Medieval, She Wrote

Until about five minutes ago, I had no idea who the woman in the video below is. Master Google tells me that her name is Penny Higgs, an Australian actor-dancer who finished fifth in the 2014 cycle of Big Brother Australia (i.e. series 11). Cool. I am not super interested in learning more about her, nor has she motivated me to rewatch endless hours of Big Brother, vintage or otherwise. But I wish her very well, and hope she has a great life. Basically I'm sending her the kind of decent-human vibes I hope most people beam out into a world filled with people in whom they're neither hugely interested nor squarely disinterested. I will forever respect Penny, however, for a short and impassioned monologue she delivered in the Diary Room in episode 45 (24:04-25:36 of the video below). She lays out the utter ridiculousness about the cultural silence about women's period pain with vigorous clarity:

Yeah, I've had a weird day. I'm going to talk about something. And I don't know why, like, this doesn't get spoken about really ever. And I want people to hear this. Like, don't be like, don't be like, 'Ooh, no we shouldn't do that'. But my ovaries are on fire today, like nobody talks about period pain. I just have to say, right, for a quarter of the year, a woman will have her period. A quarter of the year. Now, this is a fact of life, right. No-one talks about it, but just think about this, right? When you walk around to the shops, and you go to the shops, and someone's serving you, or you go order your coffee, or you go to the bank and a woman serves you, you know what? You didn't even know, that woman might actually be in excruciating pain. Like, fully, like so much pain. But they just get on with their day, no-one would know. But sometimes, when I have got this kind of period pain, which it doesn't get spoken about, because I had to tell one of the boys [fellow housemates], they said 'What do you need painkillers for?' And I said, and they were all like 'Oh, oh,' [and] like got all a bit weird.