If there’s one thing I learned about men, it’s that they have no intentions of dealing with women and their periods. Though women handle bloody messes every month and still hang on by a tampon string for decades, men who come in direct contact with a few drops of blood every so often have no trouble expressing their knee-jerking disgust. I once warned the guy I was sleeping with that I was spotting and suggested we do it in the shower if he was really concerned about his spanking new sheets. He weighed the pros and cons, and he concluded that the benefits of shower sex would not be worth the effort. So we did it in his bed anyway and, stupidly, without a towel laid down. It was his decision to part the Red Sea sans protection and most of the evidence of my fertility had been removed with a Tide-to-go pen. Yet, it did not stop him from talking crap about Aunt Flo for the next few days, as if she was an unexpected guest. To spoil this already tainted narrative even further, he told me that he felt uncomfortable sleeping in a bed with traces of my blood and that he was embarrassed about the maids coming in to change the period-smudged sheets.

Apparently, my period blood was not only disgusting but also something for him to be ashamed of. And I was taught the same ideas growing up. At home, my mom would lecture me for a good 10 minutes whenever I accidentally left my tampon unwrapped in the trashcan of a communal bathroom. The moral of her rants was usually that seeing my fully saturated tampon would be too scarring for fragile men and that a woman’s bodily functions should remain a mystery to the opposite sex. The girls in my high school also reinforced the same notion. My friends, in their quasi “I’m bleeding like a stuck pig” yoga-pants-and-hoodie uniform would shyly ask each other for tampons, as if they were exchanging something more illegal than cotton. Then, they would proceed to slip the tampon into the hoodie sleeve before walking to the bathroom, praying that no guy saw evidence that they’re healthy and not pregnant. It is seemingly a crime for men to learn about a woman’s body. With the archaic notion that periods are gross and shameful, men internalize those ideas and women end up sheltering men from their periods.

Then, ill-informed guys develop a misconception about the menstruating woman and a habit of getting flustered when confronted with an intimidating floral-scented pad. buy nrl marvel jerseyAnd though not every guy has a mild case of hysteria every time the Red River floods, the men I’ve met have generally been less than chivalrous about my menstrual “problems.”northern uprising hoodies Aside from getting swoony at every mention of periods, immature guys sometimes use “PMSing” as a reason to invalidate women’s concerns and angers. north face oso jacket turquoiseThough premenstrual syndrome does sometimes, perhaps, maybe have slight symptoms of irritability, it does not give anyone the right to ignore a woman’s concerns on the basis that she is “hormonal.” pbr sweatshirts hoodies

Menstruation doesn’t compromise brain processing. Unless the period comes right after a potential impregnation, men are unreasonable and less-than-empathetic about menstruation.taa hoodie What’s even more unfair is that there is no male equivalent to shaming women for their periods. shm hoodieAll women have is calling men out for accidentally cumming on their sheets, which is far more controllable and hardly comparable. Plus, men don’t have to shove cotton up their dicks to prevent cum from seeping out. With the social stigma surrounding periods, men will always have something over women. I didn’t ask to have my waist temporarily expand an inch every four weeks, I didn’t ask to stain every pair of underwear I own, and I certainly didn’t go to bed hoping that I’d bleed on your sheets come morning. Periods are frustrating enough as they are without men throwing in their two cents about cooties and hormones.

If blood were coming out of every dick in the country, not only would thousands of pairs of cheesy American Eagle underwear be destroyed but guys would also be staining their girlfriends’ sheets just as much. So try to be more understanding, and thank biology that you’re fortunate enough not to have to fork over $5 to U by Kotex instead of to a monthly Spotify Premium subscription. Be glad you’re not the ones dealing with the periods. You just have to deal with us while we deal with our periods, so at least do a good job with that. Catherine Straus writes the Thursday blog on taking two sides. We’ve got our hands full at the moment but we should be up and moving shortly.This page will automatically refresh and bring you into the website as soon as we can handle it. or reach us by phone. 電話 ： 受付時間 9：00-17：00（日・祝日も営業）Before Tara McPherson was a successful commercial illustrator, making poster art for bands like the Strokes, Interpol, Duran Duran and Built to Spill;

before having her sweetly creepy illustrations featured in Oscar darling Juno; and before preparing more than a dozen paintings and several sculptures for her first solo show opening Feb. 23 at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery, she was the vice president of the astronomy club. As a Santa Monica Community College student, she would spend weekends camping on the rocky deserts of Joshua Tree National Park, drinking beers and watching the stars until the sunrise snuffed them out of view. Ms. McPherson considered giving up art for an astrophysics degree. “But I was thinking, do I really want to be an astronomer? I’ll be alone logging data in the middle of the night,” Ms. McPherson, now 31, explained in her storefront Williamsburg studio, curled up in a paint-smudged black hoodie and turquoise-colored jeans. “But now here I sit by myself all night. Ironically enough, I’m doing the exact same thing I was trying to avoid. Becoming an artist, I didn’t realize I’d be alone so much.” Ms. McPherson, an L.A. native who moved to New York three years ago, has been applying a painterly technique to her promotional music work since she made her first poster, in 2002.

Her distinctly female-oriented aesthetic, which could be spied at rock clubs all over the country, inspired Juno producers to ask whether they could include some of Ms. McPherson’s illustrations in the bedroom where Ellen Page’s ultra-hip character confesses her accidental pregnancy to her best friend on a phone shaped like a hamburger. Ms. McPherson’s image of a stunning, alienlike woman with a heart-shaped hole cut through her chest stands out among the pop-culture-cluttered landscape on Juno’s wall. Her work features solitary, hauntingly beautiful women with curtains of bangs and catlike eyes looking out onto supernatural landscapes. Some are intergalactic fighters, battling snakes and tentacled beasts with their bare hands. Others present their detached, cartoonish hearts in cages or on platters. In the background, sad-eyed balloons hang dejectedly out of reach. Cartoon skulls grow like cabbages out of rolling fields. Mountains have smiley-face grins. “I want [my work] to be subtly unnerving.

Even if it’s cute and innocent and sweet, I want it to be just a little unsettling,” Ms. McPherson said while examining a painting of a girl with a knife piercing the crown of her head. “I think life is that way. It’s a reflection on the complexities of the situations life puts you in.” WITH HER SOLO show at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea, Ms. McPherson is creating some distance from her punk-rock roots even as she brings her cool-kid, comic-book edge to the gallery scene. Mr. LeVine, the gallerist, has been tracking Ms. McPherson’s progress since she graduated from college. Artists with a rogue, street-art aesthetic like Ms. McPherson, he thinks, are breaking new ground between commercial illustration and fine art. Walking the path worn by artists like Art Spiegelman and even the Sotheby’s street-art favorite Banksy, Ms. McPherson is one of the subculture-inspired punks currently making inroads to the still-stuffy art world. “I grew up on TV, skateboarding, punk rock, tattoo, all this stuff that just gets incorporated into this kind of art,” Mr. LeVine explained.

Growing up in Trenton, N.J., in the 80’s, he was a punk kid who collected comic books, record jackets and posters. He opened his gallery on West 20th Street in January 2005 to push the “lowbrow,” “pop surrealist” genre out of the streets and into contemporary art galleries. “We look at it and it has an iconography. It’s like their visual language that some people don’t see. The fine art world is so oblivious to it, despite that it’s proliferating all over the world.” Mr. LeVine said Ms. McPherson has been working in the “ghetto of the art world,” by designing toys for companies like Kid Robot and constantly making art for other people, to sell a rock show or a concert. “Because their training is about applied art and providing imagery for other people, it takes a while for an artist to slowly evolve out of that commercial work and really transition into fine art work,” Mr. LeVine explained. “This is going to be a very pivotal show for her,” he said.

“It’s about her life. She’s dealing with the typical stuff, besides her career, of being single, being of a certain age, going through boyfriends, being into rock music. A lot of that stuff comes out with her work. She’s talking about her own struggle in a way, her own emotional struggle, her human condition.” BORN IN SAN Francisco in 1976, Ms. McPherson was raised in Los Angeles during the rise of the rock art movement. She studied drawing, photography and stained-glass painting at her arts magnet school before taking the California proficiency test at 16 to leave high school early because she was “bored.” A year later, she enrolled in Santa Monica Community College and took an astronomy class for a math requirement and became enchanted by stars, planets and outer space. “I think it was my own little backlash against doing art for so long,” she explained. Although she abandoned the idea of a career in astrophysics, she illustrates her characters under starry skies, on other planets and in otherworldly atmospheres, often sporting large helmets like the kind astronauts would wear.