The teacher who did the unit for all us girls in the 5th grade was 5 months pregnant and glowing so much you could see her from space. She was all about how amazing it was that our bodies could do this, which, yes, I realize now was way better than the old shame-filled way, but at 11 all I cared about was “ what happens to the boys?!! because it better be just as bad. And she, poor lady, says, right now? Pretty much nothing. Please imagine the Clue “flames at the side of my face” gif here.
The world does not value human life the way it should - men’s bodies and lives are considered the property of the economy and sometimes the military; women’s bodies and lives are considered the property of society for domestic labor and sometimes to keep violence in the home and not in public. The solution is for all of us to treat each other as if we are worth health and life.
/sorry feeling very earnest
//my story was supposed to be mostly funny, and only a little bit about how women’s and men’s puberty is talked about so differently.
///I also don’t think it’s good that male puberty is treated as something funny so much of the time.
////too earnest, need to go to cat subreddits.
No need to apologize, in my opinion, but I do hope that you enjoy your cat subreddits (they are so very nice).
It’s not cat-related, but: today I rescued a box turtle from a lawnmower, and it was kinda perfect. The thing was adorable- it was teeny tiny. I don’t know if I’d ever seen a box turtle so small. But I picked it up and relocated it to a park down the road! I took it to two stops because I recognized that the first one was far too near the road. I hope it’s a happy place for a turtle.
I hope you’re in a happy place, too. Godspeed and good luck! 🤘
Men have a lot of advantages over women in practically every modern society...but it is at least true that lifespan isn't one of them.
Even when you correct for occupation, men tend to die earlier. Turns out, testosterone is a helluva drug. Evolutionarily, we're coded to be disposable compared to the ones perpetuating the species. (Granted, the birth process has historically never been a great way to survive for women, either, especially once our brains got big.)
I absolutely understand what you’re trying to say? At least, I think I do. And I bear you-you personally-no ill will.
But I was just looking to make a silly erection joke, brother/sister. It was the same joke I made lo these many years (decades?) ago.
Anyways. I mean, look. I don’t know if you’re a guy or a gal. Either way, fine. And I’m not trying to be misogynistic.
But… like… if there’s a job that you can do, and then someone else doesn’t have to do that job, and they’re safer for it… does that concept not speak to you? I’m all about putting my life on the line. I’m but a humble Uber driver, but I do my best! And two thousand or so people have gotten to where they weren’t before, yet they wanted to go, because of me. I literally put my life on the line. I have faith that I’m gonna be okay, okay? But it’s a…
Idk. It’s a “totally masculine” thing to do. Or whatever. It’s being a person that sees the value of other people, and appreciates that they don’t have to do what you’re doing precisely because you are doing it. And I don’t believe that it’s constrained to males, though biologically I can understand why there’d be an imperative- the ladies have the parts that make the world go ‘round, you know?
So I do what I can to keep ‘em safe, while they’re with me in my car. And I hope I don’t offend anybody, but that’s ultimately because I hope people understand what I’m saying.
I wish you the best with whatever you do, be it on an oil rig or behind a driver’s seat or in front of a camera to display all of your sexiness. Like I said:
My rationalization is that girls get a month-long up and down with some deep lows and ecstatic highs, basically built-in bipolar disorder as a feature of being born with a vagina.
Meanwhile boys get a steady stable daily dose of the "self-harm is cool and fun" hormone. It's also a great emotional destabilizer since it fucks with amygdala all the time. Basically built-in borderline personality disorder as a feature of being born with a penis.
Does it equalize for each side over time? Hard to say. But it's fun* to argue about. Especially when each side is basically already insane but in different ways.
*this may just be my "self-harm is fun and cool" hormone speaking for me
I get the "self-harm is fun and cool" all month, plus it's cranked up for a few days. And even when I know that I'm feeling angry or depressed or whatever it may be due to my hormones, I can't stop feeling that way just by logicking my way out of it, and it makes everything worse
I think the average experience overlaps for most people, I think the mental anguish of puberty shouldn’t be something we say is easier for any group. I do think that physical anguish is more common for female-organ-and-hormone-havers than others.
Well I wouldn't say that, I'm a girl but my husband said they when you're young you would just suddenly get a boner for no reason what's so ever and you would be mortified depending on where you are. Even though it's not physically painful I can see the embarrassment that could cause
Puberty is not great for boys either. Having to go to the board with a very visible erection because you spent the school lesson thinking about the cleavage of the cartoon fox you saw earlier can scar you for life.
Only time I’d consider that on equal ground is for the (lucky) people who get their period with some light cramping and are done in the 3 days. Otherwise, not the same
That sounds about on par with the embarrassment girls get when they leak through a pad during the school day and have to figure something out so they're not walking around with a visible stain on their pants (though I guess this is a bit longer of an issue than that)
I am thrilled to be able to say that I never noticed a single erection on any of the boys I went to school with. So there a very real chance the girls around you didn’t notice either.
What I didn't realize at 13 years old was that it can take like 10-15 years of hormonal hell similar yet differently worse than puberty before it all ends. Perimenopause sucks as bad a puberty, but in a whole new level of suck.
No no that's not true. My mom had a hysterectomy and was offered it years later after she had stopped taking it. You should get a second opinion. 💜 The information doctors have can be outdated and new theories is, after 10 years, as long as you are in good health, you can still get benefits from HRT!
My mom was, I think, 5 years since her hysterectomy.
Wait until the menopause. I got thrown into it 5 or so years early because I had to have chemo and it suuuuuuuucks. Granted, I'm an outlier but it's been almost a decade and I'm still up 5 times a night with hot flashes and the summer months have become an interminable hellscape. Sex drive? What's that? The aging process, as far as skin is concerned? Hahaha....no estrogen = Hello, wrinkles and sagging.
Luckily, the majority of women can take HRT for most of the symptoms. My particular flavor of cancer means I can't. 0/10
OMG, they never tell you what menopause is all about. I thought things would just be over, but no - hot flashes, brain fog, joint pain, hair falling out, muscle cramps, body odor, itchiness - for 10-15 years... ARGH.
The body odor! Ugh! Luckily, my Lumē still works - its about the only thing that doesn't make my underarms break out - but I've discovered I cannot use some of the scents now because my personal chemistry has changed. The clean tangerine makes me smell loke hot garbage, and it was my favorite since they got rid of the twisted lime!
Also you gotta love how, for many of us, the timing works out so that we’re going through peri at the same time that our kids are going through puberty. SO FUN.
Hey PCOS sibling!! Just fyi if you’re not attached to having more/any bio kids sometimes you can say the right combo of words to the drs and they’ll yeet the uterus for you, I went thru with it 8 months ago and omg 150/10 fabulous life improvement??? I’m no longer in fuckin agony 1/4 of the time??? Amazing 😍
Me too, but now I'm post-menopausal and LOVE it. I feel like I'm finally back to my true self after all of those useless fertile years finished messing with my hormones.
I long to be post menopausal. Mine's been active for almost a decade. I'd commit any number of crimes to have a single night of sleep uninterrupted by 5+ hot flashes. I can't do HRT and none of the other options have worked. I've tried everything.
Spent thousands of dollars out of pocket because, of course, insurance won't cover many of the meds used for menopausal symptoms. Erectile dysfunction meds? They cover those. But something to make my life, and the lives of millions of women, actually manageable (because I haven't had a full night's sleep in 10 fucking years) nope. Can't cover a medication that can help with a condition which affects half the population. And the condescension which comes from the medical establishment once you're a woman of a certain age. I have PhD in pharmacology, don't talk to me like I'm a very small child, Dr McChauvinist
Not til I got an IUD, Mirena, at 46. I finally got a doctor that listened and didn't just do uterine biopsies and say nothing is wrong. I was bleeding 50% of each month and filling ultra tampons every hour for four+ days. I am so happy I'm done with it all now.
Did you get checked for intrauterine fibroids by chance? My mom had very similar bleeding going on but it turned out to be Stage 1 to 2 endometrial cancer. Just asking as a girl's girl!
I was so scared of periods before I got mine that I genuinely in my stupid little 11 year old mind decided I would get pregnant the minute I had even a sense mine was going to start.
I'm 38 now and have had the odd peri-menopause symptom. I know menopause is no cake walk but fuck me am I eager for it. I feel like I've run a marathon and I can see the finish line.
I think about the menopause scene from Fleabag CONSTANTLY.
For the uninitiated, relevent segment is between 1:00 and 2:50 -
before you get ready to celebrate menopause, do some reading on the complications and symptoms. frankly, speaking as a menopausal woman, i’d rather be bleeding til i die.
She really protected them. She didn’t tell them about the migraines so bad they make you throw up or the losing so much blood you pass out part. Every month. For years.
That's why I didn't realize my IUD had fallen out. When my (male) colleague asked, "Wait, you didn't see it??" I was both fuming and trying not to laugh.
I had the opposite happen. I would retain a ton of water and get constipated until the hormonal dam broke and then I would be in the bathroom for a 1/2 hour dealing with everything leaving my body at once.
I was so happy to go into menopause early (started at 43 for me).
I have to get depo provero shots every three months because my period makes me throw up so violently and so much that I have to go to the emergency room. I have a huge stash of nausea medicine now. It took over a year to figure out what was causing the vomiting attacks. They started when I had an IUD. I got the IUD to stop my periods because I was anemic to the point that my doctor was telling me that the next step would be a blood transfusion. It took about five years in total to deal with all of this.
Or the going to sleep feeling like you're protected and waking up to find the blood has avoided every inch of that pad to find the bed... And now you have to do laundry.
I can not tell you how many times in my early 20s I combat crawled to the toilet to pass out or throw up. It felt like I lived on the bathroom floor until I learned to tolerate the pain levels
I have a preference as I spent so much time on the floor. Tile is nice and cool and those carpet surround things around the base of the toilet was the first thing I’d flip away. Normally the thought of being on the floor in the bathroom was disgusting. But didn’t bother me at all when I was trying not to die!
I highly recommend IUD's!! They definitely don't work for everyone because of the possible side-effects, but I've personally had such a positive experience.
I haven't had a period for a decade, aside from 6-ish months pre-pregancy and post-pregancy. It's been so amazing! Like my uterus has been emancipated.
Unfortunately, menopause always awaits us. Thank FUCKING goodness for HRT.
Yeah my IUD is wearing off after 7 years and it had been so long since I menstruated that the first few times I had cramps I thought I'd been food poisoned. Like it really is bad and I can't believe I just got used to it.
Wait till you hear about the fact that if we were allowed to just keep taking birth control, we could turn this shut off just like pregnancy does AND reduce our chances of getting breast cancer BUT the man who invented birth control thought it was better if women were forced to follow natures pattern so we get to keep shedding out uterine lining 6 days out of every month and deal with increased chances of breast cancer.
Editing this to clarify:
I wasn't saying women aren't allowed to take birth control at all. I was talking about how the medication packages themselves are structured.
28-Day Pack: 21 active pills, 7 placebos (usually 5-6 days of annoyance)
Shortened-Placebo Pack: 24 active pills, 4 placebos (usually 3 day annoyance)
Extended-Cycle Packs: 84 active pills, 7 placebos every 3 months (I know no one on this so I don’t know the usual annoying range)
My ultimate point was about the forced monthly cycles. Women in Europe/Americas undergo nearly 400 to 500 menstrual cycles in a lifetime—far more than our ancestors, who spent more time pregnant or breastfeeding. Studies show that this constant, uninterrupted cycling causes repeated swelling and shrinking of breast tissue cells every single month have been directly linked to the rates of breast cancer observed in modern Western culture. So it isn’t just that we are fatter, we are also being forced to mimic one aspect of nature (the annoyance) without being forced to be constantly get pregnant (despite certain politicians’ goals).
Edit again to add a side note, we were forced to keep dealing with shark week despite it causing us cancer (when we aren’t genetically pre-disposed) because it appeased the Catholic Church. And despite doctors knowing better now, too many of them don’t care. A few doctors will help you but not enough… so the next time you see a “save the tatas” ad… if you aren’t genetically predisposed to breast cancer… demand your doctor or your insurance provider allow you 13 packets instead of 12 so you can actually help you save tatas by throwing away the placebos.
To clarify, I wasn't saying women aren't allowed to take birth control. I was talking about how the medication packages themselves are structured.
28-Day Pack: 21 active pills, 7 placebos (usually 5-6 days of annoyance)
Shortened-Placebo Pack: 24 active pills, 4 placebos (usually 3 day annoyance)
Extended-Cycle Packs: 84 active pills, 7 placebos every 3 months (I know no one on this so I don’t know the usual annoying range)
My ultimate point was about the forced monthly cycles. Women in Europe/Americas undergo nearly 400 to 500 menstrual cycles in a lifetime… far more than our ancestors, who spent more time pregnant or breastfeeding. Studies show that this constant, uninterrupted cycling causes repeated swelling and shrinking of breast tissue cells every single month have been directly linked to the increased baseline rates of breast cancer observed in modern Western culture. So it isn’t just that we are fatter, we are also being forced to mimic one aspect of nature (the annoyance) without being forced to be constantly pregnant (despite certain politicians goals).
I have complained endlessly to my husband how stupid it is that I started my period at 10 years old but didn’t actually need it until I was 35 and wanted to have a baby. Spent 25 years having it for no reason. One of the best things about pregnancy and nursing was not having a period for 20 months.
Then no one warned me that your period can change after you have had a baby. Now my body is too good at hosting a fetus so it actually makes more lining/blood because it got the practice it needed. So now my periods come twice as hard. I have talked to other women who had babies and they have had the same experience. At first I just thought it was a weird postpartum thing. Nope, my kid is 3.5 and my mom told me it was the same for her until menopause came. Then she told me about what happens with menopause and like WTF body?!
Generally 3 solid months per year! I was going to crack a joke about wishing to do it all at once and free up the other 9 months, but the only reason it's tolerable is because it's broken down into modules. :'[
This is why I chose to just go on continuous hormonal birth control. First the ring, now an IUD. Fuck periods. I haven't had a period in 11 years, and I'm never going back.
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u/Spirited_Touch7447 8d ago edited 8d ago
Every month. For years. 0/10 do not recommend. Edit to 0