Men are writhing in pain and millions of women can’t stop watching

In a video uploaded to TikTok, English reality-television-star-turned-influencer Jamie Laing looks to camera smugly and lifts his hoodie to reveal a contraption taped to his stomach, or – as he calls it –his “ovaries.”

He is wearing a period pain simulator, a gadget created by Somedays, a period-pain-relief company with a simple mission: “to shift culture towards a more compassionate and understanding future where people with period pain are believed and supported.”

Period pain is trending online thanks to a new pain simulator. Credit: Getty

Predictably, Laing cowers from the simulated pain as he tries to order a coffee. While audibly groaning and twitching, he teeters desperately toward a nearby couch, oat latte in tow, and takes a seat. After catching his breath and looking back to camera, he emphatically claims that he has “a newfound respect”, and that “period pain honestly suck.” The video pans out to reveal his female co-worker tsk-tsking and smirking nearby.

This particular product, which was designed to “bring awareness to the frequent and sometimes debilitating pain that [people who menstruate] experience by giving the other 50 per cent an opportunity to walk a mile or two in our shoes”, has harnessed a huge online footprint. Somedays estimates that videos of the simulator being used have tallied more than one billion views across various media channels.

Each video follows the same, unerring format: a man wearing a period pain simulator confidently endeavours to do something mundane like order a meal, or complete a task on his laptop, until he no longer can. The cramps become too severe, and so he is convinced, usually by the end of the clip, that period pain might actually be a real phenomenon.

There is something gratifying about witnessing a man struggle to endure an element of what is, for many people, a monthly burden. It scratches a deep itch that the founders of Somedays have been smart to identify in their female audience. Given that period pain is often dismissed, ridiculed and brushed aside, can you blame a woman for finding comic relief in watching a guy wince while trying to navigate the Eftpos machine at his local Starbucks?

What do we lose, though, by having the very real pain of menstruation reduced to a 25-second gimmick that becomes a viral content trend?

When I consider the aches of having a female reproductive system, they extend far beyond the occasional, debilitating cramp. The real distress can be found in the fact that chronic conditions associated with menstruation, such as endometriosis, can take an average of seven years to be formally diagnosed. Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), a condition that incites feelings of suicidal ideation while menstruating among other emotional disturbances, has only recently entered public discourse, despite it affecting one in 50 people who menstruate. Endometriosis Australia estimates that the illness alone costs Australia $9.7 billion per year, inclusive of healthcare costs – around $2.5 billion – and the rest in lost productivity.

When I see Laing doubling over in discomfort, I don’t necessarily feel understood. Instead, I feel distracted by my own reproductive plights: namely, the eight years it took for me to acquire a diagnosis for vaginismus in the eyes of disbelieving doctors. My many foiled, painful attempts at using tampons as a teenager. The knowledge, too, that these men on social media don’t have a catalogue of stained underwear to their name for all of the months they were a little less organised, or the distant memory of a particularly traumatic swimming carnival they have tried to repress from their adolescence.

When I see women’s pain distributed online into a bite-sized, consumable stunt, I am forced to consider whether the real pain of having a female reproductive system can ever truly be simulated. Or rather, can the impact of women’s pain really be felt by a man who can identify—for a brief, comical moment—the physical sensation of a brief, lone cramp?

This is not the fault of Somedays, a company built on the labour of its co-founder, Lux Perry, who spent 20 years “being passed from physician to physician, trying to find answers and relief” before discovering they had endometriosis.

But for all Lux has sustained, their journey can’t be understood properly if period pain is pared down to a quick and risible TikTok upload. This is because, for men like Jamie Laing, their involvement in the politics of period pain starts and ends with an interactive costume. I can’t imagine this sort of product inciting real, genuine involvement in dispelling stigma surrounding painful periods.

But this is just what happens when women’s pain is made bite-sized, ‘trendy’ and consumable online. The period pain simulator is, after all, just that. A simulation.

Madison Griffiths the author of Tissue and a freelance writer.

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