paulb@hcrvx1.UUCP (Paul Bonneau) (12/14/84)
[Out Vile Jelly!] This is actually carried over from net.women.only but since I'm male I'm replying here. Sophie Quigley writes: > When I was in high school, I had a friend whose parents celebrated with her > the beginning of her womanhood by taking her out to a restaurant. I thought > that was rather nice. If I get a daughter I plan to do something similar. > It IS a very important event, and should definitely be celebrated! > > I wonder when people start feeling ashamed of such things. When I was in > Junior high, we were all longing to get our periods, and those who "had it" > had a special aura about them and were the envy of all the other little girls > who were not so lucky. I remember bragging about it when I "got mine". > After a > while though, nobody was bragging anymore, just trying to hide it. Boy! Sometimes the girls don't have it all that bad! Consider the opposite case, ie. when a newly pubescent male has his first wet dream. For most of us it is a scary experience. And nobody talks about it. It doesn't seem to have the same public awareness that the female menarche does. Perhaps this is due to the fact that we (men) are not having the same degree of physical change occurring as women do. Nocturnal emissions are usually not periodic, last but a short time, and require no special measures against staining etc. So as a result, you have your typical about-to-become-more-than-a-boy experiencing this thing that no one has ever told him about and the psychological reverberations are usually quite unpleasant. If he is lucky to know what is happening to him (unlike me - woke up in the middle of the night with this goo and thought that some important bodily fluid was escaping somehow - scared shitless) then he is still not immune from a false guilt that this thing that just happened is bad and evil. To celebrate such a thing? It seems equivalent to the femalee case - the boy becomes a man, maturing, fulfilling his destiny, etc. But it seems doubtful that the stigma attached to this process will abate for a long time. P.S. For those of you who see the mad rantings of a pitifully uniformed child, flame on!, I like a bit of discussion now and then... -- I'm a man! I'm not a horse! Paul Bonneau {decvax|ihnp4|watmath}!hcr!hcrvax
ecl@ahuta.UUCP (e.leeper) (12/15/84)
REFERENCES: <1037@hcrvx1.UUCP>
Regarding celebrating menarche/first nocturnal emission (not to be confused
with "primus noctis" :-) and I probably racked up the spelling, but I couldn't
resist)...
Anyway, back to the point. When we lived in California, I remember one woman
we know talking about her son and how she couldn't wait until he had his first
wet dream. At the time this seemed odd (translate that, I never heard of it
before), but it does make some sense. Presumably, he would at least have been
told what was going on.
Germaine Greer points out that women who never carry a purse other times always
take one when they go to a public restroom at "those times" because they won't
carry a (wrapped) tampon where someone might see it.
Frankly, I love the bit in MONTY PYTHON'S THE MEANING OF LIFE ("Mr. Creosote"
sequence) where the woman, desperate for an excuse to leave the restaurant,
says that she's having a rather heavy period and doesn't want to start bleeding
on the seats.
Evelyn C. Leeper
==> Note new net address: ...ihnp4!ahuta!ecl
(Mail sent to my old address will be forwarded temporarily.)