What do women of ancient times or the Renaissance have in common with women from Siberia, Brazil, or Tokyo of today? What unites them? What lies at the core of all women? Certainly not fleeting societal norms and beliefs about what women should look like and ways they should behave, dress, and act. Those rules are artificial constructs, conditioned by ideas (how), time (when), and place (where). I recognize the female menstrual cycle to be at womanhood’s core. It is the origin, purpose, and goal at once. The core of womanhood has always been it – in plain sight, invisible. It has been overlooked, ignored, and stigmatized to the point that the new generations of women are often no less oblivious than their grandmothers to their menstrual cycle’s transcendent meaning for physical, mental, emotional, and social health and relationships.
The female cycle got quite a reputation. Rather, it was given by generations of oblivious to the estrogen flow male health practitioners. The gender empathy gap is a reason women’s menstrual thus global health, was overlooked, ignored, misunderstood, and women were judged for being too much and not enough at the same time. Undeserved shame was placed on women, and the whole subject of ‘incomprehensible’ female flow was silenced. How much damage has this unfair treatment inflicted on women’s healthcare, self-care, and self-perception already? And how much longer will women feel misunderstood, ignored, and furious for lack of answers to their questions about “a shitshow of a womanhood” as one FB user wrote.
Is there hope?
After generations of being quite on the subject of menstrual health and estrogen flow and normal emotional volatility throughout the cycle, and beeng strongly persuaded to copy male testosterone linear ways, comply with linear expectations of behavior, we finally do the work to recognize, accept and expolre female natural estrogen-driven ways, from menarch, first menstrual blood till menopause without diminishing women’s sense of self-worth.
If we look at the bigger scale, for humankind as a species, a female estrogen cycle has never been less meaningful than the testosterone one. Understanding the menstrual and emotional cycle and its range of norms should now become a priority for healthcare providers, every woman who bleeds or not, and their partners. And then, maybe we can stop expecting women to comply with testosterone-based norms, and start expecting men to acknowledge estrogen baselines, and cancel stigma and generational shame.
