When I was 12 years old, I was browsing through Borders and found a book called Jokes Women Won’t Laugh At. I still remember an embarrassing amount of those jokes by heart. I read it like The Bible. Indoctrinated into the hilarious world of misogyny.
One joke went:
Why do they call it PMS?
Because Mad Cow was taken.
Like most men, my introduction to a woman’s period was making fun of their moods. “That time of the month” was when women would just suddenly be bitches. I think that, even today, when faced with an ‘unreasonably’ aggressive or angry or emotional woman, the majority of American men will think, if not say, “It must be that time of the month.”
And there is truth to it. On its face, it’s a fact: it is a time of the month when women get angrier.
But just writing that sentence fills my chest with an iron weight and I feel the grief for how much our society leaves unexplored and underdeveloped at the preference of profit and other fabrications. How come we never asked any deeper questions about their anger?
But why are you angry?
What is this deep global well of anger that you and all women can magically tap into?
What in your life is making you act out in desperation?
Are you dying to be heard? If so, what are you trying to say?
What is the nature of your pain?
Spaghetti Forgetti
As is not uncommon, my wife and I tend to have blowouts, and our relationship feels tenuous every time her period comes around. She was curious and asked me what my relationship was to my ex’s period. She wanted to know how I managed it in the past.
I honestly didn’t really remember it being a thing we talked about. Except, I told her, there was this one time in Italy. We were at this big group dinner at a large U-shaped banquet table with white table clothes and white upholstered chairs. It was a small restaurant in some mountainous and picturesque town.
We were seated next to my Israeli cousins. That’s not really relevant but it feels relevant.
In the middle of the meal my ex’s complexion went to pale white and she lifted her thigh to show me the chair was completely soaked through with blood. She rushed to the bathroom and I covered the seat quickly with her napkin.
She came back, finished the meal, tucked her chair in quickly after the meal, and we got back on the tour bus. She later told me she had taken off her bra, filled it with paper towels from the bathroom, flossed it between her legs and pulled up her pants.
I wonder what the waiters must have thought when cleaning up that night.
That’s all I remember about her periods. I don’t remember it coming up in my house even though my family is three women and two men.
Mad Cows
Marley is entering her Luteal Phase, the 60th since we’ve been together. Like a friend who has just dropped acid, she reminds me that when her feelings—often rage— come up over the next few days, she needs to be held, and heard. Her body is mustering up all of its resources to produce another cosmic being. But there is no baby, and the egg must be released. With that release comes the grief of a lost child. A grief I can share with her as we have been talking about our third.
The egg is not just another cell in a woman’s body, but the whole raison d’être. And not only is it the whole reason the female exists, but the female body is the whole reason humanity exists. Marley likes to remind me that every pair of dick and balls was first carefully made inside a woman’s body.
It takes immense energy to be in such a receptive state as to fully receive fertilization that results in a new soul and self-sustaining body.
I humbly add a woman’s period as yet another instance where decolonization can lead to clarity and more moral choices. It’s no secret that colonial mindsets seek to banish and sever every up-cropping of connection to nature. It makes no excuses for the menstrual cycle.
And in a world where, sorry to get all vegan on you, 270 million postpartum cows are removed from their children (who would steal the milk, preventing it from being sold), the term Mad Cow is such a hiding-in-plain sight admittance that colonization, industrialization, and civilization, leeches off female bodies while minimizing their rage about it.
It’s that time of the month and nothing more. Women get angry because women are emotional. And that is a bad thing. There’s nothing to see here.
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