Not in current societal norms and beliefs, fleeting standards, and rules on femininity, conditioned by ideas (how), time (when), and space (where).
What do women of ancient times or the Renaissance, and from Siberia, Brazil, or London of today have in common throughout space and time? What connects them beyond standards and opinions? What lays in a woman’s core?
While sociocultural constructs differ in places and times, the female cycle is a core of womanhood, the origin, purpose, and goal – all at once. The core of womanhood has always been the same, as it has always been – in plain sight, invisible. Sadly, even in 2025, the female cycle gets inadequate attention. It has been overlooked, ignored, and stigmatized to the point that the new generations of women are no less oblivious than their grandmothers to the menstrual cycle’s transcendent meaning for their physical, mental, emotional, and social health or relationships.
The female cycle got quite a reputation. Only that its ‘problematic’ reputation was given by oblivious to estrogen flow male doctors and health practitioners. The gender empathy gap is a reason women’s health was overlooked, ignored, misunderstood, and judged for being too much, and at the same time, not enough. Undeserved shame was placed on women, and the subject of incomprehensible female flow was silenced. Maybe partly because it was one of those subjects men felt deeply ignorant about. And no one wants to feel stupid, so we’d better not discuss it at all.
How much damage did this unfair treatment inflict on women’s healthcare, self-care, and self-perceptionr 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.
Where do we go from here?
It seems to me that after generations of beeng strongly persuaded to copy male testosterone linear ways and comply with linear expectations of behavior and convenient emotional states, now is a place and time to acknowledge and accept women’s natural estrogen ways, from menarch, first menstrual blood to menopause without diminishing women’s sense of self-worth.
On a bigger scale, for humankind as a species, a female estrogen cycle is no less meaningful than the male testosterone one. The estrogen menstrual cycle is vital beyond planning or avoiding pregnancies and childbearing. Understanding the menstrual cycle and the normal range of physical and emotional fluctuations should become a priority for healthcare providers and for every woman who bleeds or not, and every partner – to stop expecting complience with testosterone norms, to acknowledge their baseline of the norm, and cancel old stigma and generational shame, and start curing the ill, not the well.
