Forgive me. I was just talking to a female friend about this.

I used to collect menstruation stories from my female friends and my girlfriends. Most women were surprised I wanted to know. I don’t know why I wanted to know, a fascination with the other, perhaps. My favorite was from a West Indian girl who has lived here most of her life but grew up there. She was 11 or 12 and she was writing year-end exams. Apparently young people were very disciplined even at the age of 11 because she describes them like high school exams. An hour or two. No talking. No bathroom breaks. And evidently she was the first among her group of friends and neither her parents nor her teachers had prepared her for her menstrual cycle and mid-way through her exam she felt a trickle and saw the blood and nearly fainted. She thought, she reports, that she was going to die or at the very least that she was very sick. Without leaving her desk she got the attention of the exam proctor. In hushed voices she was made to stay in her seat and finish her exam. The adult tried to tell her that it was normal and that there was no problem but for this 11 year old girl, bleeding profusely down there – that’s what she said, “down there” – this didn’t seem either particularly normal or problem-free. She didn’t recognize until later in life that it was crazy that she hadn’t been prepared and crazier that the teacher, fetching some paper towels, made her stay to finish the exam. When she finished her exam the teacher told her to go home and tell her mother. “I was wearing Bambi underwear,” she told me. “I killed Bambi.”

God was unkind to women. For something like 35 years women have to fuss with this whole monthly flushing thing even if they are not using, even if they never intend to use, their plumbing. Life is hard enough. Getting dressed and going to work is hard enough. Working out time for lunch and smoke breaks and bathroom breaks is tricky enough; I can’t imagine the added stress of menses. All that extra work to make sure you don’t have any accidents. All of the equipment and preparation, just in case. Being required to pay that much attention to your body. And all of that emotional trauma and, as I understand it, pain that goes along with the cycle. I don’t know how women do it. I don’t know that I would like to be so blatantly and so often reminded of my biological functions. Men, for the most part, get to take their bodies – and their biological functions – for granted. I’m quite convinced men couldn’t possibly be nearly that attentive nor nearly that prepared to cope with anything remotely like menses.

Scientists report that men have cycles too but not nearly of the same kind, not so obvious, not so unavoidable, not so heavy-handed, not nearly so uncomfortable or messy, and not nearly so often. And we don’t have to prepare for them, we don’t have to buy equipment and carry it around with us to have at the ready.

Women also get, from what I understand, extended orgasms and the miracle of birth, along with the pain of birth, cellulite, and menopause. But from what I can see, that doesn’t — no not by far — make it an even trade.

SS