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4 guys try a menstrual cramp simulator and can't remotely handle it

"It's stabbing me! What do I do?"

via Benz Trap House/TikTok

Men try a period simulator and hilarity ensues.

They say the best way to understand another person is to walk a mile in their shoes. If you ask most women, though, they'll tell you to forget about the shoes. They've got much bigger problems they wish men could understand.

Imagine how different the world would be if cis-gendered men had the ability to give birth, for example? Would the state of Texas still have a near-blanket ban on abortions or would they be available on-demand? Would we live in a country without mandatory paid maternity leave? How much more affordable would childcare be? Would there be a tax on period products? How would we treat people experiencing period pain?

A few brave men decided to see what life was like for people who have periods in a funny but enlightening video that's gone viral on TikTok.


period pain, men have periods, period simulator, women, men, abortion, womens health, reproductive rights, feminism People who menstruate are often used to being forced to push through the discomfort. Giphy

In a video posted by Benz Trap House that has over 1.4 million views, a group of guys tried a period simulator to experience what menstrual cramps really feel like. Period simulators are essentially the same as labor simulators. They're called transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) machines that are designed to relieve pain. But when turned up a notch can create intense, debilitating discomfort.

The group took a semi-scientific approach to the experiment with a woman acting as a control subject. At the beginning of the video, she attaches the simulator to an area near her ovaries and turns it up to ten, the highest setting. In the clip, the group looks impressed as she endures the extreme setting without showing any discomfort.

The men would not do as well.

@benztraphouse

The boys tried a period simulator #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #funny #periodcramps #periodsimulator #viral

When the first guy attempted to wear the period simulator he was shocked by the discomfort. "Is it supposed to hurt like that?" the second guy says before erupting in nervous laughter.

The third guy said that he felt the pain all the way down to his knee caps.

The men's description of the pain certainly seems to indicate that the simulator machine is pretty accurate. According to Mayo Clinic, menstrual cramps are a "throbbing or cramping pain" that radiates to the lower back and thighs. The pain itself, during actual menstruation not simulated by electrical charges, is caused by repeated contractions of the uterus as it sheds its lining. The cramps can be much worse for women and menstruating people with certain conditions. In fact, they can be debilitating and excruciating. But most of the time? Women are expected to just soldier on as if nothing's happening. In many male-dominated spaces, pain or other difficulties associated with periods is not considered a valid excuse for needing a day off, taking a break, or even going to the bathroom!

At one point in the video, the period simulator is attached to a woman and a man at the same time. When the device is turned on, the guy is in extreme pain while the woman stands still, claiming the feelings created by the machine are "not even as bad as a cramp."

"Yeah, my cramps hurt worse than this," she added. See, this is exactly what they mean when they say women have a higher pain tolerance than men. Scientifically, that claim may be dubious, but when it comes to this specific kind of reproductive discomfort, women are far more used to sucking it up.

A lot of people who menstruate felt validated after seeing the guys experience their first period.

"'You feel that in your back, boi?' every month, friend," a commenter named Crystal said.

period pain, men have periods, period simulator, women, men, abortion, womens health, reproductive rights, feminism Menstrual cramps can radiate through the lower back and even legs. Giphy

One of the most popular comments was from Candyce, who said: "I'm convinced if men could get pregnant they'd have abortion clinics on every corner and paid maternity leave the whole pregnancy."

Another commenter, S DeMarco, pointed out that women have to go through an entire day in pain without a break.

"When he said 'it's stabbing me what do I do?' You go to work, clean the house and continue on bb," she wrote.

"Please this needs to be added to every high school health class ... cause some guys really don’t understand the pain" another user added.

Shellz took reality up a notch. "Let's add headaches. And period poops. And bloating. And the feeling of blood leaving you. And the nausea," she wrote.

If only there were a machine that could simulate all that!

period pain, men have periods, period simulator, women, men, abortion, womens health, reproductive rights, feminism If more men appreciated period pain, how might the world be different? Photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition on Unsplash


It's cool that the lighthearted video has gone viral because it'll give some people newfound respect for the pain that people who have periods go through. Some who watched the video thought that period simulators should be mandatory in sex ed classes.

Imagine how different the world would be if everyone experienced menstrual pain just once in their life.

This article originally appeared four years ago. It has been updated.

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What to know about the 1864 abortion ban Arizona's Supreme Court says is 'now enforceable'

The legal code it comes from also outlaws interracial marriage and forbids minorities from testifying against white people in court.

Peter Zillmann (HPZ)/Wikimedia Commons, Brandon Friedman/Twitter

Arizona's borders may soon be even more consequential.

When the 2022 Dobbs decision overturned the federal protection of medical privacy in reproductive decisions, leaving abortion law up to the states, experts warned of the legal and medical consequences to come: People in states with old laws on the books would find themselves facing abortion restrictions the likes of which had not been seen in over 50 years since Roe vs. Wade became "settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court," and medical providers would face legal conundrums that threatened patient care.

Nearly two years later, we've seen the fallout on multiple fronts, from women suing states for denying them medically necessary care to children who have been raped and impregnated being forced to travel across state lines to get an abortion.

And the latest development has Arizona set to enact a near-total abortion ban based on a 1864 legal code, after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the law "it is now enforceable."

Here's what to know about the 160-year-old law:

There is only one abortion exception allowed for in the law—to save the life of the mother. As medical providers have made clear, that kind of exception is a murky gray area that leads to impossible questions like "How imminent does a mother's death need to be?" for a doctor to take action without fearing legal repercussions.

Civil War-era historian Heather Cox Richardson shared some of the details about how the law came about and the context in which it was written on Facebook, and the historical facts paint a picture of how utterly absurd it is for the law to go into effect in 2024.

"In 1864, Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvet-lined cases," wrote Richardson. She pointed out that the U.S. was in the midst of the Civil War, and that the law didn't actually have much to do with women and reproductive care.

"The laws for Arizona Territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men," she explained, sharing that the word "miscarriage" was used in the criminal code to describe various forms of harm against another person, specifying dueling with, maiming and poisoning other people.

Richardson offered that detail as the context in which the law states that "a person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two years nor more than five years."

How did the law even come about? At that time, the newly formed Arizona Territorial Legislature was composed of 27 men. The first thing they did was authorize the governor to appoint a commissioner to draft a code of laws, but a judge named William T. Howell had already written one up. After some discussion, the legislators enacted Howell's laws, known as "The Howell Code."

The code included laws like, "No black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to give evidence in favor of or against any white person," as well as "All marriages of white persons with negroes or mulattoes are declared to be illegal and void."

Richardson also pointed out that the code set the age of consent for sexual intercourse at 10-years-old.

Essentially, a law written by one man, 48 years before Arizona was officially a state, over half a century before women were allowed to vote, when it was perfectly legal to enact and enforce racist laws and see 10-year-olds as old enough to consent to sex, is now considered "enforceable" by the Arizona Supreme Court.

As Richardson pointed out, the difference now is that women can vote. And Americans have proven time and again that draconian abortion laws are wildly unpopular across the political spectrum. Even some Republican lawmakers and politicians are flip-flopping on previous praise for the 1864 law, saying that the Arizona legislature needs to do something about the law to prevent it from taking effect.

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How abortion ban exceptions muddy ethical care for pregnant patients

"How imminent must death be?"

Pavel Danilyuk/

Obstetricians are facing impossible dilemmas with abortion care in some states.

When the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, experts warned that there would be medical consequences. Politicians have made abortion a black-and-white issue when it's a vast ocean of gray, and doctors are now stuck in dilemma after dilemma in states like Tennessee, which enacted some of the strictest abortion laws in the nation in the wake of Dobbs.

In Tennessee, it is now a Class C felony to perform an abortion. Exceptions are made for rape and incest, ectopic pregnancy, molar pregnancy, and if "the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman."

But as OB-GYN Sarah Osmundson explained on Radio Atlantic, that last exception is "very gray." Working as a maternal-fetal specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Osmundson serves on the abortion committee that decides whether a doctor has the green light to perform an abortion to save a mother's life or bodily function. In an interview with Hanna Rosin, Dr. Osmundson shared how making those calls can feel like an impossible task as providers walk the line between ethical care and the threat of legal action.

Osmundson explained that it's unclear what the exceptions to the law even mean because there's no predictable line for when a patient will cross over into imminent death or permanent injury. "It is a continuum of risk," she said. "Where is the cut point that we have to decide some aspect of risk is too high?"

Some cases are cut-and-dried, she said, but others present a conundrum for those who are tasked with assessing whether the risk to a mother's life or health is high enough to warrant an abortion. There are no clear thresholds, especially since risk assessment isn't an exact science.

She offered an example of a patient who has diabetes combined with an autoimmune condition, but they're both currently well managed, on top of kidney disease.

"You know, these are the kind of cases where we’re really trying to guess at: What is their risk of death or serious morbidity?" she said. "And even when I see these patients in the office, like, I can’t sit down with them and say, Your risk is X percent. I don’t have data to drive that individual case. Maybe their risk of serious problems in pregnancy is like 5 percent."

Osmundson pointed out that some patients choose not to screen for chromosomal abnormalities with an amniocentesis because there's a 0.1% risk of complication and they decide it's not worth the risk. "So we don’t do certain things because of very low risk. How am I to say that a risk of 5 percent is too low of a risk?" she asked.

Dr. Lisa Harris, an OB-GYN and professor at the University of Michigan, posed a similar questions to NPR shortly after the Dobbs decision was announced.

"How imminent must death be?" Harris asked. "There are many conditions that people have that when they become pregnant, they're OK in early pregnancy, but as pregnancy progresses, it puts enormous stress on all of the body's organ systems – the heart, the lungs, the kidneys. So they may be fine right now – there's no life-threatening emergency now – but three or four or five months from now, they may have life-threatening consequences."

Osmundson gave a specific example along those lines that posed a problem for some doctors on her committee. A woman was 14 weeks pregnant with a fetus that had no skull, which meant it had no chance of survival but an increased risk of excessive amniotic fluid, which could threaten the mother's life. Osmundson thought the case warranted an abortion, but others on the committee wouldn't commit, with one saying they weren't "brave enough."

The doctors were concerned about the way the decision would be scrutinized and the potential legal consequences if someone brought the case to court. Dr. Louise King, an OB-GYN at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, had warned of this scenario when Roe v. Wade was overturned.

"Laws will exist that ask [physicians] to deprioritize the person in front of them and to act in a way that is medically harmful," King told NPR. "And the penalty for not doing so will be loss of license, money loss, potentially even criminal sanctions."

The reality Osmundson described in the Radio Atlantic interview demonstrates how prescient that warning truly was.

"I feel like I’m making a decision thinking about: How would our attorney general interpret this? How would the optics appear? And it makes me feel really uncomfortable, as a physician, that I’m considering care for the optics, rather than for what is right and best for the patient," she said.

Legal abortion ban exceptions like "to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman" may sound straightforward to the average person, in the reality of medicine, it's not. Doctors aren't magicians or oracles, they don't have a crystal ball that tells them if a patient is going to live or die or be irreparably harmed—they make their best guesses based on their deep well of knowledge and experience, which lawyers and politicians deciding on legal boundaries don't have. Abortion restrictions and exceptions like Tennessee's force doctors to think as lawyers and lawyers to think as doctors when they don't have the training for it, all while people's lives hang in the balance.

The ambiguity in risk thresholds also makes these legal questions impossible to navigate. As Osmundson pointed out, a 5% risk is actually quite high, especially when it's your own life on the line. That's a hard enough choice for a person to make for themselves, much less a choice we should expect a doctor to make for someone based on political decisions and legal judgments made by people with no experience in the intricacies of medicine.

The challenges are even causing some doctors to leave states where they feel they can't care for patients properly. Kylie Cooper, MD was a maternal-fetal specialist who moved from Idaho to Minnesota in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

“My husband and I would talk about this every day. It was consuming us,” she told the AAMC. “What if I lost my license? What would happen to our kids if I went to jail? What about my guilt if I didn’t help a sick patient to my fullest ability? It was a nightmare. I didn’t feel I could remain a health care provider in a place where I couldn’t help a patient sitting right in front of me. It was unbearable.”

And for many, it doesn't seem to be a matter of making the law clearer. There are simply too many factors on an individual patient basis for more clarity in the law to even be possible, much less helpful, while also preserving a doctor's ethical standards of care.

So what's the answer?

The simplest answer is medical privacy—the protection that was provided by Roe. v. Wade—which was argued for and passed by the majority of Republican-nominated Supreme Court Justices, by the way—for doctors and patients together to decide on healthcare decisions without government interference. We were warned by doctors of what would happen when abortion laws were left fully up to each state, and now we're seeing those consequences play out in state after state.

After going through various challenging scenarios, Osmundson summed up the crux of the issue with two questions that every person ought to consider: "Do you want your cancer doctor to be considering the opinion of an attorney general when they’re making recommendations about your cancer care? Why would you want those kind of external things involved in your care during pregnancy?"

Listen to Dr. Osmundson's enlightening Radio Atlantic interview here.

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I did a roundtable with the Vice President about abortion. Here are 4 things that surprised me.

The conversation was important, but in some ways the experience was nothing like I expected it to be.

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Upworthy associate editor Annie Reneau chatting with Joy Reid and Kamala Harris in an MSNBC roundtable

It's been a very weird week.

I'm a writer and editor—not a medical professional, legal expert or political activist in any way—so imagine my surprise when I got a message from Vice President Kamala Harris's senior advisor inviting me to join a roundtable discussion on MSNBC for the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. I thought someone might be pranking me, but nope. The invite was real.

Apparently, someone had read an op-ed I'd written years ago about how it's possible to be morally pro-life but politically pro-choice and felt that my voice would add something to the discussion. The panelists included the lead plaintiffs in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization and the Texas Abortion Ban lawsuits, two activists involved in the fight for reproductive rights, a Texas OB-GYN who has seen the implications of the Dobbs decision in his own practice…and me.

I felt remarkably average among these experts on the issue, but I think that was the point. My view represents millions of average American voters who may feel conflicted about where they stand on abortion morally and legally and are trying to reconcile their personal or religious beliefs with what they think our laws should be. Additionally, as someone with no political affiliation or loyalty to any party, I could speak about grappling with this issue without any partisan pressure or influence.

I'd like to point out that I'm wary of most politicians and well aware of biases in the media, so despite feeling honored to be asked, I was a bit hesitant to participate. I certainly didn't want to contribute to the partisan divide if I could help it. But because abortion is such a complex and nuanced issue, dedicating an entire hour of prime time to a discussion about it sounded like a good way to help people gain a better, broader understanding. So less than 24 hours after being asked, I was on a plane to Dallas to join the roundtable, which filmed the next day.

The full roundtable discussion is worth watching (and can be found on Peacock, with clips available on MSNBC), but I wanted to pull back the curtain and offer a peek behind the scenes because there were some things about the experience that genuinely surprised me.

1. I had no idea ahead of time what questions they were going to ask

I assumed participants in these kinds of events would be prepped ahead of time with what questions they would be asking and have ample time to prepare. This was not the case for me, and according to the fellow panelists I chatted with, it wasn't for them, either. I used my travel time to prepare a few talking points I felt I could address somewhat intelligently based on my op-ed (since that's what prompted the invite), but all I knew before arriving for the taping was that we were going to be discussing the Dobbs decision.

The only preparation we got was about 30 seconds before each segment was filmed. Joy Reid briefly explained how that segment would be structured with something like, "Okay, in this segment, we're going to talk about [some element of the abortion issue]. I'm going to ask [panelist] about [XYZ] and then pivot to [panelist] to talk about [XYZ]. But feel free to chime in if you want to respond to something. We really want this to be a conversation."

That was it. The entire prep. I was surprised—but also delighted—by how unscripted it was. No one asked me to make any specific points. I didn't feel any expectation or pressure to even agree with what was being said. Obviously, they knew where I stood based on what I'd written, but they had no idea what I was actually going to say ahead of time.

2. The conversations on-screen were no different than the ones being had off-screen by all parties involved

I think people who are skeptical of media may think that things said for the camera aren't as genuine as one would hope. Maybe that's the case sometimes, but that wasn't my experience at all here. In the green room and during the commercial breaks while filming, the conversation about the issue continued just as it did on screen, just without a host guiding it. The genuine sincerity of the discussion filled me with hope.

For instance, the OB-GYN panelist I was chatting with in the green room told me that in his 30 years of practice, he'd never had a patient come to the decision to terminate a pregnancy lightly, and we talked about the importance of keeping compassion and empathy central to the conversation about abortion. That was just our casual conversation. In the hours I was there, I overheard people from the crew to the other panelists to Joy Reid and the VP talking behind the scenes about all the things we talked about on screen. There was nothing contrived or fake about what you see in the roundtable discussion.

3. There was no atmosphere of eliteness

Despite the presence of Secret Service agents everywhere and despite being a high-profile cable news show involving the Vice President, the whole thing after going through the metal detectors felt mostly…normal.

All the people I interacted with, from the folks arranging my travel to the people headlining the show, were so down-to-earth. Everyone was genuinely nice and repeatedly expressed their gratitude to all of us for being there. I kept thinking, "Wait, aren't I the one who's supposed to feel grateful for this opportunity?" I didn't expect to feel so at ease. There was an air of professionalism, of course, but not at all a stuffy or high-pressured one.

I mean, I chatted with Joy Reid about her hot flashes while we were waiting for Kamala Harris to arrive, for goodness sake. It was obviously a serious and highly organized event with lots of moving parts, but it also felt casual and relaxed, which made it easy not to feel too nervous.

4. I came home to an immediate example of why this issue is so important

The night after I came home from Dallas, I had friends over for dinner. One of them works with pregnant women and told me about a mom who was in her second trimester and very ill. Her bloodwork looked horrible and her health was going downhill fast. It turned out she had a very rare fetal anomaly that was creating her health problem, and she needed to terminate the pregnancy or risk a dire outcome. The anomaly meant there ultimately wasn't going to be a way to save the fetus.

Her previous OB-GYN who had delivered her other children was in Idaho, and though he wanted to help her, he couldn't, because what she needed was an abortion. She wasn't at death's door yet (though technically could crash at any time), so despite the obvious need to end the pregnancy, his hands were tied by Idaho abortion laws. She then had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get to a provider in Washington who could help her, all while her health continued to be in danger.

There are countless stories like this that illustrate the very real implications of the Dobbs decision on real people, including people who don't actually want an abortion but need one. There's a tendency to try to make this issue black-and-white, but it's not. There are unique circumstances surrounding every pregnancy and every childbirth, and real women are harmed when lawmakers insert themselves into healthcare decisions with no medical expertise or training.

It's vital that we keep the moral debates separate from the legal debates on this issue. Pregnancy is a healthcare issue, deserving of medical privacy. No lawmaker needs to be in the room when a woman and a doctor are making decisions about her healthcare. People can debate the morality of those decisions all day long, but keep the law out of it.

I wasn't necessarily surprised, but I was happy to see first-hand how, at the highest levels of this unfortunately politically-charged issue, the concern behind the debate isn't about politics, but about the real people negatively impacted by the court's decision.


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