My mother also talked about periods to my brothers.
When I first got mine I had terrible cramps. Crippling cramps. I once was camping with my family and a few of my big brother’s friends when my period came. My cramps were so bad that my mom gave me a full pain killer ( I was 13 and before that she only gave me pills cut in half).
I literally laid down on my parents’ air mattress and cried in pain for an hour before the pill kicked in.
My brothers friend came in to the big tent and I was just curled up and sobbing. Now, I was quite the tomboy and was known to rough house with my brothers and their friends and made sure I wasnt seen as just “a little girl.” So my brother’s friend was confused to see me openly weeping in the fetal position (seriously, these were the worst cramps I have had in my life. My vision went white). He asked what was wrong with me.
My big brother stood up immediately and suggested a nice long hike. During this hike I am sure he had a pretty awkward conversation with his friend explaining menstrual cramps, because when they got back the pain pill had (mostly) kicked in and I was sitting up at a table when my brother’s friend sheepishly asked me if I was feeling better. I said I was better, and he said good.
When we made s’mores that night my brother and his friend kept me well supplied with chocolate.
Making sure sons know as much about periods and menstruation as daughters makes them better brothers, better sons better fathers, and better men. A man that understands a period will not lightly accuse a woman of “being on her period” if the woman is in an argument.
Raise better sons Teach them about normal bodily functions.
“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
omg I’m doing research for one of projects for college, and apparently, girls learn better when they’re in an all girls class, but boys learn even worse when they’re in an all boys class, because all the negative things become even stronger of there are no girls to act as “buffer”
get rid of the boys and let girl learn in peace, i couldn’t care less about them
It’s not our job to be a “buffer”
Separate boys from girls then, they don’t have to be acting like mothers at age 12, if boys ruin the education of others boys, um, idk, fix their behavior maybe?
I work at uni. My program is very competitive. Like you need a 92% or more to get in. We get 10x the applications than we can accept. So. This means our program is 95% female. Simply because girls do better in highschool than boys. Its literally that simple. However. This is a HUGE deal in the administration! Because OMG all those poor boys with less than a 92% can’t get into our program and woe is me, those poor poor boys. Every year we meet to talk about ways to “rectify” this “problem”. One year they’re going to stop inviting me to these meetings. Because I always ask questions like “how do we get boys into the program with lower GPAs without denying girls with higher GPAs? And how is giving boys preferential treatment not sexist?” Keep going good ladies, I’m saving your seat!
This type of thing always happens when women are dominating something, protocols are changed to accommodate and benefit men, and if this strategy isn’t successful the field is devalued.
Keep the good work!
The amount of times I heard my grandfather talk about the ‘feminization’ of schools because he wanted to blame the system for boys under performing (or, more accurately: girls out performing the boys) instead of, ya know, boys’ entitled attitudes and overall piss poor behavior when at school.
When women fail at something: there must be something wrong with women When women succeed at something: there must be something wrong with the system
I think I’ve talked about it before on other posts, but I once had an anthropology class that, completely unintentionally, was all women and one man, and he dropped the course after two weeks. The other section of the same anthropology class, taught by the same professor, was mixed with men and women. So, since it was anthropology, she asked if it was cool if she took notes. She said right away that the all female class had a wildly different vibe, that we spoke and acted differently and had different social expectations of her and the rest of the class, and that we let students complete their thoughts before disagreeing, while the mixed class was highly traditional and almost entirely male dominated because every time a woman spoke, a man jumped in halfway through to “correct” her by saying the same thing. Its a very small sample size, but I think about this a lot
As a woman, I gotta say, nerds and “nice guys” create the most awkward situations.
Ive been given a diamond bracelet by someone who I only knew by their D&D name.
Another guy gave me a birth stone necklace after I’d just had a break up and just couldn’t understand why I needed time
Ive come home from a late night of studying to find a guy sitting beside my apartment door at 11pm. He’d “been waiting for hours” and “just wanted to see me.” (I don’t have to tell you how scary it is to see a grown man in an empty hallway when you are all by yourself.)
Ive had a guy send me 1000+ text messages…which started as a conversation about cartoons, turned into a love confession, then turned into him calling me a bitch
Not to mention the ones with jungle fever whose wet dream is not only a “nerd girl” but an “exotic nerd girl.” (“exotic” is just a cute word for fetishizing women of color)
And ALL of these men were self proclaimed “nice guys.” But what they don’t understand is that what they consider “nice” is usually creepy. You are a grown ass man. Waiting outside for hours is horrifying to women. Giving gifts and expecting sex in return is not a “nice” thing to do. I just wish “nice guys” would realize that the things they think are chivalrous and romantic are straight up horrifying and sociopathic. They think their loner status deserves some kind of sympathy and I should be greatful for the attention. But if they saw things from the female perspective they’d realize that that kind of behavior is literally stalking and bribery
Once
a boy looked very sadly at me after a little bit of conversation.
‘you’re so smart’ he said, ‘I feel like I couldn’t keep up’. And then he
did that sad boy face where you’re supposed to agree to tone yourself
down. So I said ‘probably’ and fucked his mate.
some top advice from a slut, here, 90% of the time when some boy looks sad and tells you you’re too ‘x’ to keep up with it’s a ploy to get you to cut bits off yourself so you can come down to his mediocre level; instead, agree with him and fuck his mate
I am a slut Wen on a dayte With Boye who would Manipulate I’m not sway’d by His saddened state- I say okay I fuck his mayte