Current Events > New Disney movie Turning Red talks about periods? Whoa

(+) Yeah! (+)

Well at least you aren't even pretending to argue that you don't sound like a nutter, and that's a perfectly acceptable result to me. I've no desire to attempt to change the mind of one with such silly pretend beliefs that they use to troll a dying videogame message board.

families have periods bro

Girls get periods around the onset of puberty, which tends to manifest anywhere between ten and fifteen depending on the person. That's a reality that girls have to contend with at a young age, and people have the audacity to say it's perverse, obscene, sexual and inappropriate to discuss with kids.

I've been listening to a pretty leftie podcast lately, and one thing the host talks about is how news is framed - one example being how the news uses "controversial". Controversial to who? In this case, this movie is controversial with an audience who see periods as obscene and sexual in nature.

Y'know, something that affects the sheer, sheer majority of the world's women. Half of our population - over half of our population, at least as far as birth rates and life expectancy goes. Something that some women have been made to feel shame about, sure - something we don't talk about because it's been deemed shameful.

But where does that shame come from?

My money's on the people who don't experience it, who view it as alien and gross because of their lack of proximity to it. People who tend to be men, who are used to choking down bland horseshit regurgitated through a game of telephone through which nuggets of "conventional wisdom" dictate the outcome - nuggets of biased information that plays to a warped sense of how the world really is for the sole purpose of pacifying a fragile and ignorant type of person.

This movie normalising discussions about menstruation - giving it levity through characters who not only know about it and discuss it and are supportive of each other over it, but who joke about it? Net positive for the world. This entire furore is only controversial to the most out of touch, self-centred idiots who spend their entire lives coddled away from the reality that girls as young as ten have the lining of their uterus expelled from their bodies painfully, causing bloody discharge out of their vaginas, necessitating the use of pads, tampons and other menstrual aids to grant them the ability to partake in the world at large. That's reality. That's something that people go through during their lives, and it happens for decades.

To assert that not only do girls menstruate, but that it's a natural process that they experience throughout their lives and that they joke about and support each other about, this Turning Red movie has whipped up a firestorm of dumb, hysterical fucks. It's not a radical concept. It happens every day. Your sisters, your mothers and your daughters have menstruated in the past and present, or they'll menstruate in the future.

Literally the only thing that makes this controversial or radical in any way is that we don't talk about menstuation enough. But wait a second - we can't. Because it's sexual and obscene, and that poses a threat to the psychology of our children. Even the ones that are going to menstruate over the course of their lives, or who have already begun to do so.

This isn't a controversy. This is an entitled tantrum from people as far removed from the topic as possible. It reeks of ignorance and entitlement, and the backlash to it tells a pretty damning story of the people who are so vocally and virulently against it.

helicopter mom

But why not just make Little Red Riding Hood, which is about the same thing?

why are men such babies when periods are brought up

male sexuality and puberty are perfectly fine to discuss in media

and in public

but womens EWW NOO

grow the fuck up already

I don't ever remember them making a family movie about puberty and boners

So...make one? There's lots of borderline ones like American Pie