woman's cycle woman's destiny

Once again, I was stuck with my period, this manic geography in my body, it made me feel constantly miserable and restless. But I don't mean that I only have one or two situations like this in my life, it's just that there aren't many times where I stop and write something about it, and most of the time I just feel stuck and have nothing else to do.

It goes back and forth, renewal, regeneration, profit and loss, and when it hurts, it’s like an eagle on a cliff pecking at Prometheus. This cruel metaphor actually exists intact in a woman’s womb, unknown—— If the "person" here refers to men as the society defaults.

During the new crown pandemic, we finally had the opportunity to educate men about menstrual pain and all the chaos that menstruation brings, but even as close as a partner, we refused to believe that the intensity of dysmenorrhea can be compared with the virus. And the worse neglect came along with it. In the past three years that the world has been so afraid of this virus, so many research results and prevention manuals have been obtained, but none of them is closed to write about the impact of infection with the new crown virus on women's menstruation. When women frightenedly seek help and share their experiences on social media, they can only get one shameful consolation: "Some female friends have poor physical and psychological quality, and they will experience great mental and psychological pressure after being infected with the new crown."

Later we began to look for women who would not be affected by menstruation, those women with good cervixes, or longer menstrual cycles, two months, three months, half a year, one year, or even their whole lives, but they were all in the minority. Although I imagined what it would be like to not have menstruation, I never realized that menstruation has caused "injustice".

When I was lying down and couldn't move, the man could still concentrate on his studies freely. If he wanted to make up the progress, he had to wait for the end of this cycle. I can't figure out how to catch up on the rest of the time, when the man slows down with fatigue and relaxes by turning his eyes to entertainment, but that's naive to assume. In fact we paid more so it didn't look like much difference. We ask for leave at school because of menstruation. If it comes to bearing capacity, we will be considered "squeamish", and we have to ask for leave for such "little things". But when it comes to learning progress, it will be treated as a cold or an ordinary disease. Both men and women will have it, and both men and women will face the situation. It is so contradictory, but it easily dominates every adolescent girl. She wants to digest the inequality brought about by menstruation in the huge cage of the school.

So successful, in fact, that we rarely think about inequality other than making the world accept that we are cranky and need to be taken care of during those days of the month.

But menstruation recently seems to be back to middle school, recalling the situations that should have been digested in detail. You can't listen to a class, write a test paper, and go to an evening self-study. The boy kindly said, I Lend you notes, but you know that you didn't choose them, that you didn't want to stop. It will never be like a cold, which happens to everyone randomly, because your next cycle is already there waiting.

So when I think back to the days when I went to work, menstruation made it impossible to devote myself to work, and it was nothing but double torture to persist, and asking for leave was just a rough deduction of that day's wages. Why is it so tolerant, why do you think of this huge inequality belatedly. And the pain caused by menstruation is still burning in the lower abdomen. Those who envy the few women who have long menstrual cycles are primarily worried about the uterus and whether they can have children, not whether a woman's menstruation is unusual and will bring pain to her. damage.

Is the injustice we suffer really because of menstruation, the inability to catch up with the progress of study and work, and the difference in treatment? Isn’t it brought about by this profit-seeking performance society?

Kristeva argues that women's time patterns are inherently at odds with history, and with society's time patterns: female subjectivity appears to be tied to cyclical time (repetition) and immortal time (permanence) , at least as understood from the perspective of motherhood and childbirth. However, historical time can be understood as a kind of linear time: that is, time concepts such as planning, technology, departure, progress, and arrival.

There is an inevitable conflict between the feminine sense of cyclical time and the masculine, aggressive, linear and progressive industrial time. Emily Martin says: women, whether they like it or not, their bodily experience is cyclical, they live in two times, the time of industrial society and a time that often runs counter to the former .

Compared with the pain caused by menstruation from within, the result of our relying on bodily experience is that we begin to realize that the real pain is caused by social violence outside the body. Just imagine that if you don't rely on efficiency to measure personal value, although menstruation affects us, it will not cause such a burden. Instead, "bleed" means "bless".

In the mythical reality of looking for a woman who is not affected by menstruation, all kinds of women pray that they can get the legendary physique and not be tortured by menstruation, even if it is a next life with a slim chance. It's also a feminist issue in my opinion, menstruation may not be such a horrible thing if we can change the values that favor men in our culture, and can remember that men deny us in us, but in fact they don't have it. Advertisements for sanitary napkins that are so terrifying to the consumer society are reluctant to show their true color, and instead use tame blue. And when the first sanitary napkin brand started advertising that they showed the true color of menstruation, they were met with a lot of complaints from the people, and finally couldn't continue.

Gloria Steinem wrote an article called "If Men Can Menstruate" in 1983, in which she assumed a scenario:

What would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate but women could not?

Clearly, menstruation would be an enviable, boastful, masculine event:

Men will brag about how long and how much their periods last.

Young boys will consider this the start of an enviable manhood. The day is marked with gifts, religious ceremonies, family dinners and bachelor parties.

To prevent powerful people from losing their jobs every month, Congress will fund a national dysmenorrhea institute. Doctors rarely study heart attacks because men are protected from hormones, but dysmenorrhea is well-studied.

In the face of such a biting irony, forty years have passed, and women all over the world still suffer from menstruation. A woman can be evicted for being stained with menstrual blood in public, and more than 500 million of the world's 1.8 billion menstruating women lack access to menstrual products. As a feminist issue, the reality of menstruation is far more severe than we imagined.

I belatedly realized that at the beginning of a period, when women are perceived as less rational and more emotional due to estrogen levels being at their lowest, on these days women actually behave most like men behave throughout the month , but they are not tormented by pain, and they can vent their mania freely, day after day-the most reasonable and ironic part of this menstrual joke.