HWhat is your pain threshold? For the past few months, I’ve been obsessively watching videos of men trying period pain simulators. The machines feature wired abdominal pads that send electrical impulses controlled by a console that can mimic the intensity of cramps on a range of one to ten. Often, men are left with five or six on the dial, groaning or even screaming in pain, while their female partners, also hooked up to the machine, sit unfazed.
Like many women, I am used to a certain level of pain. From childhood we live in varying levels of pain, often with those around us knowing little of our discomfort. However, there are days when it all becomes too much. In the past, all you had to do was vaguely mention “women’s problems” to get some reprieve. That is no longer the case, at least in some schools.
Last week Neale-Wade Academy in Cambridgeshire had to reverse his policy about menstrual pain after a protest on social media. I’m not surprised: students were We have been told that time off due to menstrual pain will be considered an unauthorized absence unless the parents have provided medical information. This was ridiculous and potentially discriminatory (the headteacher has now confirmed that under Department for Education guidelines such evidence does not need to be shown). But it also conveyed the message that women and girls are not reliable witnesses to what they experience in their own bodies — a gendered assumption they will struggle with throughout their lives as they encounter widespread medical misogyny.
If I were the parent of a girl at this school, not only would I have been furious, I would have been tempted to give the principal, Graham Horn, who is of course a man, exactly what was asked for. Namely too much information. You see, I’m old enough to remember the good old days of early 2000s feminism, and the funny tactics many women resorted to when male Republican, anti-abortion politicians made ill-informed statements about female biology.
They found them on Facebook or Twitter and gave them extremely detailed information about their various gynecological problems. I’ll never forget the hilarity of reading a poster’s vivid retelling of trying to find a tampon that was absorbent enough for her extremely heavy period. Do you want to poke your nose into female biology? Be careful what you wish for.
The period simulator videos are fascinating because they portray how conditioned women have become to tolerate our own physical discomfort and suffering. After all, menstrual cramps can be like that painful like a heart attack. (I also find the male solidarity quite moving. These are men who are willing to make themselves vulnerable in the interests of empathy.)
I have had periods for over 20 years. But when I see the grimaces on these men’s faces, I vaguely remember the shock I felt as a young teenager at the intensity of the spasms that coursed through me as I writhed in a fetal position on the bed. I also fainted often.
I consider myself lucky. I have friends who vomit repeatedly every time they menstruate, or who have had several surgeries for endometriosis. They struggle to be taken seriously by doctors, or to get the pain relief they so desperately need. And their menstrual cramps are often just a precursor to a whole series of medical events they’ll eventually have to endure, from burning precancerous cells on your cervix to unblocking your fallopian tubes without anesthesia.
I was told that my severe period pain would mean I could probably cope well with the pain of contractions (and indeed some happy women say they felt no worse than period pain for them). Sweet summer child that I was, I almost bought it. I didn’t expect a back-to-back baby. My period pain has never been so bad that I seriously considered jumping out of the window – no exaggeration – while that Kristin Scott Thomas speech in Fleabag rang in my ears: “Women are born with built-in pain.”
But the medical establishment can be shockingly laissez-faire about that pain. Too many women still have to beg for pain relief during labor. And it continues to shock me that some new mothers are sent home after a C-section with nothing more than two paracetamol. This minimization of feminine pain – which has been internalized by so many of us – can then be passed on from mother to daughter like a disease. Sometimes I look at Mumsnet threads late at night and see comments like: ‘Should I take my child to A&E? They are short of breath and vomiting blood, but I don’t want to waste NHS time.”
Change is needed across society to address women’s pain, not to mention new innovations in pain relief (and please, for God’s sake, legalize cannabis, which some women in the U.S. believe really helps.) Male solidarity and empathy are part of that image. I recently saw the Almeida Theater’s production of The Years, which features a scene in which a bloodied Romola Garai narrates in graphic detail what it feels like to lose a dead fetus after an abortion. I had read of theatergoers fainting and having to be carried. I assumed these people would be women, triggered by a memory of their own pain and trauma.
Reader, I was sexist. It was the men who couldn’t handle it, one of whom yelled at the cast for not warning him. Although it was a graphic representation, for most people who have had a heavy period, an abortion, a miscarriage or childbirth, it would have felt true. Some men still don’t know the half of it. That is why truth, solidarity and women of faith are important when describing their own pain.
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Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
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