Living in India made me understand that a white
  minority of the world has spent centuries conning
  us into thinking that a white skin makes people
  superior, even though the only thing it really does is make
  them more subject to ultraviolet rays and wrinkles.

  Reading Freud made me just as skeptical about penis envy.
  The power of giving birth makes "womb envy" more logical, and an
  organ as external and unprotected as the penis makes men
  very vulnerable indeed.

  But listening to a woman describe the unexpected arrival of her
  menstrual period (a red stain had spread on her dress as she argued 
  heatedly on the public stage) still made me cringe with 
  embarrassment.  That is, until she explained that, when finally
  informed in whispers of the obvious event, she had said to the
  all-male audience, "and you should be proud to have a menstrating
  woman on your stage.  It's probably the first real thing that's 
  happened to this group in years!"

  Laughter.  Relief.  She had turned a negative into a positive.  
  Somehow her story merged with India and Freud to make me finally 
  understand the power of positive thinking.  Whatever a "superior"
  group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an
  "inferior" group has will be used to justify its plight.  Black men
  were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be "stronger"
  than white men, while women were relegated to poorly paid jobs 
  because they were said to be "weaker."  As the little boy said when
  asked if he wanted to be a lawyer like his mother, "Oh no, that's
  women's work."  Logic has nothing to do with oppression.
  
  So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate 
  and women could not?  

  Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boastworthy, 
  masculine event:

  Men would brag about how long and how much.

  Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood. 
  Gifts, religious ceremonies, family dinners, and stag parties would
  mark the day.

  To prevent monthly work loss among the powerful, Congress would 
  fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea.  Doctors would research
  little about heart attacks, from which men would hormonally protected,
  but everything about cramps.

  Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free.  Of course, 
  some men would still pay for the prestige of such commercial brands 
  as John Wayne Tampons, Muhammad Ali's Rope-a-dope Pads, Joe Namath 
  Jock Shields--"For Those Light Bachelor Days."
  
  Statistical surveys would show that men did better in sports and won
  more Olympic medals during their periods.

  Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists 
  would site menstruation ("men-struation") as proof that only 
  men could serve in combat ("You have to give blood to take blood"), 
  occupy high political office ("Can women be properly fierce without a 
  monthly cycle governed by the planet Mars?"), be priests
  and ministers, God himself ("He gave this blood for our sins"), 
  or rabbis ("Without the monthly purge of impurities,
  women are unclean").

  Male liberals or radicals, however, would insist that women are 
  equal, just different; and that any woman could enter their ranks 
  if only she were willing to  recognize the primacy of menstrual 
  rights ("Everything else is a single issue") or self-inflict a 
  major wound every month ("You must give blood for the revolution"), 
  
  Street guys would invent slang ("He's a three-pad man") and "give
  fives" on the corner with some exchange like
  "Man, you lookin' good!"
  "Yeah, man, I'm on the rag!"

  TV shows would treat the subject openly. (Happy
  Days: Richie and Potsie try to convince Fonzie that he is
  still "The Fonz", though he has missed two periods in a
  row.  Hill Street Blues:  The whole precinct hits the same cycle.) 
  So would newspapers. (SUMMER SHARK SCARE THREATENS
  MENSTRUATING MEN. JUDGE CITES MONTHLY STRESS IN
  PARDONING RAPIST.) And so would movies (Newman and Redford
  in "Blood Brothers"!)

  Men would convince women that sex was more pleasurable at "that 
  time of the month".  Lesbians would be said to fear blood and 
  therefore life itself, though all they needed was a good menstruating
  man.
  
  Medical schools would limit women's entry ("they might faint at the
  sight of blood").

  Of course, intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical 
  arguments.  Without that biological gift for measuring the cycles 
  of the moon and planets, how could a woman master any discipline 
  that demanded a sense of time, space, mathematics--or the ability 
  to measure anything at all?  In philosophy and religion, how could 
  women compensate for missing the rhythm of the universe? Or for 
  their lack of symbolic death and resurrection every month?

  Liberal males in every field would try to be kind. The fact
  that "these people" have no gift for measuring life, the liberals 
  would explain, should be punishment enough.

  And how would women be trained to react? One can
  imagine right-wing women agreeing to all these
  arguments with a staunch and smiling masochism. ("The
  ERA would force housewives to wound themselves every
  month": Phyllis Shlafley. "Your husband's blood is as
  sacred as that of Jesus--and so sexy too!: Marabel
  Morgan.) Reformers and Queen Bees would adjust their lives to the
  cycles of the men around them. Feminists would explain endlessly 
  that men, too,  needed to be liberated from the false idea of Martian
  aggressiveness, just as women needed to escape the
  bonds of menses-envy. Radical feminists would add that the 
  oppression of the nonmenstrual was the pattern for all other 
  oppressions. ("Vampires were out first freedom fighters!") Cultural
  feminists would exalt a female bloodless imagery in art and
  literature. Socialist feminists would insist that once capitalism
  and imperialism were overthrown, women could menstrate, too
  ("If women aren't yet menstrating in Russia," they would explain,
  "it's only because true socialism can't exist within capitalist
  encirclement.")

  In short, we would discover, as we should already guess, that
  logic is in the eye of the logician.  (For instance, here's an idea
  for theorists and logicians:  If women are supposed to be less rational
  and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when
  the female hormones is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical
  to say, that in those few days, women behave the most like the way
  men behave all month long?  I leave further improvisation up to you.)

  The truth is that, if men could menstruate, the power justifications
  would go on and on. 
  
  If we let them.