... as an adolescent ... from the world around me, I learned that must I hide all signs that I menstruated or face deep, crushing shame. - Kathryn B. H. Clancy

Menstruation is a wild process that should captivate and delight. It offers up so many lessons in terms of how we understand bodily autonomy, sexual selection, even tissue engineering. It is strange, then, that instead of being something so fundamental to science education as Mendel's peas or dinosaur bones or the planets of our solar system, it gets at best a brief mention in health class.

... A study in Taiwan found that, despite education programs on menstruation at school, the boys in the sample had a significantly worse attitude toward menstruation than the girls. ... An older study from the United States showed that men tended to think the majority of menstrual symptoms occurred during the menstrual phase, whereas women reported that they occurred during the premenstrual phase. Men also tended to think periods were more emotionally debilitating but less physically bothersome than women. ...