If Men Could Menstruate

Gloria Steinem's 1978 satirical essay imagining a world where men menstruated — arguing that whatever the dominant group does becomes valorized, so menstruation would be treated as a sign of power and virility if men experienced it.

Performs the feminist thought experiment of reversing the gender of a stigmatized biological function to expose the social construction of stigma — demonstrating that the shame attached to menstruation is a product of power dynamics rather than the biology itself.