We talk about periods at BMB but almost always to other women. Today, we are turning the camera around because honestly? The men in our lives have opinions too. Some surprising, some frustrating, some genuinely thoughtful and here’s what we found when we actually asked.
- Should men even be part of this conversation?
Not everyone agrees and that’s fine. Some people think men have no business in period conversations at all. It’s not their body. It’s not their pain. It’s not their experience. So why center their feelings or comfort in a discussion that is fundamentally about something that they’ll never go through? There’s a real fatigue here too; women have been managing this alone for centuries and some of us feel like the moment men show interest in the conversation, magically it becomes “important” in a way that it wasn’t when it was just women talking amongst ourselves.
Some push back hard on that. Men are husbands, fathers, doctors, legislators, bosses and teachers. If they don’t understand periods, they end up making decisions about school policies, healthcare, household budgets, sick leave without understanding the thing that they are deciding on. A father, who doesn’t know what a period is, cannot support his daughter through her first one and a boss who thinks menstrual cramps are an excuse will keep dismissing his staff who will be more productive with better support if he didn’t. When a husband has been married for seven years but can’t name a single symptom of endometriosis, that’s a problem. The man who runs the pharmacy and stocks products or doesn’t. All of that is participation, just the harmful kind. From this view excluding men doesn’t protect anyone, it just leaves them making uninformed calls that affect women anyways.
I think it depends on the seat they’re taking. If they’re just listening and learning, 100% welcome. If they’re speaking over the people that are actually living it, 0% welcome.
- What did boys actually learn growing up?
For a lot of Nigerian men, the answer is almost nothing and what little they learnt came from the wrong sources. Some grew up with periods being treated as an unspoken topic. Maybe a sisters pad always being hidden in a black polythene bag, secret conversations between females inhouse that immediately stopped once he stepped in and questions always met with “that’s not for you to know”, a paragraph in a biology textbook sandwiched between the lymphatic system and God knows what else. So by the time they were teenagers, their main source of information became schoolyard jokes between peers which is as accurate and respectful as it sounds. They learnt nothing about pain, nothing about emotional shifts, nothing about what it actually means to live in a body that bleeds monthly.
Some boys had a slightly better experience. Maybe a mum or an aunt explained the basics matter-of-factly, treating it as biology rather than scandal. Those men tend to describe periods today with way less awkwardness, because to them it was never framed as shameful in the first place.
There’s also a generational angle worth naming honestly. Older men often say “we just weren’t taught that back then and it was fine”. Thus, implying ignorance never hurt anyone. Younger men, especially those with sisters or daughters now, are more likely to say that silence did more harm than good. It just wasn’t damage anyone could see at the time.
- Does “Real Men” have anything to do with this?
This is where it gets tender. One camp sees periods as completely irrelevant to masculinity; it is not a test of manhood, it is just female biology, the same as malaria or flu excluding the sick privileges. To them, the discomfort they feel around periods isn’t really about masculinity at all; it’s about unfamiliarity and unfamiliarity fades with exposure.
Another camp sees something deeper going on. A real man is unshakeable. Strong. Unbothered. In a lot of Nigerian masculinity scripts, anything associated with fragility, blood, or emotion gets coded as “not for men” and menstruation ticks all three boxes. Buying pads at a shop, talking to a female loved one about the effects of her cycle or even mentioning the word “period” out loud can feel emasculating. They subconsciously believe that periods are shameful and have absorbed a culture where anything period-adjacent gets filed under women’s business and stepping into women’s business carries its own social cost.
A third view splits the difference. Maybe it’s not that masculinity is inherently against periods but that nobody ever modelled what comfortable masculinity around periods look like. There’s no template for the guy who casually grabs pads at the store because that guy was never shown to anyone growing up. It’s less a belief and more a blank space.
The irony is that all versions doesn’t protect anyone. Not even the men who perform it. It just builds a wall between men and the people they love, made of silence and pretend-not-knowing. Think about what that wall actually costs. A teenage boy grows up thinking it’s funny to mock his classmate who leaked. He becomes a man who thinks it’s awkward to buy his wife pads. He becomes a father who has no idea how to talk to his daughter about her body. At every stage, what looks like “staying in his lane” is actually just disconnection. And disconnection isn’t strength. It’s just a different kind of fragility.
- Where we land (For Now)
So maybe the question isn’t why men don’t understand periods. Maybe the question is why they decided, somewhere along the way, that understanding them was optional. So here’s the solution. The men who grew up in silence, should educate themselves. The one who learned from bad jokes should acknowledge how wrong he is, unlearn and correct his mindset. The men that flinch at the word period should unburden themselves from the shame they are carrying on our behalf because honestly, over here there’s no shame in menstruating. Menstrual stigma doesn’t survive in rooms where men are willing to learn.
And because we carry our future generations forward as responsible adults, we ought to educate men and women, matter of fact, all genders should know about menstruation and its intricacies in age appropriate language at every stage of growth. Real strength, the actual kind, not the performance, looks like a man who can walk into a pharmacy and buy pads without making it a whole thing. It looks like a father who prepares his daughter instead of leaving her to figure it out alone. It looks like a partner who says “what do you need?” instead of “I don’t understand why it’s always this bad.