The Ovaries are coming! The Ovaries are coming!

Carol Burnett once described labor as follows: "Grab your bottom lip and pull it over your head."

I have actively considered becoming anorexic, not because I want to be skinny, lethargic, unhealthy and have my family fawn over me constantly, showering me with steak and chocolate (...actually that last part doesn't sound so bad) but because one diagnostic criteria is, your period stops. Your body becomes so unhappy with you, it begins shutting down critical functions, kind of like car manufacturers going on strike until they get health benefits and a pension. I guess your body wants to blackmail you back into compliance. The problem is that your period has stopped.

  It's basically the Ransom of Red Chief on a biological scale.

Men joke about it. "Never trust anything that can bleed for five days and not die," "she's on the rag", so on, so forth. One section of the totally awesome first Council Wars book, There Will Be Dragons (It's silly as all get out, but how many books do YOU know contain a literal dragon catapult AND Sluggy Freelance's Bun Bun?) uses period humor, where the previously artificially sterile women suddenly have periods en masse and all think they are dying. And while this may seem very fucking funny to a guy, let me point out that the female human body contains a function where your first reaction is OH FUCK I AM GOING TO DIE. 

People wonder why thirteen year old girls are so flighty and brain-dead. My proposal is, about two weeks before/after their thirteenth birthday they looked down and saw a great deal of blood staining their clothing and, naturally, screamed because they are fucking bleeding out of an orfice, and humans are trained from birth to consider sudden blood out of any biological opening as a bad thing. Naturally these terrified shreeks bring either Daddy or Mommy, who (our child knows) will sweep them into their arms, run downstairs without stopping for coffee and take them to the ER, where a CT scan will show the source of the bleeding.

So imagine our little girl's horror when Daddy backs out of the room veeeeeeery slooooooooooowly and Mommy starts laughing and cheering and discussing ways to celebrate this huge step via a large dinner. There is much cheering, and Daddy may be sent to get a stuffed bear and Baby's First Maxi Pads while Mommy shows her daughter how to rinse blood out of panties (always use cold water, kids). Our heroine here realizes one of nature's fundamental truths: Her parents want her to die. There could be no other possible reason for such celebratory behavior. They will probably put her ashes into the stuffed bear, or worse, into the maxi pads.

Then the truth hits her. This is normal. Mom does it to. This is how we get babies to continue the cycle of life. And then the cramps hit her, and she realizes she would rather cut these organs out of her stomach with a blunt button than she would ever have children, if it means she's going to feel like this more than once. And when the tears are dried, the cramps are over, and the maxi pads applied, our little girl finally sees reality clearly. She sees what life wants to do with her. She sees a future of rigorous sanity punctuated by a period of red, a celebration of womanhood preformed by women in too much pain to stand upright, and our heroine says, "Fuck it and pass me the hair gel."

Also, I'd like to address something that feminists keep bringing up. Now, I do consider myself slightly feministic, in a Susan B. Anthony kind of way. Equality, ya know? And yeah, I do the whole when-I-have-a-brand-new-hair-do thing, because there are times when I do like being girly. But there are a group of women who insist that the reason women consider their periods a curse is because the Patriarchy says it is. Which leads me to believe that the misogynist accusation that all feminists are transsexuals is correct. These women have obviously never had a period in their life and experienced the joy of severe cramps, or putting on your favorite off-white jeans and then looking down halfway through your workday, or trying to explain to a humorless male boss that your abs hurt so much you are dry heaving and you need to go home and lay down. It is not a gift, it is not the moon's blessing, I am not going to fucking paint with my menstal blood what the hell!?! I am going to go lay down with tylenol and a heating pad and a tub of chocolate ice cream and try to pretend that I am not bleeding uncontrollably into cotton batting. There is really only one picture that can fully portray what a period makes me feel like and this is it:

The chestbuster is my uterus.