The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

i say it's a design flaw

I get that shedding unfertilized eggs is part of the female experience. I get that we need to shed unused life and make room for new. I get that we are essentially machines that consume and excrete and somehow have the ability to feel. What I don't get is why we have to experience pain with it. Why the cramps, God? What's with that? Is it to keep us in our place, to make us wholly aware each twenty-eight days that we are little more than beasts of burden? Do we get extra points on judgment day for this and the fact that we never wage war or pull unsuspecting people into the bushes to rape and sodomize them? Then, you go and give us bloated bellies, creating angry, round, hissing creatures who might pull a man's eyes through his nose if he stands between us and chocolate. It seems so strangely perverse, if you ask me. I see no reason for the pain on top of the inconvenience of stained underwear and seven days of sexlessness. Cramps on top of the smell of hot dog breath from below the equator. Tiny, cyclic births of the dead and never will be's, with low grade labour pains while we're trying to carry on with our other lots in life.

I say unfair, God. I say this seems unnecessary.