Unf*ck Menstruation | Cordelia Röders-Arnold | TEDxHamburg

Hello, do you remember how you felt that day? Do you remember where you were in 2001? Because I remember that day very well. It was the day I had my first period. And I remember that day very well because I was very excited. I was so excited that I was finally becoming a real woman and I was so excited that I wanted to tell my mom and I was running down the stairs of her house to tell her and as I was running I was wondering what she would do. Tell me, how would she react? It was like a great gift that they gave me now and now it was coming to her and I told her and she was looking at me and said: you will have it every month, he has a pet and I was.

As expected, this was not the reaction I was expecting, this doesn't seem like a great gift, more like a curse, so 50% of the world's population are straight men and if you add up the days that we are straight men and add it up, it would be like almost six years of our lives, six years of bleeding, so this is a pretty large amount of time in our lives, so

menstruation

plays a very important role in our lives and not all women, men, are heterosexual and all those who repair trades. is a woman but the majority of us are and 50% of the population the other 50% do not menstruate and have no contact with

menstruation

they have nothing to do with it but I was thinking why not end it today so if you are a guy who looks at this now and thinks why the hell why do I have to start thinking about menstruation?

I'm telling you, chances are you share an office at least or maybe even a Your life is bad, maybe you're sharing your visions with someone who bleeds and I was thinking this makes you straighter, so now that we give Realize that we're all in this together, we're going to deal with this together, that's why I was thinking about what I wanted to talk to you about today, six things men need to know about periods, but I mean, I know you're really curious about hear the first thing you need to know, but let me quickly go back to my 13 year old self. because I remember even though my mom wasn't super excited about me getting my period, periods were extremely cool when I was a teenager, it was actually cool to have one that we had, we pretended to have them all the time, it's like it was the best excuse not to do it . participating in sports classes but not only that, we had the feeling that it made us feel strong and made us feel proud because we went from being a girl to being a woman and it made us feel like being part of a really special and great gang and that's how it is how we felt and sixteen years later, at the age of 29, I remember sitting at my office desk and having really hellish period pains, it was the first day of my period and I had taken painkillers in the morning, but it was one of the days when the painkillers didn't really work, so I had a very important presentation in the afternoon, but then I went to my boss and said, hey, you know?

I'm really not feeling very well. I'm on my period. Can you take care of the presentation in the afternoon? and he said of course no problem obviously I didn't say I've been good say you were favored of course I said yes I went to him and said you know I have a really bad headache, I feel like my forehead is exploding. I can't make the presentation, can you take over this time? and he said, of course, yes, and I went back to my office to take the exam and I was wondering why that happened. Why was I lying about my period?

How did I come to pretend I had my period all the time when I was a teenager? Because it was cool to deny that I had my period and lie about it. What happened in these 16 years, what did society really do to me? That I wasn't lying about my period, so I was really curious about the fact that I just lied, lied about my period, and did what you usually do when you're curious. about something and you want to change something. I left my corporate job to research menstruation and all I needed was someone to pay me while I researched menstruation and un

ders

tood what's going wrong in society, so I found these two guys.

Philip and V Adama, foun

ders

of a fair and sustainable startup in Berlin, Einhorn, and I said, guys, I know you're selling vegan condoms right now, but there's something else below the waist and it's really interesting, it's about blood. and pain and taboos and they said wow, this sounds amazing, let's do it, so I joined them and we started what we called the period revolution and I was starting my research and the first thing that came to mind while I was researching the topic of menstruation was you. We all know this menstrual pad metaphor ad where they pour this liquid onto the pad to show how it will wonderfully absorb all the blood, which brings us to the number one thing men should know about periods, so do we? what is this, why?

They pour a blue liquid on the pad. I mean imagine a child seeing an advertisement for a patch. Someone gets a scratch and then it appears as a blue scab. Why do we do that? I mean, how should we perceive our period as something very normal when I don't even dare to show its real color on TV, so I was really wondering if actually menstrual blood is red, it's really red, it's actually quite slimy because it contains an accompanying uterine lining and the stem cells reach the researchers. It's because it is the most nutritious blood you can get in your entire body.

It is the best blood. They use it to produce new cardiovascular cells. Because it's the best blood you can get. The second thing you should know about periods. It's super normal. superpower, so really the period or the menstrual cycle is about creating the best circumstances for new life to grow in our bodies and I mean, that's great, the uterus is building an extra lining along the circle so that a egg potentially settles in a very rich place. and a nice cozy lining, and if there are no eggs, menstruation occurs, the extra lining is removed during administration, so actually having your period means that your rep reddick tv system is working very well, so it is a big deal, so we see that what happens during menstruation is nothing strange, the only thing that is strange is the way we deal with it, the way we whisper about it, the way the man does not enter into contact with menstruation and understand why we face it in In a very strange way, we have to go back to the Stone Age because in the Stone Age carved sculptures that have been found from the Stone Age suggested that menstruation in the Stone Age, menstrual blood was something truly magical, it was something precious, precious.

It was very powerful and the women bled once a month without even dying, they were damn goddesses, but guess who didn't like the idea of ​​women being goddesses with superpowers and the church. The party ended when the church came into the game, so the church. They had found a perfect reason in menstruation to claim that women are inferior to men and they wrote something really interesting in a very famous book that we all know called the Bible, this is the Old Testament and it says when a woman has discharge and the discharge in her body it is blood, she is impure, so all religions actually agreed.

If you look in Hinduism, for example, you will also find that menstruation is impure, so that was a really clever thing, on the eighth day, in fact, the woman that the men emphasized will bring two doves. The priest apologized before God for having blood, so we still carry this burden with us and I found a menstruating goddess from India. They actually have a menstruating goddess. I couldn't take the photo because I didn't have the rights to show it. it's here, but I quickly drew it for you, you should google it, you should video it, google it and it looks a little different, but it's a squatting menstruation goddess, but even in front of her temple there is a science that says that Entry for a menstruating woman is strictly enforced. forbidden, so we wanted to know how we deal with menstruation in Germany, this is a long time ago, the Bible, this is India, this is very far away, how do we in Germany deal with menstruation?

So we gathered 69 questions about menstruation and put them on Facebook. and it actually went viral, which I didn't even know was still possible and we realized that there is nothing in Germany, so people talk about periods all the time, it's totally normal. Couples talk to each other, it's nothing in Unfortunately, that wasn't all we discovered. 20,000 people participated in our survey and we found that menstruation is still one of the biggest taboos in our society, even in Germany in 2018, so there is still a lot of shame and embarrassment. Not to mention things, there is also a lot of lack of knowledge about what really happens in the body and I will tell you the two main things that we discovered, first of all, periods are painful, not for all of us, but for some of us or let's say . most of us are very painful, in fact they are very, very, very painful.

When we ask about the difficulties experienced during a period, we see that the classic one is menstrual cramps. 70 percent say they have menstrual cramps and the scientists simply compared the intensity of the immense ones. to a cramp with a heart attack imagine you would see someone having a heart attack and you would run up to them with a hot water bottle and tell them to stay together, who makes that second problem? We don't talk about it, so one in two women. You think your partner dislikes menstrual blood and that fits very poorly with the number one thing that people miss during their period, which is sex, so we all know, hopefully, that orgasms during menstruation can release menstrual cramps, so it would be a very good option. good idea to talk to your partner about what you really like and what you don't like, so we need to talk because if we don't talk we will never know. 60 percent of the people we ask want more understanding from us. their partners and we were thinking how can they understand something that they themselves are not experiencing and then we asked our friend Yun Becca, he is a mentalist and we asked him if you can hypnotize guys into thinking they are on their period, so we collected, we collected from our Instagram community, we collected a lot of very pictorial descriptions of how they feel their pain and we selected 20 very brave guys in our backyard in Berlin and that's what happened Sean and Anna hunt de noiron' point to the account of sweetheart from school in Slav an excuse to enlighten shmatte 11 alive and I just saw that there is a teacher in soft, so I hand him the duty and the workers then really want the gaddama indiri organic salmon hook that we hand over to the one who delayed like an organic Indian to a low verbage is from Meza when links chosen at the end the power London in English will be a goal are stackable possessions is a disaster in fact Santiago is a practical cut with its highest for certain aspects Whiskey Wadman Sitting in the Hospital Lincoln found when I rinsed the lien and then they gave me a 10 hour Powell, so ladies and gentlemen, we really have to stop fucking with menstruation, we have to break this taboo that still exists together and we have to learn about it, we have to understand what really happens in the body, we have to invest in it. science so that menstrual cramps can be treated as well as heart attacks and we must provide education to eliminate this stigma associated with this very normal process in our body and, of course, we have to talk about it, we have to have more empathy in the couple and also in the workplace for people who menstruate and periods should be normalized and share their experiences with each other talk to their partners talk to their colleagues talk to their sons talk to their daughters because if they perceive their period it is very normal but very beautiful process as a curse or as a gift that is something you decide thank you