Under the heading Things Sure Have Changed, pubescent girls are so lucky now. Getting swept up in the frank talk trend, along with toilet paper, erections and lubricant, are periods. It’s all out in the open now and on every screen you happened to be in front of. They have Hello Flo videos on YouTube, where a sassy tween talks openly about her vag, pulls red nail polish pranks, and makes uterus jokes. When I was growing up we girls entered womanhood via pamphlets, nurses and embarrassment.
Joking about getting your first period? Please. We had no sense of humor over anything below the neck in the 1960s and ’70s. In my high school’s early experimentation with sex ed, our male health teacher stood in front of our class and, face red as the nail polish in the Hello Flo video, read from a textbook and wrote things on the blackboard. When he described menopause as when a woman can no longer get pregnant and doesn’t have a menstrual period anymore, my friend Jody turned to me and whispered, “Sounds good to me,” and we both got kicked out of class for smiling. [Read more…] about Period. End of Story