First and foremost, yes, my name is Micah, but I’m a boy. I know a lot of people use the name “Micah” for their daughters. Please stop this. It’s a boy’s name (or do whatever you like, it’s 2018 after all).
I’m a stand-up comedian and writer by trade (don’t worry, you haven’t heard of me yet), but I’ve also had the opportunity to work with the staff of Modern Filipina. I’ve always thought it’s pretty cool that they’re writing all these articles that empower our women to be more than just what society expects them to be. After reading through a few articles, I asked them if I could contribute something.
Now, you may be wondering, what’s a guy doing writing an article for Modern FILIPINA?! Is this another attempt at mansplaining?!
Let me be clear: I am not a clever person, so I have no right mansplaining anything to anyone, even if I wanted to (I rarely do), and after reading the articles, and talking to the writers, of Modern Filipina, I realized that, wow I had some serious misconceptions about women when I was younger.
While I eventually cleared up a lot of these dumb ideas, I thought it would be pretty funny if we take a look at some of the things I thought about women (they’re not as offensive as you might think. I hope).
Misconception #1: All Women Around the World Get their Periods at the Same Time
I was raised by a house full of women. I had my single-mom (who raised me and my three siblings without losing her mind), my sister, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my yaya. Suffice to say, that’s a lot of estrogens.
I also grew up with my brothers, but we fought a lot, maybe as a subconscious display of testosterone to balance out all the girl power happening in our house? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that no matter how loud or aggressive we were, the moment “that time of the month” happened, we knew damn well to get out of the way, woe betide us if we pissed off one of the girls.
As I grew older, I learned that women’s periods synced. Which made sense, hormones and proximity and all that. However, I must have failed to read the rest of that encyclopedia chapter because I assumed that it wasn’t just happening at my house, it was a worldwide phenomenon that every woman in every corner of the world had their periods the same time as the women in my household, which usually meant every third Thursday of the month.
Of course, I know better now, which is why I no longer assume that the annoyed woman I’m talking to on the second-to-the-last week of the month is hormonal. Maybe I’m just annoying in general.
Misconception #2: Women Pee from Their Butts
Even just typing that subheading makes me feel stupid, but I mention it because, for the longest time, maybe up until my senior year of high school, I firmly believed that women did their number 1s from their number 2s.
Barring basic working knowledge of human anatomy, this made sense to my teenage brain. I pee standing up, and I poop sitting down. Why do women sit down to pee? Maybe, it’s because the pee comes from their butt. L-O-G-I-C.
In my high school’s defense, they did their best to teach me Biology when I was 14. Unfortunately, I did not pay attention; mostly because I was too busy giggling at the diagrams of the penises and the vaginas (or, vaginae? Is it Latin?) because, as I said earlier, I’m dumb.
While this factoid was cleared up by my Calculus teacher (who was 1. Astounded that I was graduating high school, and 2. That I was asking him about biology), it did lead me to a connected, but still wholly wrong misconception: if women didn’t pee from their butts, then that means they pee from their vaginas.
Wrong. I don’t know if I’m the only guy who ever thought this, but my mind was BLOWN when I found out the truth.
Without getting into the graphic details, let’s just say that it took a very confused ex-girlfriend and a very unsexy anniversary in bed for me to realize that, oh my god women don’t pee from their vaginas, they have a urethra. So weird!
Misconception #3: Sometimes Women Aren’t Being Emotional, Sometimes I’m Just an Asshole
This is self-explanatory.
Again, let me assure the women reading this that, maybe not all men are as dumb as me, but we can be pretty thick-headed. I don’t know if this is because we were raised in patriarchy that makes it okay for guys to dismiss women as alien creatures, or if I was just too lazy to finish the books I’m reading, but clearing up these misconceptions kind of gave me a better understanding of women, somehow.
I have a few more, but I feel like that’s another story for another article. If there are any guys reading this, did you ever have a stupid misconception about women? Hit us up in the comments section!