The patriarchy in your uterus is making you sick
Imagine how our godlike bodies could be venerated by everyone
Photo by Monika Kozub on Unsplash, edited by Natasha Coulis
Nothing has clarified for me the issue of sexism in mental health and medical practice in general like having and treating my Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD).
On November 28, 2022, after previous SSRI therapy stopped working, I began a chemical menopause protocol to treat my PMDD. I began getting injections of Lupron Depot to shut down my ovaries’ production of hormones, creating a full-on menopause experience: hot flashes, night sweats, sore joints in places that were never sore before like my hands and wrists, aching muscles even more than I already experienced, insomnia even worse than I was already experiencing, exhaustion, and even drier skin than I experienced in perimenopause. Probably weight gain, too, but that could also be from not moving my exhausted, chronically pained hot bod.
Sounds terrible, right? Why would I pursue this treatment? Because it has been heaven compared to the psychological symptoms of PMDD.
The shots are supposed to last a whole month, but many women experience their PMDD symptoms returning after about 2–3 weeks, when the shot’s ability to suppress their hormone production wanes.
Sure enough, after three weeks of my first shot, I suddenly felt panic-stricken and anxious while Christmas shopping online. I enjoy shopping for presents! I felt happy! Until I didn’t. Out of nowhere, panic swelled and lasted for two days. Not wanting to go to my partners’ family’s home for Christmas feeling this way, I asked the doctor if I could get my Lupron shot early and he said, yes, there were no safety concerns. Later that night, I felt better.
This cycle has continued: Three weeks of feeling calm, neutral, and clear-headed, and then suddenly I would feel anxious and/or depressed until I got my Lupron shot.
This past Sunday, I wanted to cry for no reason. The next day required all my energy to not weep on the city bus to my dental appointment. I wish I was exaggerating to say I felt like a sack of old bones held together by loose, rotting flesh.
On February 7, 2023, I couldn’t possibly attend my university sociology class. I felt so exhausted after my previous day’s activity, so achy, so incapable of anything, that I felt close to death, to be honest. I truly felt like I was slowly dying, with maybe five years left to live. (Part of the reason I needed to put Undoing Motherhood in hibernation mode for a while.) I couldn’t imagine mustering up the energy even to email my accommodations advisor to request any new accommodations. I could not write words.
My partner asked if three weeks had passed since my last Lupron shot. I checked my calendar—yes, nearly three weeks! I gave myself the shot, then immediately forgot this ever happened. I wasn’t expecting to feel better because I literally forgot I gave myself this injection and might then have reason to begin feeling better—this is how tired I was.
Lo and behold, within two hours, I suddenly felt perky! I felt cheerful, good-humoured, energetic, and capable of almost anything. Write an email? Hell, I could write this essay! I could hand-saw some wood to brace the base of my nightstands to install new feet onto them! I could catch up on all my school reading!
After three cycles of this, I still needed to be reminded that my psychological distress and exhaustion might be hormonal. I blamed myself instead of confirming the timing of my next Lupron shot. My self-blame sounded like,
“Why can’t I just…” and, “I’m so pathetic for…” and, “I’m never going to be able to…” and, “Maybe it’s Vancouver…” and, “What’s wrong with me?!”
I ask you, Reader:
HOW
MUCH
TIME
AND ENERGY
HAVE WOMEN SPENT
OWNING
BIOLOGICAL STATES OF BEING
AS
CHARACTER FLAWS?
It would be easy to look at all this and cluck, My, my, isn’t feminine biology so oppressive?
But none of our feminine struggles have to be this way.
These are the fruits of health care within a patriarchy, where not enough is understood about feminine bodies because medications are tested on masculine bodies at a much higher rate. Not enough studies are done on female health issues, and women’s pain is ignored or dismissed as exaggeration or attention-seeking because women are untrusted in general.
I didn’t have to live without a diagnosis until age 31.
I didn’t have to be stuck with a family doctor who didn’t know what PMDD was and who didn’t help me.
I didn’t have to need to research so much about PMDD on my own and teach my new family doctor so he’d know what to ask specialists on my behalf.
And it never needed to be the case that I would, as most women probably do, default first to taking some sort of personal responsibility for causing my mental unhealth, or comb through my life for what could be causing me to be so unhappy.
Why do we default to self-blame when there are likely biological causes to rule out first?
Because. We always blame women first.
Yet woman-hatred is so embedded in culture, so “normal” does it seem, so profoundly is it neglected as a social phenomenon, that many women, even feminists and lesbians, fail to identify it until it takes, in their own lives, some permanently unmistakable and shattering form.
-Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence
Women are the scapegoats and sacrificial lambs for everything systemic or masculine or scary and uncertain about the world. We are taught directly and by repeated examples to take the fall as individuals.
“I’m sorry, I must have misunderstood.”
“I’m sorry, I was probably talking too quietly.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”
“I’m sorry to bother you.”
“I’m sorry I got emotional [about the emotional thing].”
“I’m sorry, this is probably a stupid question.”
“I’m sorry, I should have known.”
“I’m sorry I made you feel _____.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer.”
Don’t forget the ways we silently apologize for being “ugly” to men we don’t even want, by spending money and experiencing pain or discomfort trying to make ourselves more attractive to them—just so we can have value in a world where our greatest social capital (sexual desirability) comes from a resource that diminishes with age while men’s greatest sources of capital come from resources (skill, wisdom, intelligence, connections, money) that increase with age.
Then, where we could reasonably redirect blame for our psychological states of being to our anatomy, we’re taught not to do this because of how it undermines the feminist agenda. Look at how much documentary gymnastics take place in order to not name “PMDD” in the second episode of The Principles of Pleasure on Netflix, even while one of the people featured clearly describes having PMDD. I assume this is because it would hurt the feminist agenda to name it and validate it; they would be handing the talking points over to the patriarchal agenda and status quo, and it would take too much time in the documentary to mount a pre-emptive feminist defence to that inevitability. But maybe it’s not addressed because of plain old boring ignorance.
Having a female body doesn’t have to be so oppressive. Every single bodily thing we experience that is uniquely feminine should be and could have been understood better by now if more money had been put into women’s health research.
And here’s something you may have never considered. It didn’t occur to me until I was writing this essay.
Every painful biological thing we experience on account of having female bodies could be… wait for it…
rewarded
in
equal
measure!
To offset the unequal state of human reproduction. It could be rewarded with policy, ideally. That’s a stretch to imagine, I know. But why isn’t it at least rewarded with a hero narrative??
Why is it that in addition to suffering physical pain and torture to make humans, we must also be embarrassed about any part of the process? WHAT? If men birthed humans, and experienced monthly periods as part of that process, would we not honour their pain societally? Would there not be some masculine hero narrative embedded into our social fabric?
It’s less the female biology we expeirence that’s oppressive and more the social dressing around having female biology that is oppressive. It’s the stories we tell about it all, the values we attribute to it all, and the policies and systems we create around female-ness, around femininity, that is oppressive.
Let’s use menstruation as a cross-comparison of what is true about women’s health and bodies in a patriarchal culture, and what could be true if our culture were not patriarchal (either if it was matriarchal or egalitarian).
What it’s like to have a menstrual cycle in a patriarchal society that values the masculine as strong, valuable, and sexy, and the feminine as weak and gross:
We experience confusion when we get our first periods because no one has prepared us. (I’m sure this doesn’t happen much anymore but it has happened for generations of girls.)
We experience shame and disgust when we get our first periods (unless we’re late to the party and we want to fit in with our friends).
Some men don’t want to have sex with us when we have our periods because they think it’s gross.
In some cultures, women were/are thought to be unclean and were/are sent away to menstruate out of the company of men.
We experience social censure around the topic of periods. If we discuss them, it’s considered impolite at best and gross at worst.
We feel embarrassed if we bleed through our clothes in public.
It’s incredibly difficult to get blood stains out of our clothes and there’s no such thing as getting a free replacement for clothes that get permanently damaged by period blood. (Meanwhile, some clothing companies have free replacements for clothes being worn out.) White cotton clothes sold at no discount, despite not being able to risk wearing them every day! No product woven in, no fabric treatment to resist blood stains. Humanity would not exist were it not for our periods and yet there’s still no renowned miracle product that easily removes blood stains from clothes with a spray or two. No well-known businesses, like dry cleaning businesses, have made this an entire vertical: period blood stain removal. Why? Because period blood is too gross and shameful. We’ll get it out of our clothes ourselves or throw the stained items away.
When we get cramps, this is seen as a weakness and a liability. We try to push through it.
We’re shamed for having mood symptoms around our periods. We’re not accommodated. We’re held to the same standards we’re held to the rest of the month (the standard: “Be like men”).
Many men don’t even understand what periods are. Meanwhile, women know so much about male anatomy and male experience because men own the dominant discourse in a culture that values and prioritizes masculinity. We absorb this information without even trying to. But men have to search out information about vaginas and periods and they choose not to because they can and they don’t care about things the culture deems to be of low value.
What it would be like having a menstrual cycle in a matriarchal or egalitarian society that appropriately apportions value for feminine bodies and feminine skills:
We would feel excited about being welcomed into womanhood through this powerful new ability to reproduce humans. Social status would accompany the ability to menstruate.
We would have free menstrual products available in every public bathroom. OR, men would buy all menstrual-related products. If women have to experience the physical burden of periods, why shouldn’t men chip in by financially shouldering the burden?
There would at least be a laundry service that advertised openly, without shame, to get period blood out, and people wouldn’t feel embarrassed about dropping off their period-stained underwear.
Men would eroticize periods more. For all the porn that exists of men ejaculating on women, there would be as much porn of men slathered in period blood, men triumphantly wiping their bloody fingers on their faces and chests after giving a woman an orgasm. Instead of all the porn that exists of women pretending to love drinking ejaculate (I am aware of, and—please believe—would never voluntarily watch, videos of women drinking the ejaculate of multiple men from a single cup, pretending—I can only imagine—to love it)… there would be porn of men getting their faces all bloody in a show of “true” manliness and sexiness. A real man who is good in bed wouldn’t be squeamish, he’d at least pretend to love period blood. There would be articles about how period blood is good for men because of the iron in it. It doesn’t have to be true. The same way the nutrient content of semen has been grossly exaggerated, and so much ink has been spilled even just speculating, the same would happen for period blood. “Don’t fear going down on your partner on her period! If you’re already fluid-bonded, you’re just getting some extra iron.”
Compare these two search results and look at the wording I searched:
Men would work harder to be more tolerable when we have our periods, respecting that we have less energy for stress and nonsense.
Men would track and remember their partners,’ mothers,’ sisters,’ and daughters,’ cycles and proactively nurture them during this time. They would take tasks away, they would make supper, they would buy comfort food, they would give back massages, they would make sure the Midol is stocked. An added benefit to men: They would know when to avoid vaginal intercourse if they don’t want to make a baby.
Men would take responsibility for researching what could help a woman whose cramps are too severe to be helped by Midol and a heating pad. Think about it: To make people, most women and people who menstruate experience pain, exhaustion, and mess every month. The least men could do is Google. They could learn why their partner or sister or daughter is in so much pain and figure out what could help. (A TENS unit? Yes, probably.) Then they would buy it for her.
We would feel comfortable talking about our periods just about anywhere. We would probably boast about how much we bled and still managed to get done.
We would experience societal coddling when we get our periods, with office spaces carved out for nest-like working with heating pads and chocolate and a staff massage therapist. Think of how boy’s and men’s testicles are coddled. I grew up thinking that testicles were so delicate and precious that if they got banged even a little that boys would be in excruciating pain. The boys in my class would put on theatrical performances if a ball in gym class hit them in the groin. They weren’t ashamed of this weakness. They loved the attention and demanded the coddling. (Meanwhile, women at work pretend their pre-labour-like cramps aren’t even happening.) Their vulnerability somehow conferred social status. Think of how, when we were kids, the term “blue balls” dominated belief about being a “cock tease,” AKA a woman who “was asking for it” but “played hard to get” AKA said no to sex despite being sexy. Think of how men sit with their legs so wide open, even on public transit, as if their balls are so delicate and important that other people need to take care of them, too, by making themselves smaller to make room for testicles: the cultural symbol for gumption. When in fact, men can sit cross-legged just like we do and be fine. Men ride bicycles. For days. Men’s bike seats don’t have giant holes in them where the balls hang down into silicone-lined hammocks.
Those are just a few of my thoughts on the sexism baked into perceptions of menstruation and how we regard female bodies in our culture.
When PMDD is directly correlated to menstruation, perhaps you can imagine how much people don’t want to discuss it.
For everything I just did for menstruation, I could do for menopause. We don’t know enough about menopause in our culture. People are unaware that menopause can cause profound mental health symptoms and that these can be alleviated with hormone replacement. If you ask women, and especially men, what happens in menopause, they will probably answer, “Hot flashes.” They don’t understand the full picture.
The lack of understanding creates a huge opportunity for grifters to sell “bioidentical hormones” (it’s a marketing scam)* and progesterone cream (it barely gets absorbed, if at all).
Ignorance around women’s bodies results in women being blamed for our physical and emotional experiences, even when our bodies cause these experiences and even when literally *everyone* indirectly benefits from us having these bodies.
We need humans to keep our society functional. We need humans to grow up and get jobs and take care of us. We need women to make those humans.
But the fat on her body that she needs to make a baby is gross and ugly.
And the period she sheds when she didn’t get pregnant is gross and private.
And the miscarriage she has when the sperm may have been crap for all we know, causing a non-viable embryo, is a sin-dicator (copyright) or a scam and a crime.
And how her vagina stretches to accommodate a baby coming out is gross and worrisome to male pleasure.
And her stretched belly skin is ugly.
And her breastfeeding of her baby publicly is indecent.
And her leaky breasts are AWK-ward!
And her baby is, ugh, so expensive for us.
And her depression when she’s abandoned to panoptic motherhood is shameful.
And her exhaustion is weak and inconvenient if it’s not an outright lie.
And her requests for appreciation and validation are narcissistic.
And her hot flashes are gross and embarrassing, but her sleeveless shirts are slutty or also gross, depending on how MILFy she is.
And her aged dependency is so manipulative.
She only becomes a saint, an “angel mother,” when she’s dead. Only when she can’t benefit from appreciation does she finally receive it.
This is how we treat the god-like bodies that create humanity:
“Ew.”
We must cease tolerating this ignorance of the female body, the ignorance we perpetuate when we absorb with our own silence and self-contortions all the awkwardness and culturally manufactured “yuckiness.”
We need to keep asking our doctors questions until we get answers that make sense, and if they don’t know the answers we need to assign them homework to find out. Send them articles to read and ask them how they’re relevant to our cases. Gift them books for Christmas. They work for us, even in Canada with our “free” health care.
Our partners and kids should have to know as much as we do about what we’re going through.
We should honour and compensate the women who made us and our children by educating ourselves on exactly what this required, including menopause.
We should honour and compensate the women who make no children and nevertheless haul high-maintenance baby factories around their whole lives long for no reason that serves them.
We should be honouring the endurance and gender dysphoria experienced by people who don’t even identify with femininity who nevertheless have to haul baby factory machinery around.
Women aren’t en masse “crazy.” Patriarchal health care is “crazy”.
Patriarchal values—in a world where women are the only reason we all exist and men may not be biologically needed anymore—are nonsensical. Patriarchy is a risky gamble; an inevitable failure; and an affront to the crossroads of biology, logic, and morality.