Talking About Periods

Recently I have read a number of articles that were shared by my friends on facebook regarding menstruation. Surprisingly, they were all shared by male friends and were all related to women being open to talking about menstruation and their periods. I really can’t understand what the big deal is.

What is it we should be talking about? What is menstruation? You can read that up in any biology text book or sex education books which are now freely available in the market.  Or do you want to know what we feel during this period? How we deal with cramps and backaches and mood swings and manage to get all our household chores done and go to work and put in a full eight hours of work without anyone even knowing that we have our periods?

Or should I just tell you, “I’ve got my periods and the pad is itchy and stinky and I have cuts on my thighs and I am so irritable I will bite off the head of anyone who gets in my way?” If I say, “All that I want to do is curl around a hot water bottle and drink cups of hot tea.”, can I take the day off from work, every month?

It is not as if we do not talk about our periods. We do. To the people who matter. We tell our mothers and can be assured of a hot cup of tea placed in our hands. We tell our girl friends who can empathise with what we are going through. Yes we even tell our dads when it is an emergency and he needs to go and buy us sanitary pads. Our boyfriends know and so do our husbands, in fact they are more aware of the dates than we are and know if we are even a day late.

Pregnancies are not announced by eating imli and looking coyly at your husband. It goes more like this. “Did you get your periods yet?” “No” “Okay”. “So till when do we have to wait before going to the doctor?” or “You vomiting every morning and you are already ten days late. Doctor ke paas jana hai kya?”

So since all the concerned people already know the why, the when and the how, what more do we need to talk about? Do you tell the world when you have had a wet dream? Or how often you have shagged? If you can take that as part of you being a man and not really worth mentioning to all and sundry, then having our periods too is just part and parcel of being a woman. It is something we accept, something we go through and get on with our lives. Till we start menopause and well, that is a topic that will keep for another time.