Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Much maligned monthlies not for marinating in....

Gentlemen I give you this bit of advice: reduce a sauce, your waist line, or your power bill before you ever, ever reduce the sum total of a good woman's thoughts down to her hormones. I don't care if you know for a fact that she's straddling a mattress, bloated and riddled with cramps, and that her breasts are clearly two vertically suspended Hindenburgs. In your effort to appear all knowing or empathic, you reveal yourself to be another card carrying fascist pig.

What allows me to say so with such precise insight? Call it the same instinct that tells me you might want to happily eviscerate a woman who whenever you expressed something she didn't like simply observed "This is really about your fear of erectile dysfunction, isn't it Hon?" No amount of penis envy would excuse that kind of self-serving presumptuous remark on a woman's part now would it? Of course not.

Yes, we menstruate. Yes, it amplifies what's already there. No we don't appreciate reminders subtle or otherwise that both these things are true. It's about as useful as pointing out to an alcoholic that they behave differently while drinking. Notice that it almost never changes a drunk's behaviour when you do that. Likewise, the t-shirt I saw in the mall pretty much sums up how most women view their period: The one time of the month when I can really be myself.
20-25 days a month we soothe, we listen, we anticipate, come man cold or anima attack. We don't earn your wages but we do take your shit and try to turn it into fertilizer.

So what can you do that would be helpful? Think NASA and give your woman some space. I mean real space. No you don't need to build a menstrual yurt or disappear for the weekend--though Goddess knows I'd pay my husband to take an occasional sojourn through Arctic tundra and leave his map at home.
But then I'd miss him. I appreciate it enormously when I am PMS'd off my face and instead of rubbing my nose in blood, he simply takes me in his arms for a soft, sensual cuddle that includes a prolonged stroke of my lumbar region.

If I'm over-sensitive or bitchy, let him consider the countless ways I prop up his manly ego and walk over egg shells so as not to bruise his pride or provoke his temper. Let him be the change he would see in me and model the self-restraint.....just once. It wouldn't even have to be once a month.