By David Futrelle
What better way to celebrate International Women’s Day than with a mansplaination of the menstrual cycle from a (presumably) young man on Tumblr who doesn’t seem to have ever seen a vagina in real life?
Although he assures us he has felt their pain.
Welllllllllllllll periods suck(trust me, I was emotionally close with a woman, in fact close enough to feel her goddamn periods. Fuck I fucking hated it, men, don’t get that attached. Be supportive, feed her ice cream and whatever else she asks for, but don’t get attached enough to feel them. It’s not worth it.
So far, so good: Don’t get yourself surgically attached to a woman so that you literally feel what she feels.
Anyway, I hate to be callous but that’s just your body telling you to hurry up and get pregnant.
Wait, what? Dude, cis girls typically get their first periods when they’re, like, 12, and can get them as young as 7 or 8. Their bodies aren’t telling them to “hurry up” and get pregnant.
Also, are you aware that pregnancy tends to be a lot more uncomfortable than having a period once a month? And that’s not even counting the nightmare that is childbirth. If pain and discomfort were a reliable guide to what your body does or does not “want,” wouldn’t the pain of pregnancy and childbirth be an indication that no one should ever have kids?
Of course birth control also makes them not as bad, depending on what kind.
Uh, some forms of birth control have an effect on, ah never mind. I doubt this guy could tell the difference between birth control and, oh, I don’t know, motor oil.
Of course you find out that there’s more kinds of birth control than there are types of oil, which is a pain.
WAIT WHAT
There are more period blood containment things(yes, tht includes tampons, pads, cups, etc.) than there are types of oil according to my dad who actually knows his shit about the oil,saying there’s like 4 types.(Yes, talking about motor oil here)
WHY ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT MOTOR OIL
WHERE AM I
WHAT IS GOING ON
So ladies, find what’s right for you. Ask a doctor. Test some different period things out. It’s for your own good
Definitely ask a doctor. Ask a friend. Ask Alexa. Ask random women on the street. Ask pretty much anyone but this dude. Or his dad, who will probably tell you to pour some Valvoline SynPower 0W-20 up in there, get everything running nice and smoothly.
In case you’re wondering, Mr. Motor Oil Menstruation Man doesn’t seem to be trolling, if his earnest responses to various, er, critics of his advice are any indication.
One anonymous commenter, for example, took offense at his notion that periods are basically just your body telling you to get pregnant.
Maybe don’t encourage minors to get pregnant cuz they have periods? Wtf is wrong with you I literally started my periods at like 11.
He responded:
Not encouraging it, I was half exhausted at the time but what I meant was it seems like your body is holding you hostage like, “hey bitch, I’mma do this again next month if you aren’t pregnant k bye” doesn’t it?
No, no it doesn’t, dude. Because in order to stave off your monthly periods you would have to remain more or less continuously pregnant or lactating from your first period until … menopause, which tends to hit around age 50. Unless you die before then from HAVING TWENTY BABIES.
Dudes, at least spend a minute or two thinking these things through before exposing your ass on the internet.
And please don’t ever offer your thoughts on the correct usage of “vagina” vs “vulva,” because we’ve already been through that. Twice.
H/T — This post has been making the rounds on Tumblr. I ran across it thanks to @babypizzagaga on Twitter, who is funny, and quite expert at finding this sort of thing, and who also has a very nice cat.
@Lainy
This thread in a nutshell.
Correct, it is.
All men must be aggressive, authoritative, and strong, after all. Otherwise they aren’t manly. Wouldn’t, you know, fit their gender role.
Can’t keep a woman. You know, like cattle, but for making babies.
Do you know anything about what Patriarchy means, my duck? Like, seriously. Do you understand the implications of it?
Well I suppose you could call yourself a Cuckette if you like LOL.
In modern parlance, that would make him a FUCCBOI. However, he would also be called a deadbeat(dad). Guys used to refer to men like this as “players”.
Double standards are very real and will never truly go away. Nor do most humans actually want them to disappear. Sexual desire will never be constrained by social norms.
Could you not be creepy for like five minutes.
I want them to go away. I want them to very much go away and so does most people in this comment section. And really? never? So all the LGBT people who used to have to marry someone of the opposite sex or each other just to survive never happened? The fact I can lose my job in my state if I’m openly gay doesn’t happen? the ocean of blood of people who are murdered for loving someone or being a way that society deems unusually doesn’t happen? hell my great great great grandmother couldn’t marry the man she loved because he was a different color then her. Their children were spat on and they had difficultly renting or owning a home because people either didn’t condone their relationship or wouldn’t condone an unmarried man and woman living together. And this is not just the past. LGBT people lose homes and jobs legally because of their relationships. People that are polyamorous lose jobs and homes legally because of their relationships. It’s like you don’t even look around at the world your in.
@Nowherepants
Biotruths.txt
@Nowherepants,
The word is cucquean. Like I said earlier.
There’s a reason that no one knows it and isn’t used as an insult, while cuckold is deeply insulting.
Can you figure out why?
@Freja
have I told
you lately
that I love your brain?
@Lainy
I adore the way you’ve spoken up, and I just want to cosign everything you’ve just said.
Folks are murdered for being gay, for being autistic, for being trans, for being women, for daring to be alive without existing within the narrow sense of what’s “acceptable”.
Monogamy is very much enforced in our society, in multiple ways. So is cissexism and heterosexism and racism and misogyny, and it’s only possible to say they aren’t if you personally don’t actually care whether or not they are.
*facepalm*
You did not understand what I said. Desire is a transitive emotional state, not an *action*. For example, people are taught to date, mate, and procreate with the opposite sex and yet some people STILL feel attraction exclusively to the same sex(or to both sexes). Homosexuality has always been around even in places where it was(and still is) punishable by death.
Now as you know, gay marriage is legal nationwide and yes, unfortunately there still are states that allow housing discrimination against LGBT folks(however, I wager this will change for the better in the next 10 years). But what is this about polyamorous people losing their homes? Are you talking about married couples in open marriages or unwed couples? If the latter well I’m not entirely surprised that some realtors would discriminate against unwed couples in certain states.
@IgnoreSandra: Not interested in non-monogamy. Period. And I don’t care if you disapprove. Quit trying to psychoanalyze me and stop telling other people what to do with their love lives/sex lives.
Also, I think it is important to distinguish polyamory from hookup culture. The are NOT the same thing. What JP is opposing most of all is the latter….which is resulting in (surprise surprise) people having *less* sex on average than they were say, 30 years ago and an surge rampage violence like we’ve never seen before.
Way to completely miss the point.
(Hint: I’ve helpfully bolded the actual point that @IgnoreSandra was trying to make.)
Oh nice blaming other for their own discrimination there buddy.
@Nowherepants
WTF.
No, it is not.
Wikipedia, “Polygamy in North America”
NowherePants,
Correlation is not causation. What makes you think that hookup culture is the cause of mass murder?
I mean, I’m not even sure it’s a correlation because I don’t know that hookup culture is even a real thing. Older generations love to scaremonger about how decadent and depraved the younger generations are. This has been the case as long as there has been media to record it and almost certainly goes back to before that. Keep that in mind when you want to discuss generational trends.
Even if we do grant that a correlation exists, what’s the evidence of causation? We already know that income inequality goes hand in hand with various societal ills. What makes you think that both mass violence and systemic sexual dissatisfaction aren’t just symptoms of capitalism starting to break down? You won’t hear that from your buddy JP. Because he likes all this social and political instability. He’s a grifter profiting off of it. But it sure is a lot easier of a fix to try and coerce women into behaving the way that conservative men want us to than it is to restructure our entire economic system. It’s always an easier fix to give into demagogues.
@Ariblester
Thank you <3 <3 Exactly that. He's trying to shift the conversation to avoid answering the actual question.
Me, in response to the ludicrous claim that monogamy isn't enforced:
The guy who thinks he’s arguing with me:
Should I even bother saying things? It’s very clear that Nowherepants is rewriting my statements (Probably all of ours) in his head as he reads them. He has to in order to have anything to say at all, which is why he never contextualizes my statements or even references them at all.
Honestly, it’s the same thing JP does. If you can’t respond to the ideas someone else expresses, pretend they expressed something else. It’s foolproof! Except for the part where people notice when you do this.
Now, how about you answer Freja, asshole.
Nowheres convo is all boiling down to….wimminz need to fall in line and know their place or the sky will fall.
People have less one night stands = violence??? Realllly????
cough
(Casual sex is not polyamory or polygamy)
Gentle reminder that this monogamy-polygamy argument has nothing to do with the topic.
This started because Nowherepants called a twitter creeper a “testosterone defficient cuckgina” and a “twitter twatter.” I (and others) said that those insults were insulting by associating the creeper with femininity.
(also, it’s a vulva)
The only response I got was him saying that “cuck isn’t sexist.” Now we’re arguing about that, and it’s pointless. Out of the 4 morphemes in the original statement (“testosterone deficient,” “cuck,” “-gina,” “twat”), three were immediately abandoned as positions-to-defend.
This argument is about whether what he said was 75% awful or 100% awful. Would being right about that 25% redeem the rest?
All of this is a distraction from the fact that Nowherepants’ idea of insulting someone is to associate them with femininity, and to say they’re not properly filling out their assigned, patriarchal gender role.
Oh, fun little detail. The surge of violent crime we saw in the past is correlated with leaded gasoline. The poor air flow and high traffic density of cities caused a bloom of lead poisoning; one of the side effects of that beyond learning disabilities is violent behaviour. Once the stuff was outlawed, violent crime rates began to drop.
(That was in an episode of the more recent Cosmos series! Worth watching if you haven’t seen it. NDT did a pretty good job, as did all the animators and crew.)
But sure, it’s about promiscuity.
here’s the comment in question:
And, once I pointed out some of the problems with the words/assumptions in it, I got this in response
The first bit of which says “wtf none of this matters at all, I can say anything on the internet because it isn’t real.”
The second of which is a weird mix of “using feminine-coded shaming language to run them off of the platform is the only way they will ever learn!” and “why isn’t the person running this blog talking about this specific thing? Why is he doing a poor job???”
You can blather on about non-monogamy, and that violent crime is linked to hook up culture (?????) all you want, nowherepants, but your MRA/incel/mgtow/lobsterite is showing.
AND WE ALL SEE IT.
9___9
(right tab, this time. lol)
@Scildfreja and Rhuu
It’s a positive delight to watch y’all nail down a troll’s utter bullshit with style.
@wwth:
I know it was just for the sake of argument that you were just considering the possibility that the asserted (positive) correlation between “hook-up culture” and “rampage violence” exists, but I thought I’d say that I find it highly dubious that such a correlation exists.
I’ve seen no stats on any correlation between hook-up culture and violence per se, but I’ve seen stats that show a positive correlation between religiosity and violence and a negative correlation between religiosity and both number of partners and willingness to self-identify as queer (lesbian, gay, bi, pan, etc.).
Now, violence isn’t necessarily “rampage violence” (however you want to define that) and we’ve got no definition of “hook-up culture”, but if “hook-up culture” is positively correlated with number of partners and/or queerness and if “rampage violence” is positively correlated with “violence” then all the data we’ve got would be highly uncertain as to the magnitude of the correlation, but strongly indicative that any correlation that exists is negative, not positive.
In other words, to the extent that we can possibly have any data for the correlation of categories that aren’t operationally defined, we have a proxy for “hook-up culture” negatively correlated with religiosity while a proxy for “rampage violence” is positively correlated with religiosity, yielding a negative correlation (albeit of unknown magnitude) between the two proxies.
Therefore, from everything we know, as “hook-up culture” goes up, “rampage violence” is something we would expect to go down. Far from being a cause, if “violence” is a reasonable proxy for “rampage violence” and being queer and having lots of fuck partners is a reasonable proxy for “hook-up culture”, then “hook-up culture” is, for all we know, a fucking cure for “rampage violence”.
Of course, it’s much more likely that there’s no causal relationship between them at all and any correlation is the result of other, deeper factors (tolerance of difference, say) that actually do have a causal relationship with both allowing other people to have whatever sex they want without interference and with not shooting other people.
But hey, that’s just thinking scientifically and what have the sciences ever done for us?
I think the assertion might have actually been that hook up culture prevents non Chads from getting sex, which drives them into a jealous sexually frustrated rage or something? Which makes the claim even more dubious because the manosphere fun fact about 20% of men having sex with 80% is based on next to no evidence. The only “evidence” I’ve seen is dating app research on who is rated attractive.