They were called “sit out days.” Boys got one and girls got three. The rules were strict. You still had to dress out in gym attire, along with the rest of the class: white shirt, blue basketball shorts, tennis shoes. No exceptions. And you had to copy definitions from the back of the gym textbook (yes, a gym textbook). If you were a girl the coach gave you a heating pad and special mat to sit on.
Coach explained on the first day of gym that sit out days should be reserved for when we felt sick. Not sick enough to go home but also not in any state to perform the strenuous physical activity of middle school PE. A boy raised his hand: why do girls get more days? Coach answers with political evasiveness that includes the phrase man-up. Another boy does’t raise his hand and just blurts, “Vagina.” I should point out that this particular boy was going through a phase of exclaiming “vagina” quite often, normally in moments where any number of four letter words would have been more appropriate. In the case of sit out days, though, he was on to something. Sit out days were designed for girls. They were period days.
It’s a concept I both agreed with and appreciated, since I took full advantage of my three days (and more, after coach realized I needed them). The heating pad, the mat, the occasional pillow, even a bend in the rules and not having to dress out all helped with the monthly discomfort that came with being a girl. Something the boys, by definition, didn’t need and didn’t understand. In fact, they were infuriated at the injustice.
There is something adorable about a group of white male thirteen year olds speaking out against a system of unequal treatment, and it was even cuter that Vagina boy was their leader. Each time a boy took a sit out day and didn’t receive the special care that the girls were given the class period turned into a filibuster from Vagina boy. The complaints all funneled to the conclusion: it’s not fair.
And it wasn’t. Girls got treatment and attention that the boys didn’t. It was a have and a have-not situation, the historical basis or unfairness. But my male classmates didn’t realize that the other have and have-not of sit out days: girls had periods, and the boys didn’t.
This distinction has bred a history of men pondering: what to do about women, specifically when they are on their period. Cultures worldwide (the Hindus among them) developed the method of simply removing women from the equation once a month. Banishment was historically used in dealing with infants who were suffered birth defects, deafness, or blindness. In regions of Africa, twins were considered evil and placed in the jungle minutes after birth to be eaten by animals. The difference with women is their role procreation. Female bodies are what banished us to caves, but it's also what kept us from following the path of the twins--and other oddities man couldn't understand--straight from the birthing canal to the hyena's stomach.
