A Man’s Guide to Menstruation

Listen up, fellas, and shut your mouths before I kill you all. It’s time you get the lowdown on what you likely find to be the single most disturbing thing about the fairer sex: periods. Roughly every 28 days, our uteri try to secede from the union that is our body. Always successful and never without casualties, when you do the math menstruation is the bloodiest war in the history of (wo)mankind. Remember the “Red Wedding” episode of Game of Thrones? Well, we get a reenactment—heart-wrenching emotion and all—in our pants every month.

Bloating.

We feel as wide, heavy, and graceful as a semi truck. And in the middle of the night, tiny, evil closet gnomes go through all of our clothes and shrink everything we own to be at least half a size too small. Sweatpants are our only allies.

Cramps.

As if a disturbingly large volume of blood wasn’t bad enough, let’s throw in some debilitating cramps as well. Hope we have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no plans on being comfortable in any position. And that is including all of the positions we learned how to dislocate our joints into at yoga.

Mood swings.

Our bodies are currently doing everything they can think of to punish us for not getting knocked up this month. No baby? No problem. Here is a tidal wave of hormones that will take us from rage to tears to laughter and back again in under 5 minutes flat.

Exercise.

Exercise doesn’t help! To say it does is a lie. And this lie was likely made up by a 60-year-old man who was trying to sell copies of Cosmo and owns hefty stock in Lululemon. The only thing exercise does to cramps is piss them off.

Gluttony.

Yes, we CAN eat an entire package of Double Stuf Oreos in one sitting. No, you are not allowed to mention that it ever happened.

DON’T ask if we’re on our period.

I know you may have questions and that’s OK. That’s what the Internet and Judy Blume books are for. But what is not OK is asking those questions aloud to us ever. Under no circumstances would it behoove you to ask a woman if she is in fact on her period. You are, in all likelihood, 100% correct in your assumption. But the minute those words pass through that idiot hole in your face you call a mouth, you have relinquished your role as a person we care for and turned into the Devil incarnate.