A simple demonstration on TikTok last year exposed something most men never learned: how menstruation actually works. Women began posting videos showing their boyfriends tampons and pads, explaining the mechanics of their own bodies. The reactions were genuine surprise. Many had no idea.
This gap in understanding isn't accidental. Boys grow up with fragmented information — picked up casually from living with women, then buried under the clinical language of school sex education. The result is a generation of men who know menstruation exists but not much beyond that.
The cost of this ignorance is real. Research shows that poor menstrual education among boys contributes to negative attitudes toward girls and women. And these attitudes have consequences. Menstruation has been weaponized for centuries — used as justification to exclude women from leadership, from work, from public life. Even now, some still argue that a woman's cycle makes her unfit for power.
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Start Your News Detox"Menstruation is an opening for attack: a mark of shame, a sign of weakness, an argument to keep women out of positions of power," Colin Schultz wrote in Popular Science. That framing doesn't come from nowhere. It's sustained by the same silence and misinformation that left those boyfriends shocked by a tampon.
The TikTok videos went viral because they captured something both funny and sad: the moment men realized they'd been walking through the world without basic knowledge about half the population's bodies. But the humor masks a real problem. Women shouldn't have to spend energy educating men about their own biology. That's a tax on their time and patience.
Some shifts are happening. Schools in several countries now teach menstruation more openly and inclusively. Some governments have made menstrual products free or tax-exempt, treating them as essential rather than luxury items. These changes matter because they signal that menstruation isn't shameful — it's normal, it's worth understanding, and it deserves resources.
But until menstruation is taught clearly to all kids, regardless of gender, the burden will keep falling on women to explain themselves. The real progress isn't viral videos of confused boyfriends. It's a world where no one has to be stunned to learn how their own body — or someone else's — works.
