How’s your pain threshold? For a few months now, I’ve been obsessively watching videos of men trying period pain simulators. The machines have wired abdominal pads that send electrical impulses controlled by a console that can replicate the ferocity of cramps on a range of one to 10. Often by five or six on the dial, men are groaning or even screaming in agony while their female partners, also hooked up to the machine, sit unfazed.
Like many, many women, I am habituated to a certain level of pain. From girlhood, we go about our lives in varying levels of agony, often with the people around us knowing little of our discomfort. There are days, though, when it all becomes too much. It used to be that all you had to do was vaguely mention “women’s problems” to be granted some respite. Not so any more, at least in some schools.
Last week Neale-Wade Academy in Cambridgeshire has had to reverse its policy on period pain following an outcry on social media. I’m not surprised: pupils had been told that time off school for period pains will be classed as an unauthorised absence, unless medical information was provided by parents. This was ridiculous and possibly discriminatory (the headteacher has now confirmed that based on Department for Education guidance, no such evidence will need to be shown). But it also sent the message that women and girls are not reliable witnesses to what they experience in their own bodies – a gendered assumption that they will wrestle with their entire lives as they encounter widespread medical misogyny.
Were I the parent of a girl at this school not only would I have been livid, but I’d have been tempted to furnish the principal, Graham Horn, who is of course a man, with exactly what was requested. Namely, too much information. You see, I’m old enough to remember the good old days of early-2000s feminism, and the amusing tactic that many women resorted to when male Republican, anti-abortion politicians made ill-informed statements about female biology.
They would find them on Facebook or on Twitter and provide them with extremely detailed information about their various gynaecological issues. I will never forget the hilarity of reading one poster’s vivid retelling of trying to find an absorbent enough tampon for her extremely heavy flow. You want to poke your nose into female biology? Be careful what you wish for.
The period simulator videos are fascinating because they encapsulate just how conditioned women have become to enduring our own physical discomfort and suffering. Period cramps, after all, can be as painful as a heart attack. (I also find the male solidarity quite moving. These are men who are willing to expose themselves as vulnerable in the interests of empathy.)
I have been having periods for more than 20 years. But when I see the grimaces on these men’s faces, I can dimly remember the shock I felt as a young teen at the intensity of the cramps coursing through me as I writhed on the bed in a foetal position. I used to pass out a lot as well.
I consider myself lucky. I have friends who vomit repeatedly every time they menstruate, or who have endured several surgeries for endometriosis. They have struggled to be taken seriously by doctors, or to receive the pain relief they so desperately need. And their period cramps are often just a precursor to a whole range of medical events they end up having to endure, from having precancerous cells burned off your cervix to having your fallopian tubes unblocked without anaesthetic.
I was told my bad period pain would mean that I would probably cope well with the pain of labour contractions (and indeed, some lucky women do say that, for them, they felt no worse than period pain). Sweet summer child that I was, I almost bought it. I hadn’t bargained for a back-to-back baby. My period pain has never been so bad that I’ve seriously contemplated jumping out of the window – not hyperbole – with that Kristin Scott Thomas speech in Fleabag ringing in my ears: “Women are born with pain built in.”
But the medical establishment can be shockingly laissez-faire about that pain. Too many women are still having to beg for pain relief in labour. And it never ceases to shock me that some new mothers are sent home, post C-section, with nothing more than two paracetamol. This minimisation of female pain – internalised by so many of us – can then be passed on from mother to daughter like a sickness. Sometimes late at night I’ll lurk on Mumsnet threads and see comments such as: “Should I take my child to A&E? They’re short of breath and vomiting blood but I don’t want to waste NHS time.”
Society-wide change is needed to tackle female pain, not to mention new innovations in pain relief (and please, for the love of god, legalise cannabis, which some women in the US are finding really helps.) Male solidarity and empathy is part of that picture. I recently caught the Almeida theatre’s production of The Years, which features a scene during which a bloodied Romola Garai recounts, in graphic detail, how it feels to pass a dead foetus after an abortion. I had read that theatregoers were fainting and having to be carried out. I assumed that these people would be women, triggered by a reminder of their own pain and trauma.
Reader, I was sexist. It was the men who couldn’t cope, one of whom shouted at the cast for not warning him. It was a graphic portrayal, to be sure, but to most people who have had a heavy period, an abortion, a miscarriage, or given birth, it will just have felt true. Some men still don’t know the half of it. That’s why truth, solidarity and believing women when they describe their own pain matters.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
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