A Stereotype About Menstruating Women

The experience of pain, whether physical or strictly mental or both of the body and mind, does not mean a person necessarily struggles with grasping even the most abstract truths of logic in such moments.  If they as an individual were to have trouble focusing on reason or wanting to be rational in those times after all, it does not follow that they will give in to emotionalism or any other kind of irrationalism.  Either way, the presence of excruciating physical or mental pain does not mean that the agony will continue indefinitely for the rest of one's life.

All of this is as true of the pain connected with women's menstrual cycles as it would have to be of any other suffering in this life.  Out of misguided but irrational sincerity or outright sexist hostility, some people, and they would not have to be men, might hold to fallacies about the nature of a woman's period.  In some circles, women are already assumed to be deeply emotional, perhaps to the point of being emotionalistic--the only thing that makes someone emotionalistic is believing or acting based on emotion as opposed to reason, so there is no arbitrary level of frustration, such as from physical pain, that makes someone succumb to this error.

Especially in groups where women are already assumed on the basis of various non sequitur fallacies like the fallacy of composition (what is true of one woman's personality is not automatically true of another's, and it never has to do with her being a woman regardless), menstruation can be misunderstood as something damning women to hysteria each time they are on their period.  Again, just suffering from any degree of pain does not force a person to be irrational, but the companion to the sexist, dehumanizing notion that men are emotionless is the sexist, dehumanizing notion that women are insane during their monthly bleeding (when this cycle is applicable to them, that is, for it is not in all cases).

One might hear everything from casual or overtly malicious jokes about a specific woman's alleged inability to control her composure while on her period to sarcastic but cautious declarations that women should not hold political/military/corporate power because of what they might be tempted to do while menstruating.  Not all women have to menstruate, not when menopause or sufficient stress intervene, and for those that do, it does not logically follow by necessity that having a period will reduce them to stupidity.  No one, man or woman, needs to be in such pain to be irrational, pain does not change someone's worldview or treatment of others unless they allow it to, and one woman is not the same being as another anyway.

During those often three to seven days in which a woman expels her uterine lining through her vagina along with blood, this normal but difficult biological process could be misunderstood by fools who approach the matter with assumptions.  If a woman mishandles anger or excitement while on her period, she is not being irrational because she is a woman or because of her menstruation.  She as an individual chose to handle her emotions or circumstances in that way.  This stereotype and other affiliated sexist concepts are invalid already, but they also hinder openness about something most women will experience month after month for a great deal of their life.  It is false and destructive.