When I was 13 years old, most of the girls in my single-sex school failed a question on a science test: Why do teenage boys have higher levels of iron than girls?
Different students took different approaches to the question. Maybe boys eat more red meat? Or their propensity for risk somehow gives them an added layer of protection?
The answer is so obvious that you’re screaming at me: Boys don’t get periods. Our all-girls school had lulled us into a sense that the female is the default human. Of course, this brief period of tranquility didn’t last—soon we absorbed the concept developed by Simone de Beauvoir that man is default and woman is “Other.”
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