I realise it is August and news is slow, but over at the Telegraph Woman’s section on Tuesday, these were the four leading stories:
- America’s Iron Lady Carly Fiorina: Has Donald Trump met his match?
- Stella Creasy: Labour urgently needs more women members to avoid ‘all male meetings’
- Periods in sport: Half of athletes don’t perform as well when menstruating
- This woman ran the London Marathon on her period without a tampon
Politics and periods – because that is all we ladies are interested in. Dear God help us. I would normally leave this one alone but I am just going to say this once – can we please stop trying to ‘break the last taboo’ and put a few things back in the privacy box. First up – your sex life – and second most definitely your goddamn period.
Feminists used to complain that women were defined by their body and their bodily experiences and now they cannot shut up about it. At The Times (another slow news day) some woman has a book out that is going to explode the myth and reality of our sex lives. Sure it is. The Sex Myth: The Gap between Our Fantasies and Reality by Rachel Hills.
We are told: “Men and women once struggled to contain themselves; now humanity was struggling with mass performance anxiety. The joy of sex had become compulsory and all of us were left to worry that we were not doing it frequently enough.”
Indeed, if you don’t leave anything to the imagination it all becomes dull. We are to accept that all of us are worrying that we are not doing it enough. This certainly is the big worry of our times: not how we are going to pay the mortgage or get the kids to school but when the next roll in the hay will be. Oh, enough already.
Then the crazy lady who obviously never saw the movie Carrie. When Kiran Ghandi got her period the night before she was due to run the London Marathon in April (but the Telegraph decided to run the story now); she didn’t know what to do.
A grown woman faced with a monthly occurrence that she has faced many times before did not know what to do! Just what can the lady brain conjure up? A trip to pharmacy perhaps? No, Ghandi decided “to just take some midol, hope I wouldn’t cramp, bleed freely and just run.”
Ghandi continues: “By establishing a norm of period-shaming, [male-preferring] societies effectively prevent the ability to bond over an experience that 50 per cent of us in the human population share monthly.
“Because it is all kept quiet, women are socialised not to complain or talk about their own bodily functions, since no one can see it happening. And if you can’t see it, it’s probably ‘not a big deal.’ Why is this an important issue? Because THIS is happening, right now.”
Ok, let’s just deal with this shaming issue. Just because something should be private does not mean it is something shameful. It is just private. Most sane women want to keep these things private because they do not want to be reduced to body parts and secondly it is not a big deal.
Women have more important things to be doing like, I don’t know, running a marathon, going to university, mothering our children, commuting to work, lawyering etc, etc, etc or anything else other than obsessing about periods. You are not 14 any more!
The feminists are now eating themselves. They have come full circle – ‘we are more than our bodies’ has morphed into ‘we are only our bodies.’ Crazy feminists listen up: you are not smashing any taboos – you are just looking the fool. Stop ruining it for the rest of us.
