Let’s start from the beginning:
Please stop before you get started.
Recent events have shown me how little men of all ages understand what it is like to live with a vagina. There has been this grand, pointless taboo placed on women and our reproductive health. Men need to be properly educated on this subject before having opinions that end up shaping our society and the way our world works.
Please stop making me feel bad about getting my period.
An article was published a few weeks ago about a chiropractor in Kansas who invented a type of medical glue that could be used to stop your period by gluing your labia together. All women will immediately understand how this could never actually work, but [some] men, think this is a viable product. The inventor of this new product conveniently named “Mensez” added to this ridiculous event by stating: “…I am a man, and you as a woman should have come up with a better solution… but you didn’t. Reason being women are focused on and distracted by your period 25% of the time.” Yeah you’re right, when I’m on my period I can’t focus on anything else. News flash to men, you don’t even know when girls are on their periods most of the time. In this exact moment 200 million women are on their period. Do you think all 200 million of those women are staring at a blank wall right now thinking about their vaginas? No.
Stop making me feel bad for defending my gender.
This request doesn’t even deserve a “please” in front of it. Guess where you started, in a woman. Guess who makes up 50% of our world, women. Men, I understand you have had control over the world for most of history, and women are now encroaching in your territory. However, it is tiring that men are openly allowed to talk down to women with low amounts of consequences when they do so. I have had someone say to me: “No one likes a feminist”. As a girl, I am expected to laugh this off like its funny. If I said no one likes men, or no one likes white people, or any other category of person, it would never be a laughing topic. So why is it fair that me standing up for my gender is viewed any differently?
Stop making me feel bad that your taxes are paying for my birth control.
Before I started birth control I had a face full of acne, cramps so bad that I would throw up, and would miss school because it can make you that physically ill. My dermatologist was the first doctor to recommend that I start birth control. Today a 20-year-old boy asked me, “Does birth control have other health benefits for women besides preventing pregnancy?” No 20-year-old, college-educated person should be asking that question. All these other health benefits are usually the main reasons why girls take birth control. Also, your taxes can stop paying for my birth control once my tax dollars stop paying for your Viagra. Yes, programs that are federally funded pay for Viagra. Or, I’ll feel bad that you’re paying for my birth control when the government stops placing luxury taxes on my tampons. A box of about 36 tampons costs around $9 because using a tampon in order to not have blood running down your legs is such a luxurious experience. There’s no luxury tax placed on condoms, and I am pretty sure that having safe-sex with a beautiful girl is a lot more luxurious than having to clean period blood out of your white shorts because you couldn’t get a tampon or pad quick enough.
Yeah, it is a weird subject to talk about, and a lot of it is gross. But we will not be educated enough about women unless people are shown the rawness of having to live with these problems every day. It’s unsettling that our country is being run by mostly old, college-educated men who don’t even understand how a period works; when this is something that most girls have mastered around the ripe age of 15.