Vive la différence — if men only had a clue
Women and men are different. I only mention this because it’s news to the Medical Council of Canada, which demands that female medical residents taking the national licensing exam not bring replacement tampons or pads into the exam room.
Under security rules, women have to pre-register their periods to try to get an “accommodation” during the daylong exam. The male residents could spend the previous night in the traditional manner, panicked and sick at heart, but women needed a strategy. Do men ever think about how women always need a strategy? I have more questions than answers.
How can I explain periodicity to those to whom this is remote? As 12-year-old girls quickly learn, periods are like crime scenes, they’re like buses — there’s nothing and then there’s a convoy — and they’re mandatory.
Sometimes female exam writers had to hide a tampon in their bras. It’s not possible to cheat; you can’t write on these small cotton bullet-like objects. You can on tampons with cardboard applicators. To test this, I just unpeeled one and wrote “Today will salt your tears” like a malevolent fortune cookie, but you can’t hide those in a bra. And, sadly, most applicators are still plastic.
As for pads, the range is limitless. I could write an essay on pads, tampons and cups, the “troika of tyranny” as Donald Trump would say, but today I have grand feminist ideas. I am not “gender neutral,” I am pro-woman.
Post #Me Too, how amazing it is to discover how little men know about us — do they even know how tampons operate? — and how selfishly they have arranged daily life for their sex alone.
What if we flipped the world? How would men react if they were forced to cope with the otherworldly daily experience of womanhood? A tiny example: big men go through revolving doors too fast, which I hate because they eat my purse, so I grab the bar and brake.
I’m sure this mystifies men. Imagine being so unencumbered that you don’t have to consider doors or floors, that you fly past and never worry about your pointy heel getting stuck in a hole in a carpeted workplace designed for men’s shoes that are flat as plates.
Imagine not having to consider your appearance. Men think their face and hair look fine, a mere mask for fine brains packed with glory, and their clothes are as generic as they themselves are unique. They can dress as they please with- out having to consider things like sitting on a high stool on an industry manel (panel of men) and having the audience look up your skirt. Imagine not having to ask the organizer about this beforehand.
Imagine going to Loblaws for slivered almonds and asking the staff for help, which is what women do because that is sensible, rather than embarking on a kind of vision-quest along miles of aisles. “Excuse me, is that in baking or in the general bulk nuts area?” we say. I ask a man — I know him well — about this. He says he does ask, but only the female staff at the checkout because they are “helpful and knowledgeable,” not males because they are “ignorant, rude and useless.” Clearly, I touched a nerve. He prefers women to men — I like a 50-50 mix — and that makes sense. We are pleasant to be with and we get things done. We can be scathing, but we’re not violent about it. We prefer thoughtful films to David Simon box sets about blowhard jazz musicians and 1970s porn hounds. We make little humans and breastfeed them. What’s not to like?
Women can be viciously mean, especially to each other as I have learned to my cost, but I have never contemplated losing an eye or breaking a rib in their company. Imagine if men were not physically stronger than women — their global supremacy is almost entirely due to that fact — and how they would sound if they had to plead their way out of a room or hint at a raise. If the concept of bar fights did not exist, wouldn’t men feel safer on a night out?
And then there is male idiocy. I read in the New Yorker about the latest polar explorer, Louis Rudd, who “will attempt to complete the solo trek that killed his close friend Henry Worsley in 2016.” But why?
This undernourished and miserable-looking man — he looks like Jordan Peterson in a parka — has left behind a wife and three children to pointlessly wander off alone into “a perfect nullity of a landscape,” as historian Francis Spufford calls it. Doesn’t he have friends?
“I am just going outside and may be some time,” said Capt. Oates, legendary Antarctic incel of the Scott Expedition, just before his death. I think of the Darwin Awards — men doing daft things and dying — which explain why women live longer than men. Imagine men realizing why women rarely go Pole-ing alone. Because it’s stupid.
Would they stop? Would the world flip permanently? And would it not be a better world?