Breaking the Cycle
Acknowledging the Feminine
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic continues our investigation into the feminine and looks at what we value and what we try to delete about her in today’s Western society. It’s going to be messy, embarrassing, visceral, and limiting because we are talking about the monthly menstrual cycle, which creates life and stews angst in our culture.
Intro
My wife,
, and I recently had a great conversation about the odd tendency to delete a core element of femininity out of existence. To be fair, it’s not something most women appreciate themselves. It is limiting, frustrating, and a burden that men don’t have especially when it comes to competing in the professional world. As Lisa and I talked, it became clear that there is almost zero tolerance for the feminine idiosyncracies bestowed by nature, creating a different cycle of deletion that we feel needs to be broken.Biology 101
Stating the obvious, women have a monthly cycle of ovulation and menstruation. This results in significant hormonal surges that can take them from euphoria and zeal to the crash of pre-menstrual stress and the crippling pain of menstrual cramping. Add in the variability between each cycle and most women will tell you it’s chaos.
Men, on the other hand, do not have this cycle. Their hormone levels have minor fluctuations but not the extremes of their feminine counterparts. It’s not a far stretch to say this dramatic physical difference has led to a lot of the societal structures that governed daily life, right, wrong, or indifferent as this video comedically captures:
This is where the statement “Women can do everything men can do,” backfires if we don’t acknowledge, appreciate, and respect this crucial biological difference.
Deleting the Cycle
In Rediscovering the Goddess, Lisa and I captured the current zeitgeist of feminine empowerment as:
To be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man.
We’ve overlooked the strength of the feminine and replaced it with the trappings and vestiments of the masculine to the point that we are attempting to delete this core feminine cycle.
What do we mean by deleting it? Let’s ask that question a different way. When was the last time a woman was allowed to acknowledge that her monthly cycle was affecting her work performance?
Most workplaces value and reward consistency. We prefer the same sort of performance every day, week, and month. We want a steady leader, stable output, scheduled time off, and standard expectations.
We want everyone to work as consistently as men and we can’t acknowledge otherwise. In some ways this is a healthy correction to the chauvinistic “oh it must be ‘that’ time of month” accusation that many of us have heard but, then again, maybe it is that time of month and we need a little more grace.
The big question to answer is why is that cycle a bad thing? Why must women hide it? Why are we holding them to the same standards as men when they are biologically coded to entirely different outlooks and interactions with the world?
More importantly, at what cost does this demand for consistency and deletion come?
Think of women in the military. Many people point to the females graduating from Ranger School, the world’s most difficult combat leadership course, as evidence this biological difference doesn’t matter or that these women overcame these issues. The assumption is that the feminine cycle wasn’t so limiting after all… but this ignores a really dark unspoken situation here.
The truth in combat or Ranger School is that the mental and physical stress on those young women very likely stopped their menstrual cycles completely.1 It’s the same for elite athletes. The environmental stress literally deletes their cycle.
As the IVI International Fertility Clinic states:
The absence of menstruation is quite common in women with intense physical activity. If it occurs sporadically, it may not pose a long-term problem. However, if menstruation is absent for an extended period, it can lead to infertility and make it difficult for the woman to conceive naturally.
Women can do anything that men can do… but at what cost?
There’s also no need to go this extreme to delete the cycle. For the average professional woman, birth control is the go-to correction of choice to smooth out those cyclical variations and provide that consistency society values. It’s a simple solution with no side effects, right?
Well… birth control tricks the female body into thinking it’s pregnant. Lest you think this puts you at the top of your game, this state of hormones is only one step removed from the low part of the feminine cycle of actual menstruation. There’s a reason they call it baby brain during pregnancy yet women on birth control live that daily.
Lisa describes her short experience with birth control as a perpetual brain fog that, while consistent, wasn’t her peak capability. Her friends and co-workers in the engineering world share similar experiences. Adding to the professional challenges, at the personal level, libido is suppressed, memory functions are reduced, drive is diminished, and anxiety increases.
Some of our friends had been on birth control since puberty and have never experienced a mature female cycle in their lives. One friend went to have her IUD replaced and instead of one procedure, the doctor recommended a pause to check back in on nature. When her cycle returned she was shocked at how incredibly different and empowering it felt and decided to embrace the feminine cycle.
A fantastic example of this is from comedian Taylor Tomlinson in a clip about wanting to get off birth control “cause I’d love to meet me,” demonstrating what many female friends have mentioned when they stopped the pill after being on it from most of their post-pubescent lives. Lest you think this is just a simple transition, you’re entire psyche, interests, and even sense of smell are different when you are on pharmacological birth control versus what nature provided.
Back to the topic of anxiety. When the female body believes it’s pregnant, evolutionarily, it’s encoded to recognize the unique vulnerabilities of that state. You have to eat more calories and more nutritionally, you can’t run away as fast, you’ll have to provide for a baby soon, etc. etc. etc. These are all anxiety and depression drivers. Is it any wonder that the ubiquitous use of birth control is correlated with an explosion of anxiety and depression medications? It’s almost like that one little pill unlocks five other pharmaceuticals in an effort for consistency.
We’ve deleted the cycle… but at what cost?
Break the Cycle
Since we’ve already broken the natural cycle, what Lisa and I hope we can do today is break the social cycle that demands we break the natural one. If you were unaware of all of this I hope it helps elucidate the quandary a bit. To recap:
It’s embarrassing, messy, visceral, and limiting
Only women have to deal with it
Western society has generally accepted that a successful woman must be indistinguishable from a successful man
This creates a cycle that focuses on deleting this element of the feminine and then continuing to double down with new medications and new expectations
BUT
It is a superpower for creating and successfully raising new life
It adds texture and insights that are different from men
It’s a core driver in the social nature of women in creating community.
What if we were more open about these challenges and the benefits of this natural cycle? What if we stopped measuring women against their ability to work, act, and perform identically to men? What if we could shed that oddly anti-feminine undercurrent in our professional world and instead of deleting the cycle we incorporated it to leverage the unique powers of the feminine?
What are your thoughts on this topic? Lisa and I would love to hear your insights.
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
- All-around great daily essays
- Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
- Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
- Integrating AI into education
- Computer Science for Everyone
Here’s an interesting Reddit that starts with pilots but with multiple comments from women veterans who describe either the stress or the medication deleting their cycle: https://www.reddit.com/r/Military/comments/192h3c4/how_do_female_soldierssailorspilots_manage_their/
 | A guest post by
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If it wasn’t for Substack, we wouldn’t even be able to address this. I’ve been trying to write this for the last 40 years on any comments of any newspaper and magazine I could find
It was always censored
Very interesting analysis. I think the underlying problem is that many feminists, male and female, insist that women are and should be not only absolutely equal to men but also absolutely the same as men. Well, if you “are” the same then you should “be” the same and “act” the same and “do” the same. It’s perfectly fine with me to accept that the female cycle in fact results in women being different from men and having different thoughts and experiences, but then go back to the original feminist thesis and get rid of this mantra that women are, should be, and should be treated as, absolutely the same as men.