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Delving Deep Inside Amy Schumer

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By Nian Hu

 

The significance of society’s inability to find women funny

It is a (supposedly) well-established fact that women just aren’t funny. As a result, it’s tough being a woman in comedy. Take Amy Schumer, comedian du jour. A talented and unabashed stand up comic and sketch writer, it’s easy to see why everyone is talking about her all of a sudden. In “Last F*ckable Day” she rips apart Hollywood’s sexist treatment of aging actresses. In “Milk Milk Lemonade” she parodies the booty craze. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Her show Inside Amy Schumer is ruthless. She leaves no avenue unspared. She turns left and right, bashing stereotypes and gender roles and sexism and societal hypocrisies. And all the

while, she is downright hilarious.

 

But look down at the comments section, and you might wonder if the commenters just watched the same video you did. Her sketch may be a satire of Bill Cosby fans, but all the commenters can see is her weight and the shapeliness of her legs. Compare this to the comments that male comedians typically receive on their YouTube videos. Commenters on a Louis CK video usually gush over how funny he is and marvel at his talent. But commenters on an Amy Schumer video systematically criticize her weight, call her ugly, compare her to various unflattering animals—and then go on to admire her rear end and discuss the likelihood that he would sleep with her (implicit in this discussion, of course, is the assumption that a talented woman such as herself would have sex with a 40-year old man living in his mother’s basement writing hateful YouTube comments).

 

No discussion about how funny she is. No mention of her talent. Just comment after comment about her body. And Schumer, perceptive as always, has already skewered this relentless objectification in her skit “Twelve Angry Men,” a parody of the classic movie—except this time the men are debating whether or not Schumer is “hot enough for TV.” And through this skit, a deeply depressing truth is revealed: No matter what she does, no matter how many jokes about her own vagina she makes, many people will never see Amy Schumer as funny.

 

And it’s not just Amy Schumer that they have trouble finding funny. It’s women in general. A 2012 study found that most people, men and women alike, tend to ascribe funnier cartoon captions to men rather than to women–even when they’ve already been told the writer was a woman. Simply put, it’s hard for people to see women as funny.

 

But what does it matter, right? As Christopher Hitchens once said, and as Amy Schumer video commenters often echo, maybe women aren’t funny because they’ve never needed to be funny. I mean, it’s just evolution. Throughout the years, as dinosaurs evolved into chickens and as carrier pigeons evolved into iPhones, human males evolved a sense of humor because it got them laid more often. One knock-knock joke, and before he knows it, the lucky man is a father to a litter of funny boys and unfunny girls. Or something like that. Science!

 

Sorry to burst your bubble, but while humor is a lot of things, it’s a lot more than just a flirting device used by men to woo women. Sidenote: if “Damn girl, that dress looks good on you but it’d look even better on my bedroom floor” is what you consider humor, consider me unimpressed.

 

No, humor is far more powerful than that. And that’s why it’s important that our society finds it so difficult to put “funny” and “woman” together. Humor—particularly satire—is a tool of social commentary and criticism. It’s a way for people to hold up a mirror in front of society’s face and point out all the pockmarks. Women, of all people, know that society is deeply flawed. When we routinely get paid less than our male colleagues, and , and when the length of our skirts determines whether or not we deserve to live—well, how could we not turn to humor to shine a light on society’s failings? It sucks to acknowledge these truths, but it sucks even more to pretend they don’t exist. And one way of making it suck less is by using comedy to reveal how shitty life is sometimes. And that’s a huge part of the reason why Amy Schumer has been so successful, with sketches like “Girl, You Don’t Need No Makeup” making fun of unrealistic “natural beauty” expectations and sketches like “Hello M’Lady” satirising those pushy guys convinced they’re in the “friendzone.” They get people to laugh, but they get them to start thinking, too.

 

So the question is not so much, “Can women be funny?” Humor, like most things in life, is subjective. Clearly I find Amy Schumer hilarious, but her style of humor is definitely not for everybody. The real question we should be asking is, “Why does that matter?” Why does it matter that most people find it so hard to believe that women can be funny?

It matters because humor is the voice, and oppression is the joke. And when you say “women aren’t funny,” you’re essentially silencing an entire population by telling them their voice isn’t important, and their oppression isn’t real. Society’s inability to find women funny isn’t just an antique strips them of a vital weapon.

Real Housewives of the Upper East Side

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By Nian Hu

 

Financial dependency and gender roles in marriage

By definition, a housewife is a woman whose main occupation is running her family’s household and who does not work outside the home. She is, for the most part, financially dependent on her husband, the breadwinner of the family.

 

But the women described in Wednesday Martin’s memoir “Primates of Park Avenue” don’t seem to fit the bill at first. Dressed in designer clothing and armed with Ivy League degrees, the Upper East Side housewives featured in Martin’s book are described as “wealthy, competent, and beautiful women.” And yet, they too are financially dependent on their husbands.   

 

Perhaps the best example of their financial dependency comes in the form of the “wife bonus,” one of the most controversial topics broached by Wednesday Martin in her memoir. According to Martin, the “wife bonus” is a large sum of money that the husband would give to his wife at the end of the year as a reward for good performance at managing the household, taking care of the children, and other wifely duties.

 

The controversy over the “wife bonus” mainly concerns feminism: namely, is it empowering to women? Some say, very. According to these people, women ought to get paid for all the work they do around the house. Housework and child-rearing is just as labor-intensive and respectable as a 9-to-5 job, and housewives should be compensated for their hard work. One woman—a beneficiary of the wife bonus herself—adamantly defends the practice, calling it empowering and feminist because she is getting paid to be a housewife, a lifestyle that she finds satisfying and rewarding.

 

It’s a compelling argument. For far too long, “women’s work” has been largely undervalued by our society. Domestic work—from managing a home to raising children—is not seen as a worthwhile pursuit. As a matter of fact, when women choose to abandon their careers and dedicate time and energy to their homes, it is often seen as quitting.

 

This mindset contributes to the stigma that many housewives face. And for many women, the “wife bonus” means that their hard work at home is appreciated and, for the first time, given a real monetary value. In this way, the “wife bonus” is an acknowledgement of the hard work that housewives do every day.

 

But this argument is far from perfect. It completely overlooks the fact that this transaction is taking place in a marriage. This is not a corporate office where the boss is giving year-end bonuses to his employees. Marriage should be a relationship between equals. Why, then, do people still think it’s okay, even admirable, for husbands to dole out “bonuses” to their wives, as though they are fathers giving their teenage daughters some extra spending money?

 

It’s because marriage is not supposed to be a union between equals. Going back to its patriarchal roots, marriage was intended as a transaction, as a woman is handed from her father to her husband. That’s the reason why brides are walked down the aisle by their father, why women take the surnames of their husbands, and why women wear engagement rings while their fiancés do not. Under the patriarchy, women are little more than commodities. Therefore, in traditional marriages, men are inherently dominant and women are inherently subservient.

 

Same-sex marriage, therefore, threatens this idea of a “traditional marriage.” One of the most frequently-raised points is this: If both are men, or if both are women, then who is the dominant one and who is the subservient one? If two men are in a relationship, then who is the “woman” of the relationship—the one who does all the cooking and cleaning and “women’s work”?  

 

Here lies the problem. The problem isn’t that society doesn’t value “women’s work” enough. The problem is that household tasks like cooking, cleaning, and child rearing is deemed “women’s work” in the first place.

 

This arbitrary gender-based division of labor carries the assumption that women are intended for the domestic sphere. Women are the ones who are supposed to cook for the family, clean the house, and raise a child or two. Naturally, this takes up a lot of time and energy. Therefore, even if a woman were to work and have a career, she would be confronted with the problem of having to “balance” her work and her life at home. Given that she would be forced to juggle demanding domestic duties with a full-time job, is it any wonder that most women simply choose to become housewives?

 

Wednesday Martin’s wealthy Upper East Side housewives have been criticized as shallow, lazy, and unambitious. But I think that’s too harsh. The fact that these women have chosen to take their Ivy League degrees and become housewives speaks less about their personalities, and more about the dismal fact that we are living in a society where women are forced to choose between work or home.

 

In this lose-lose situation, it’s impossible for women to win. Choose work, and you’re a selfish and overly ambitious career woman. Choose the home, and you’re a shallow and unambitious housewife. In this situation, there are no winners—only losers.

 

Down with the Dad Bod

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By Nian Hu

 

Loosening standards for men while tightening standards for women

What makes a man “hot”?”? If we take a look at the list of the sexiest men alive—a list that includes actors Channing Tatum, Ryan Reynolds, and Chris Hemsworth—we notice that they all have a similar body type, with glistening washboard abs and rippling biceps.

However, the conventional standard of beauty for men has been turned upside-down with the introduction of the “dad bod.” A term popularized by Mackenzie Pearson in a widely-read Odyssey article published earlier this year, Pearson explains the dad bod asthe dad bod is “a nice balance between a beer gut and working out.” Pearson lists several reasons why she (and all girls, apparently) is crazy about guys with a dad bod.

First, girls crave men with dad bods because fit men make them feel insecure about their own bodies, and “we are insecure enough as it is.” Second, girls want a boyfriend who is bigger so that in comparison they seem skinnier, because “we want to look skinny.” Third, guys with dad bods provide better cuddling, because they don’t feel like “a rock.” Fourth, guys with dad bods love eating, and they are “not scared of a cheat meal.” Fifth, a dad bod gives girls a preview of what the guy is going to look like twenty 20 years down the road—relevant because “girls tend to picture their future together with their guys early on.”

When this article was first released, reception was initially overwhelmingly positive. Men and women alike championed the arrival of the dad bod as a celebration of body acceptance, an appreciation of “curvy men,” and an acknowledgement of the unrealistic social pressure facing men to be buff and trim.

But if we take a closer look at the reasons that women provide for wanting a man with a dad bod, it has much less to do with the man and much more to do with the woman herself. If you look at Pearson’s reasons in support of the dad bod, you may notice that most of these reasons have to do with how the girl feels about her own body.

Reason number one: fit boyfriends make girls feel bad for not being more fit themselves. Reason number four: heavier boyfriends love eating, so they don’t make the girls feel bad for having a “cheat meal” herself. And most disturbing of all, reason number two: the chubbier the boyfriend, “the smaller we feel and the better we look next to you in a picture.”

These three reasons are an indication that the dad bod craze isn’t about male body acceptance. As a matter of fact, it isn’t about the guys at all. It’s all about promoting and reinforcing the notion that there is only one appropriate body type for women: skinny.

Don’t believe me? Then tell me why guys with dad bods—the ones who moan about the unrealistic body expectations set by Channing Tatum and Zac Efron—encourage their girlfriends to eat salads or work out. Tell me why Leonardo diCaprio, poster boy of the dad bod movement, almost exclusively dates supermodels. Tell me why men now have even more of an excuse to neglect their physical appearance, and why women are using this as an excuse to further scrutinize their own physical appearance.

The dad bod movement has nothing to do with making men feel more comfortable in their bodies. Such a goal is irrelevant in a world where men have never been subjected to the same physical beauty standards as women, a world where men are judged on their merit rather than their appearance. No, the dad bod movement has everything to do with making women, as Pearson said herself, feel smaller and look better in pictures. It has everything to do with making women less comfortable in their bodies.

The dad bod, therefore, is not a celebration of male bodies. It is a shrinking of female bodies, literally and metaphorically.

While men are encouraged to fill up the space around them with their loud voices and spread legs and now, thanks to the dad bod, expanding waistlines, women are encouraged to make themselves smaller, speaking less frequently and more quietly, and always, always watching their weight.

The easiest way to see this double standard is by asking where the mom bod is. If young college-age guys are allowed to look like fathers who spend their weekends drinking beer and eating pizza, then are young college-age girls allowed to look like mothers who have birthed three children?

The answer is an obvious no. Stretch marks and jiggly arms are sources of shame, plus-sized women are called things like “tractor-sized” and a “female hippo,” and according to one advertisement women don’t even belong at the beach if they don’t have a flat stomach and thigh gap.

And what’s more, even mothers aren’t allowed to look like mothers. Women inevitably gain weight during pregnancy, and if they aren’t Victoria’s Secret models with the time and money to exercise for 6 hours every day, most women find it very difficult to lose this weight after giving birth. Yet mothers are expected to look flawless immediately after giving birth. Tabloids regularly criticize female celebrities for failing to “get their body back” after giving birth, and idolize the celebrities who do manage to successfully “bounce back” and look as slim as they did before pregnancy. In other words, even actual mothers don’t have an excuse to look like mothers.

And yet, men, who undergo absolutely no physiological changes upon becoming a father, are congratulated for having a “dad bod.”

So let’s stop pretending the dad bod is some revolutionary and progressive movement, because it’s not. As long as women continue to be feel like there is only one body type they can aspire to, and as long as women of all ages continue to be shamed for putting on weight, there can be no gender equality.

In order for there to be true body acceptance, we need to end the double standards. Personally, I see no reason why we can’t celebrate both mom bods and dad bods. After all, I’m sure reason number three (“better cuddling”) is appealing to everyone.

Slut

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By Nian Hu

 

The double standard of male and female sexuality

If you’re a woman, chances are you’ve been called a slut.

Women who have slept with 10 men have been called sluts. Women who have slept with one man have been called sluts. Women who have never had sex have been called sluts. Eleven-year-old girls have been called sluts. Laura Ingraham was called a slut by Ed Schultz, simply because she was politically conservative. Sandra Fluke was called a slut by Rush Limbaugh, simply because she supported access to birth control.

I’ve been called a slut, too.

In the first op-ed I wrote for The Crimson, I briefly mentioned that feminism is important to me because it gives me freedom, including the “freedom to have as many sexual partners as I want without being looked down on.” I thought it was clear from this statement, given the context, that I was pointing out the double standard when it comes to male and female sexuality, and the fact that men are not subject to the same judgment and disapproval that women receive for having multiple sexual partners.

Unfortunately, that meaning was lost on some readers—in particular, a journalist and conservative commentator named Robert Stacy McCain. He incorrectly interpreted my statement to mean that I wanted to engage in promiscuous activity, and that other people were not allowed to have their own opinions about my behavior.

McCain responded to my article by writing a blog post titled “Harvard Sluts and the Thought Police.” In his blog post, he accused me of being sexually promiscuous and he derided me and other Ivy League girls for being unclean and immoral.

He railed against “those tramps at Princeton” and the “floozies at Cornell” and the “vile hussies” at Harvard who “put out for every random guy in Cambridge” and are a “public health menace.” He ended his piece by saying that nothing is as “dangerous as having sex with a nasty Harvard slut,” and I can only assume he was referring to me.

However, in the comments section below, it appears that Robert Stacy McCain would actually risk that danger. In his comment, McCain said that he saw a picture of me online, and he conceded: “I’d hit it, after wrapping myself head-to-toe in latex and spraying her with Lysol.”

I cannot deny that I am disgusted by his spiteful comments. However, I am also grateful. It is people like McCain who give me the motivation, the drive, and the passion to continue writing about gender inequality. It is people like him who make me realize just how real the gender double standards are, even at this day and age, and just how important the feminist movement is.

It is ironic that McCain, in writing this blog post, presented such an excellent real-world example of exactly the type of double-standard phenomenon I wrote about in my op-ed.

In response to my innocuous statement about the societal double standard regarding male and female sexuality, McCain attacked me for being sexually promiscuous. It seems that accusing me of excessive sexual activity was the easiest way for McCain to smear my reputation and discredit my opinion.

This is, sadly, true for all women in our society. The fastest way to bring down a woman—any woman, of any age, for any reason—is by calling her a slut. Men of different political stripes such as Ed Schultz and Rush Limbaugh employed this method in dealing with women they disagreed with. Even women use this term against other women, as a way to tear down someone they envy or dislike.

The same, however, does not hold true for men. Herein lies the double standard. One commenter on McCain’s blog unwittingly provided an excellent example of the double standard, saying of me: “I also have to wonder what her parents make of her demands. She seems to put more emphasis on her sex life than on her education and career. Sounds a little skewed to me.”

You know what sounds a little skewed to me? I mean, besides the fact that you think I don’t put emphasis on my education and career when I am studying at Harvard and have seven internships under my belt. No, it’s the fact that you’re worried about what my parents think of their adult daughter for writing about sexual inequality, but you’re not worried about what McCain’s six children think of their 56-year old father for saying he’d like to have sex with an 18-year old college freshman.

Somehow, male sexuality seems less dangerous, less taboo, and less inappropriate than female sexuality. McCain’s desire to “hit it, after wrapping myself head-to-toe in latex and spraying her with Lysol” seems more acceptable than my desire to have the “freedom to have as many sexual partners as I want without being looked down on.”

While I am glad that McCain has embraced his sexuality, I wish that he and the rest of our society would extend the same courtesy to me. If he is allowed to be a sexual being, then why am I not allowed to be one? Why do women get shamed for their sexuality when men do not? Sex, after all, requires two people. And in heterosexual relationships, one person is a man and the other is a woman. Yet, women are derided for having sex while men are often lauded for it.

This double standard is exemplified in the words we use to describe people who have multiple sexual partners. For women, descriptors like “whore” and “tramp” have decidedly negative undertones, suggesting contamination and lowliness. For men, however, descriptors like “womanizer” or “player” are much more positive, evoking conquest and domination.

Slut-shaming, as a phenomenon, is uniquely directed towards women. It is defined as the idea of shaming women for being sexual, having multiple sexual partners, acknowledging sexual feelings, or acting upon those sexual feelings. In other words, we shame women for acting as sexual subjects, rather than the sexual objects they are expected to be.

Sexual objects are the sexy female models whose breasts, butts, and legs are used to sell things like milk, deodorant, and cars. They are meant to turn other people on; they are not meant to be turned on themselves. In our society, we expect women to be sexual objects. Women are meant to be sexy to other people, but they are not meant to enjoy sex themselves. I’m meant to be seen as sexy by Robert Stacy McCain, but I sure as hell am not meant to enjoy sex myself.

Sexual subjects, on the other hand, have sexual desires, pursue sex, and enjoy sex. Sound familiar? That’s right. Women who choose to act as sexual subjects are the very same ones we call sluts. And in desiring the “freedom to have as many sexual partners as I want without being looked down on,” I made myself a sexual subject. I became a slut.

If enjoying sex makes me a slut, then I’m glad to be one. But I want to live in a world where enjoying sex isn’t just a privilege reserved for men. I want to live in a world where female masturbation is just as accepted as male masturbation is, a world where women watching porn isn’t considered unusual, a world where depictions of female pleasure in movies get the same PG-13 rating that depictions of male pleasure do, a world where it’s acceptable for women to have casual sex the same way men can. I want to live in a world where women can simply admit that yes, they want sex just as much as anyone else.

Unfortunately, that just isn’t the world we live in right now. And historically, that hasn’t been what the world looked like. For centuries, female sexuality has been repressed and controlled. Under the patriarchy, where women were nothing more than property her father intended to pass down to a male heir, a woman’s virginity was paramount. What husband would want a wife who has already slept with another man? What husband would want “damaged goods?”

Therefore, the control of female sexuality was central in the patriarchy. Fathers were expected to safeguard their daughter’s virginity and ensure her sexual purity by secluding her from the rest of society, closing her off from educational and career opportunities. Should the daughter somehow find a way to have sex before marriage, the father, along with his sons, might even murder her in an “honor killing.”

In describing the patriarchy, I use the past tense because, though it still exists, it no longer manifests itself so overtly in places like the United States. However, for many girls and women in other parts of the world, this is still very much so their reality.

Though time has passed and things have largely improved for women in places like the United States, vestiges of the patriarchy still remain in our customs and habits—and while some are harmless, others are considerably less so. We continue to wear white at weddings, we continue to have fathers escort the brides down the aisle, we continue to hold purity balls—but most importantly, we continue to slut-shame.

We, as a society, can do better. And we, as people, can definitely do better. As long as people like Robert Stacy McCain continue to uphold outmoded sexist values and reinforce double standards, you can bet there will be people like me (and, hopefully, you) challenging those beliefs and working towards a world of greater gender equality—a world where sexuality is embraced as a natural and wonderful thing, not targeted as a source of shame, for men and women alike.

Are You On Your Period?

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By Nian Hu, a student at Harvard

 

The stigmatization of menstruation

Call it the crimson wave, Aunt Flo, or cousin red—call it anything but what it actually is. Menstruation, the process by which the body sheds the lining of the uterus through the vagina, is all too familiar to any woman of childbearing age. That “time of the month” is an inconvenient and unpleasant, but also natural and universal, phenomenon.

 

Unfortunately, despite affecting roughly fifty percent of the world’s population, menstruation comes with a heavy stigma. In the past especially, there were many taboos surrounding a menstruating woman’s behavior. For example, people used to believe that drops of menstrual blood could kill plants and animals. In ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder wrote that bees left their hives, mares miscarried, and corn withered at the touch of a menstruating woman. People also used to think that beer, wine, vinegar, milk, and jam would become spoiled if touched by a menstruating woman.

 

Things haven’t gotten much better in recent times. As recently as the 1930s, scientists were trying to prove that menstruating women produced menotoxins, or poisons, in their menstrual blood, perspiration, saliva, urine, and tears. Professor B. Schick first came up with this concept in 1919, proposing that this was the reason why menstruating women supposedly caused wine to spoil and flowers to wilt at their touch.

 

Thanks to this stigma, women used to be—and in some places, continue to be—forced to leave their homes and spend time in isolation whenever they experienced their period. In many developing countries, girls as young as 10 must spend their menstrual cycles in an animal shed built outside their homes. This practice often causes girls to miss school, contributing to the phenomenon of uneducated women developing countries. In Africa alone, one in 10 girls misses school when she has her period because of lack of information and inadequate facilities.  

 

While the physical ostracization of menstruating women is no longer a reality in countries like the United States, the stigma of uncleanliness and shame lingers. Recently Kiran Gandhi, drummer for M.I.A. and Harvard Business School graduate, decided to run a marathon on her period, without a pad or tampon. She had trained for months for this marathon, and had unexpectedly gotten her period the night before. She decided to run the marathon anyway, citing comfort as her primary reason for forgoing a pad or tampon. During the marathon, she freely bled into her athletic leggings.

 

When the story broke the news, the entire world recoiled in disgust. Even though the menstrual fluid was contained in the runner’s leggings, only leaving stains in her crotch area, people derided the runner as unsanitary, cited public health violations, and ridiculed her as disgusting and shameless.

 

Marathon runners often urinate as they run, unwilling to waste a precious second, and this is seen as understandable; yet, when this runner menstruated as she ran, unwilling to wear a pad or tampon that would cause painful chafing throughout the course of a long run, this was seen as disgusting and radical.

 

Why the enormous backlash? Kiran Gandhi said it herself best: “As I ran, I thought to myself about how women and men have both been effectively socialized to pretend periods don’t exist… Because it is all kept quiet, women are socialized not to complain or talk about their own bodily functions, since no one can see it happening.”

 

She has a point: in our society, periods are seen as something that should be hidden. Advertisements for pads and tampons are intentionally vague and misleading, showing montages of frolicking women and demonstrating pad absorbency using mysterious blue liquid. Seventeen publishes “period traumaramas” where girls share embarrassing stories about their periods—apparently, the worst thing that can happen to a teenage girl is getting your period around your boyfriend or dropping a tampon in front of your crush. Kotex sells pads with specially designed rustle-free wrappers, so even other women in a public bathroom don’t have to know you’re on your period. In our society, menstruation is so stigmatized that we essentially pretend it doesn’t even exist.

 

The stigma of menstruation is not only physical, but also psychological. Women on their periods are not only dirty and repulsive, but also moody and hysterical—according to experts on female physiology like Donald Trump, at least. Infamously, the controversial presidential hopeful insinuated that Megyn Kelly was menstruating during the GOP debate. On an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Trump said, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her…wherever.” Though he later insisted that he was referring to her nose, it is obvious that he was implying that she was on her period while questioning him in what he perceived as an overly aggressive manner.

 

This is not only an unfair assumption that invalidates women’s emotions and reactions as mere hormonal impulses, but also a line of thinking that prevents women from being taken seriously in their educational and professional pursuits. In 1981, a survey of Americans found that over half of the respondents thought that women were more emotional while menstruating, and about a quarter of the respondents believed that women cannot function normally or do their work as well while menstruating. However, studies found that there is no evidence of premenstrual or menstrual decline in women’s mental or physical performances.

 

Nevertheless, the stigma of menstruating women as being hysterical harpies persists. It is this stigma that caused Newt Gingrich in 1995 to declare that women are unfit for combat because “females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days.” It is this stigma that caused cartoonist Pat Oliphant to portray Hillary Clinton as weepy and weak in the face of terrorists. It is this stigma that caused Marc Rudov to point to PMS and mood swings as the main downside of having a female president.

 

This stigma even puts the health and lives of women at risk. In the past, women who expressed any range of symptoms—including sexual desire, loss of appetite for sex, and a “tendency to cause trouble”—were often diagnosed with “hysteria,” a diagnosis no longer recognized by medical authorities today, and forced to enter an insane asylum or to undergo surgical hysterectomy.

 

Even now, doctors often do not take women’s complaints of pain as seriously as men’s complaints. Women under 55 are two times as likely as men in the same age group to die after being hospitalized for a heart attack, in part because doctors often ignore or minimize women’s complaints when they speak up. Women are often dismissed as “hysterical, dramatic, or crazy,” a dangerous stereotype that could even put their lives at risk.

 

The period stigma sucks. It’s annoying to constantly have your thoughts and emotions dismissed as hormonal impulses, it’s irritating to devise methods of bringing a tampon into the bathroom without anyone noticing, and it’s embarrassing to be shamed for having unexpected period leaks on your clothing or bedding.

 

But the period stigma has much more far-reaching consequences. It means that women are not taken seriously in the workplace. It means that women are not seen as competent leaders. It means that Megyn Kelly is seen as a hormonal bitch on her period rather than an intelligent reporter brave enough to ask the tough questions to Donald Trump. It means that Kiran Gandhi is seen as a disgusting unladylike rebel rather than a woman who wanted to run a marathon with her family and friends and just happened to have her period that day. The period stigma shames women for their natural bodily functions and for their thoughts alike, making women feel just as uncomfortable in the workplace as they do in their own bodies.

 

Sure, periods can be messy and annoying and always seem to come at the most unexpected times, but they are also a reminder of the incredible capabilities of the female body. Instead of pretending they don’t exist, we should be bonding over an experience that half of the human population undergoes every month. Period blood, after all, consists of eggs and uterine lining prepared for a potential developing baby—the apparatus used for making life. Personally, I don’t find that gross at all. I find it pretty miraculous.