Putting the 'men' in menstruation
This week, we sent Tyler out to study if males A) can pronounce menstruation, B) know what it is and C) figure out why or why the fuck they don’t know anything about it.
I'm not going to lie, when I was approached by my lovely editor to run this piece I firstly mispronounced menstruation as ‘Men-as-tration’, then asked her what it was. I did already know what it was, it was just an off day, but regardless it really set the tone for this piece.
My first experience learning about menstruation wasn’t until I had my first serious girlfriend at the age of 15, when my sex education maxed out at how to put a condom on, the contraception pill and that periods went for 28 days (which turns out isn’t very accurate).
I moved from Napier Boys High School to Takapuna Grammar School in 2010; my class at Napier Boys was yet to do sex education and my class at Takapuna Grammar had already been through it.
This meant that as a young, sexually active male in my first year at a co-ed school I was unaware of how the female body works, which today, makes me feel cheated out of an important part of my education. I asked to join a different class so I wouldn’t miss out, but the school told me that wasn’t an option.
Men are inherently lucky enough to waltz through life without any of the problematic implications of menstruating, therefore they should at least make time to try and understand women as women understand themselves.
I sat down with one of my close friends Carlos McQuillan, who grew up in a household that was full of women and proclaimed that he knew more about menstruation than your average male.
He could define that menstruation was when a woman bled from her uterus to ‘recycle all of the bad things inside’. He could also list common menstruation symptoms, although his knowledge of chronic menstruation conditions were limited to statistics on endometriosis.
I aired the idea of asking Carlos’s father the same questions that I asked him, although we came to the conclusion that there would probably just be a lot of confusion and not enough answers.
The two men were of the same blood and came from the same environment, but going through the education system 20 years apart meant that Carlos had a far more insightful education on the birds and bees than his father.
I moved to Wellington in 2011 and attended the same high school as Carlos for the duration of my schooling. I wanted to find out why he may be more educated than other males I know, so I contacted the head of Social Sciences Randal Wakefield from Wellington High School.
I asked him some questions about their sexual education programme, which included discussing how the curriculum has changed over the years.
“The biggest shift would be in the volume of content we can now discuss and the changes along with modern society,” he said.
“Five years ago pornography wasn’t talked about, but now forms a big part of what we teach. Ten years ago consent was not taught, but now it is a major focus. Students have always been interested in sexual education and this has not changed in my view.”
“As a co-ed school we have an advantage in delivering education towards both biological male and female reproductive systems, arousal and orgasms,” he added, which sounded a little stale so I continued to probe.
When further grilled about their sex education options, Wakefield replied, “Mates and Dates, in 2019, ran through year groups 9-13; we previously had a nurse who students could take questions to.”
Mates and Dates is a programme that aims to help young people have healthy and happy relationships and particularly focuses on identifying unhealthy relationships, negotiation and consent and a whole lot more.
This allowed for me to see that maybe the sexual health curriculum in New Zealand was improving, although it may only be for co-ed schooling and not at single sex schools. Maybe I’ll look into this further and see what approach an all-boys schools would take on sex ed, but for now just educate yourself and be empathetic towards your menstruating pals and gals.