It’s the 7th grade. For some reason, your time playing dodgeball in gym class has been cut short and all the girls and guys are ushered into separate rooms. By this point, you can physically feel the awkwardness in the air as the school nurse puts on an educational film from the 1970s about—you guessed it—periods. The video tries to tell you that everything will be okay, but when someone tells you that you’re going to probably be bleeding every month or so for a very large portion of your life—it’s not the happiest of pictures. From there, it’s a downward spiral, even if you have accepted your developmental fate, you can’t help but feel… weird.
Let’s think about this for a second. If periods weren’t marginalized to the increasingly long “do-not-talk-about-this-list,” us period-owners would not have to engage in a world-class secret spy mission just to slip our friend a pad or tampon. Therefore, venting about PMS symptoms to non-period owners, wouldn’t be such a leap of faith and asking permission from your male-teacher-in-the-middle-of-a-very-important-lecture, to use the bathroom would be smooth sailing. Needless to say, the waves are bumpy.
From a young age when girls are experiencing changes both internally and externally, society implements the ideology that women’s health issues are matters that should be kept away from the public eye, locked in a box, and tied with a pretty pink bow—basically a more sophisticated way of saying that girls have cooties, and that the world should be spared from our problems.
Boys are sheltered from learning about women’s health issues at a young age. It isn’t until middle school or high school where boys and girls are in the same health class and learning the same information. This can plant the thought that women’s issues are this mysterious, taboo subject matter. There is a stigma that women’s experiences come from a place that is manifested from these school-age years—if something goes wrong then it must be your fault, either you are emotional or overreacting. This societal thought process accumulates as women get older and are more likely to face potentially serious health issues. The lack of empathy and understanding that ensues from this mindset is incredibly dehumanizing.
Jessica M. Vaught, MD. states in her article, “5 Reproductive Health Issues We Need to Talk About in 2020” that with conditions like premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) or fibroids, pain can often be subjective. Therefore, a women’s pain is taken less seriously by the medical profession. “Women’s physical symptoms also may be dismissed as being the result of emotions, leading to less effective treatment,” Vaught explains, as she presents reporting from The Independent that displays how men on average wait 49 minutes before being medically treated, while women, on average, wait 65 minutes. The article goes on to explain that “similarly, women are consistently prescribed less pain-relieving medication … medical professionals take longer to address women’s pain, and do less to address it when they eventually do, even when they have the same symptoms as men.”
Another article from The Atlantic, details a couple, Rachel and Joe Fassler’s trip to the emergency room after Rachel experienced excruciating pain one Wednesday morning. Rachel spent all day waiting in the hospital while encountering condescending remarks from medical professionals who believed that she was being overdramatic. Little did they know that Rachel was sitting, waiting in the pain of an ovarian torsion—a mass that required serious surgical attention. Over 14 hours had elapsed since the time her pain had started.
We will never realize this weight that these issues hold until we have an open discussion about them from a young age. We will never be able to combat the stigma until we recognize that a stigma does exist. Women’s health is a human rights issue. Normalization of women’s health should be enthusiastically implemented into elementary and middle school health education, uncomfortable discussions need to be had, and systemic changes need to be enacted within the medical field. So what do you say, should we take that locked box, tied with a pretty pink bow, down from its shelf and open it?