The Big Red Question...

My boyfriend and I do everything together. We have breakfast together, we have dinner together, we feed the dogs together, we go grocery shopping together..I wax my legs, he sits and watches tv, he shaves, i stand and watch him. You name it, we do it together.. So you would think that since we know everything about each another, there is almost nothing that we should be shy or be ashamed of.. But ahh, there is....

See last month when we went to the pharmacy to get our toiletries as usual, and i walked straight into the sanitary pad section to pick up a packet. Without warning, my boyfriend fled to the counter, paid for his stuff, and waited for me outside the pharmacy. His reluctance to walk with a girl who has a packet of sanitary pads in her hands were as if i was holding on to a porn video to rent out in the open. While i thought it was hilariously weird, and also cute of him to react that way, it also baffled me how guys can still be disgusted with the mere word "period" and cringe and flinch involuntarily as if it was unbelievably disgusting to even be mentioned.

As long as I have lived, I have not heard of a man talk about menstruation as if it was a normal thing. But ironically, its as normal and normal can get. It is as normal as your morning toilet bowl visit or the urge to piss. They would always avoid the topic at all cost, and if they had to join in the conversation, hyperventilate and shift their eyes when they had to refer to the word. Many men i know call it "PMS" simply because it sounds cooler and much lesser like the real thing. Well news flash! It is different. PMS stands for Pre Menstrual Syndrome and has nothing really do to with the actual Menstruation cycle. I used to have a friend who would not shut up and the only way to stop him from talking is to throw a fresh spare pad on the table and he will shut up as if horror stared him in the face. An ex boyfriend of my cousin used to say " Oh My God!" everytime she had her period. And i remember an incident where " a guy" asked me why i was wearing a skirt if i was menstruating. ( beats me...)

While we don't generally talk about poop at the dinner table, it is a bigger taboo to mention the "P" word anywhere at all at anytime. It's a "girls" topic so men generally feel as if they should not path-take any bit of it.

So what is it really? It is the fact that there's blood involved thats why it comes as a gory topic to men or is it just culture or social ignorance? I really don't know!