But how do you simulate cramps?
Hmm.
It starts with a written announcement or explanation or declaration.
Menstruation is something natural that is constantly associated with being a “woman”, therefore it is completely normal for all women to want to experience this sensation and I hope you can all appreciate that.
One – why the scare quotes on “woman”? Why any scare quotes? Why the claim that menstruation is “constantly associated with being a ‘woman'” as opposed to something that happens to girls and women or something that girls and women do? Menstruation isn’t something that’s foolishly attributed to women, it’s a tiresome and unpleasant aspect of being a woman.
And two – are you serious? It’s completely normal for all women to want to experience menstruation? It’s completely normal for all women to hate menstruation. You might as well say all women want to be kicked in the abdomen for a day or two every month along with leaking clumpy messy blood for a few days every month. Menstruation is not a fun fabulous perk of being a woman!
Three – it’s not a “sensation.” It includes sensations, all of them nasty, but a sensation is far from the total of what it is.
Four, to the extent that it is a sensation, it’s a nasty sensation.
Also? It’s something that women tend to want to keep as covert as possible, so there really isn’t any need for trans women to pretend to menstruate. It’s not a detectable bit of dimorphism, generally speaking, so my advice would be to SKIP IT. Just skip the fuck out of that particular bit of the Womanly Experience. Double up on the dangly earrings or lacy frocks, instead; that’s my advice.
I only watched as far as 1:43, but by then the deeply sincere bozo who made this vid has said she’s going to show us how to make some fake menstrual blood to put on a pad, or if you’re post-op you can try putting it in a cup.
Perhaps she goes on to butcher a pig, I don’t know.
This can’t be serious.
I clicked play out of morbid curiosity, assuming it was made by a transgender adult. The fact that the “deeply sincere bozo” (and I can’t dispute your characterization) is probably about 15 years old softens my attitude. I expect teenagers to be bozos of one sort or another, and I’ll take a sincere and well-meaning bozo over a snide, belligerent bozo. (Non-bozo kids give me Midwich Cuckoo vibes). I’m sure the day will come when she finds this video completely mortifying.
I mean, this is gold: “I tried to use [only things that are] edible because I figured if it was edible you can also [slight pause] put it in your vagina. Just seemed like it wouldn’t be dangerous.”
Makes me wonder if we equip my son with some sort of deep-tissue-electro-shock apparatus with sensor to detect sharp impacts to the crotch area… which would allow him to experience that wonderful kicked-in-the-nuts “sensation” that all us cis guys just “take for granted”.
Joking aside – and maybe giving a hint at what could possibly motivate transwomen to desire a simulated menstruation… just yesterday my son appealed to us to buy him a cup in addition to his other karate sparring equipment… “I know I don’t need one but all the other boys get to wear one so I should be allowed to, too, and I really just want to”.
But even there, I’d think that would only be the equivalent of a transwoman simply buying and “using” feminine hygiene products… and it still doesn’t get close to my son’s primary driver: it’s a minor but realistic risk (perhaps over-inflated in his mind) that somebody sparring with him might note the lack of a cup. If wearing a needless jock strap takes that risk (and risk of a dreaded “but you’re a boy – what do you mean you don’t need a cup?” question) to zero, then that’s what he’d prefer to do. When it comes to menstruation – I can only think it’s more likely on a level of physical dysphoria rather than social dysphoria (i.e. driven by a sense of a transgender woman of a “gap” in what her body is experiencing and what she feels it should be experiencing).
Apologies for the “transwoman” rather than “trans woman” (and few other grammar gibberishments); multi-tasking a bit as I’m commenting; the lack of space was not intentional.
How to simulate cramps:
1. Give someone a steel gauntlet from a medieval suit of armor. Have them put it on their dominant hand.
2. Cut a slit in your abdomen.
3. Have the person insert the gauntleted hand into your abdomen and grab a handful of guts.
4. Put a bowling ball inside your abdomen on top of the hand.
5. Have the person alternately squeeze and twist your guts.
6. Continue incessantly for 3-5 days.
That might be a rough approximation.
No, no. “Edible” != “fine in your vagina”.
I’m… Er uh I’m going to go away until I have something witty and intelligent to add to this that is not also likely to be deeply offensive to someone. I mean, WHAT do you say?
Kevin @ 3 – ha! I paused for a few seconds when writing to try to think of an equivalent but gave it up quickly. That one works.
And right, about the cup; that’s why I said the thing about preferring to be covert, and the lack of visible dimorphism. (Except possibly with intimates, but then intimates might walk in when one is preparing the fake menstrual blood, so…) Hiding all that shit is a big, looming, scary need for girls hitting puberty, and even grown women don’t love bleeding through their jeans and leaving drops on the floor, or advertising what they’re using to prevent that.
I guess the dysphoria thing makes sense but even there – I would still say rejoice in your luck.
Okay, hearing that this was made by a teenager does soften my attitude towards the initial description considerably. At 16, I was doing dangerous and stupid things with a banana-yellow Mazda hatchback, including proving that it could, under the right circumstances, get fully airborne. If I was still religious, I’d be thanking the powers that be that I never killed anyone. By comparison, this seems… quaintly inane.
I empathize but–reality is better than delusion. Really.
That said, I love this thread for its wordings.
“Gibberishments.” “Quaintly inane.”
:)
That is all.
When I was a wee lad of 21, I shared a house with several people. One of my roommates experienced incapacitating cramps each month, so severe that she was unable to do anything but just lie on the couch in a fetal position for several days with a heating pad, and a towel over her eyes to block out the light. Rejoice in my luck I am, indeed, Ophelia. Human biology is cruel.
Kevin Kirkpatrick #3
Getting kicked in a groin that has female anatomy is extremely painful and not funny.
Groin protectors for female anatomy are highly recommended (fucking necessary) for anyone with those body parts who engage in contact sports.
Google something like ‘female sport groin protection’.
DO NOT just slap a boy-cup on your son’s external genitalia.
Really, seriously, don’t do it.
I saw a story today about a man who had reached middle age without realize women don’t *control* their periods. That we can’t just choose not to bleed. He also apparently thought tampons were for sexual gratification.
I have to wonder now if there’s a lack of real information about menstruation behind this child’s attempt.
Perhaps when they’re older trans men can try empathising with their cis counterparts swollen prostate problems with the application of super glue to their urethras.
To quote MrFancyPants “Human biology is cruel”.
There is also the possibility that she doesn’t get cramps, or at least not severe ones. I didn’t have cramps when I was a teenager; I didn’t start cramping until my early 20s, and even then it was not consistently every month, so women obviously have different experiences with menstruation.
That being said, even without the cramps, the entire situation is difficult to deal with, and Ophelia’s right about our obsession to hide that we are menstruating. If menstruation is what it takes to make you feel like a woman, I would gladly give up any feeling of being a woman.
The real clue might be women with hysterectomies. These are often women who are just as eager to be recognized as women as they always were, but I’m not aware of any women I have known that have felt the need to simulate menstruation. They’re almost always glad it’s over.
There is a slippery slope of ‘social construct’ stuff around cramping. Obviously SOME women experience dramatic hormonal roller-coastering, including classic cramping, migraines that can be scheduled etc. etc. But it might be worth wondering how much suggestion and social reinforcement spread misery to all.
‘Chlorosis’ and ‘hysteria’ seem to have retreated from the general experience of women. Once they weren’t being driven to produce symptoms to match the idea.
My ex-spouse had abrupt, ‘no problem’ periods,hoped for the same for her daughter and tried hard to keep the shame and dread at bay…no such luck. For whatever reason, my step-daughter had classically miserable cramping.
@chigau – sound advice, reading up on that now, thanks. (an aside – the words “and not funny” kind of stood out – was that directed at anything I’d written?)
@Samantha – sounds like someone who might’ve benefited from a gender-segregated health-education program.
How to simulate prostatitis?
John t D @ 16 –
I should clarify. I didn’t mean all women have terrible cramps; they don’t; I didn’t. I had blergh and discomfort for a day or two, but nothing remotely like what maddog and MrFP’s roommate had.
But the thing itself just isn’t fun.
Kevin Kirkpatrick
‘not funny’ was in response to ‘joking aside’
[I’m probably making something of nothing, but thanks to the more despicable representatives of my gender, I feel the need to be clear on this.]
I took “and not funny” to imply that something in my post gave you the impression that my joking derived some of its humor from “forceful blows to female genitals”. If something in what I wrote struck you as having a flavor of, “and isn’t there just something funny about women being kicked in the groin?”, please let me know. It’s not something I find funny. But as my gender is full of a lot of assholes who do; I feel it’s necessary to take great care to avoid writing/saying anything might confuse me with them.
I’ll reiterate though: I am totally appreciative of the heads-up about ‘female sport groin protection’ (and the riskiness of having my son use the male version instead of female), and have placed an order for the girl-sized “women’s pelvic protector”.
Much as I’d prefer it had been listed as a kids-sized “female pelvic protector”.
You’re not asking me, but for what it’s worth, nothing in what you wrote struck me that way at all, and as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve developed a very alert radar for such things over the past few years. I took it as dark (hence the opposite of callous) humor.
Uh, y’all seem to have drastically misunderstood me?
The middle-aged person who knew nothing about how periods work was a man. The teenager who also appears to know nothing about how periods work is the trans woman of the original post. I can’t see how either would have benefited from segregated sex ed (unless that was being suggested ironically). Also, the teen clearly wouldn’t get cramps of the menstrual variety. But it sounds as if the teen might have been getting her ideas about the wonderfulness of menstruation from some ignoramus like the middle-aged man who thought it was voluntary. I just can’t see many women saying things about it that would make a kid want to experience it for themselves.
Kevin Kirkpatrick
I have been doing karate for ~30 years.
The tournaments we (my dojo) attend have always been “non-contact”.
In the past, the “non” part has been enforced somewhat sporadically.
With increasing participation by children and streaming toward the Olympics, non-contact is becoming very strictly enforced.
As is mandatory protective equipment: mouth guards for everyone, helmets for juniors, groin cups for men, chest protectors for women, etc.
Now, everyone wears chest and groin protection.
(booby protection for women was mandatory before groin protection for women, go figure)
Anyway…
I think my point is that you didn’t say anything that I took as ‘funny about kicking women in the groin’.
Those other people in my karate world trivialized it for so long, I just knee-jerk.
@Samantha – “unless that was being suggested ironically”: yeah, that – sorry for the imprecise delivery
Oh lord… she’s young and she’s dangerously ignorant. It’s not a good idea to put anything yeast forming into a self-cleaning female vagina and it’s a *really* bad idea to put *anything* into a non-self cleaning surgically created vagina – many trans women who have had this surgery have real problems with bacterial infections anyway without adding a colloid of water, food colouring and flour!
Actually, as I was watching, I thought the audience who would *truly* benefit from this would be young girls on the verge of puberty – this is what it will look like etc. Add in a bit of this is how it works, this is how to deal with certain problems, all from an older teen girl who could be a cool big sister figure.
But who cares about young girls? That’s dull.
Samantha: I’ll be honest, for men these days, menstruation info comes from a handful of sources:
1: A barely remembered lecture in high school that was careful to sanitize anything that might make anyone uncomfortable in any way.
2: Fleeting, superficial references in pop culture (typically played for laughs) that only barely touches on the subject, often in stereotypical and misogynistic ways. Gets re-deployed as locker-room jokes that are not big on factual information.
3: Heavily coded ‘feminine hygiene’ commercials that leave many young boys thinking that menstruation is blue. These commercials typically show women being able to smile and dance and skip around happily, just because they use the right tampon/pad. I’ve never once seen a commercial where the woman is doubled over in pain, weeping, the way my wife’s cysts would make her do before she went on the Pill.
In short, the mere notion that menstruation is somehow genuinely unpleasant and might need intervention, and at the very least compassion, is utterly obscured from young men’s lives.