febristmas McExplodey day. Presents AND fireworks!
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