When Mean and Messy Aunt Flo Came to Stay
She taught us about Pre-empting, Preventing, Pausing, and Rolling with the Punches
Women are at the helm of the new medicine the planet needs — a preventative health that does not require an industry. It begins with the body, with cycles, with a bloody visitor no man has ever known: the menstrual flow.
She barges in without asking. Sometimes early, sometimes late, always inconvenient. She is messy, painful, and absolutely uncontrollable. Aunt Flo: mean and messy as she is, never plays by our rules. And that’s the point. Because of her, girls learn early that life is not always predictable — but that we should listen and prepare so we can flex, and survive.
Between the ages of seven and twelve, before the period arrives, children are aware of their heads, their thoughts, and that they have bodies — but they live mostly from the brain looking outward. There’s a gap, a disconnect. Girls at this stage are on the threshold of something men will never cross — health from the inside out. Men remain in the old paradigm for life: disconnected and relating to their bodies as machines to command or ignore — health from the outside in. Medicine, designed largely by men, reflects that detachment. It treats the body as parts to be fixed rather than cycles to be understood.
Then, menstruation arrives and everything changes. The tidy separation between head and body dissolves. The cycle teaches us to live inside unpredictability. To notice signals. To plan ahead (pre-empting). To make choices that protect us (preventing). To stop when the body insists (pausing). And to adapt when everything goes off-script (rolling with the punches).
These are not forebearances. They are powerful assets — capacities men cannot claim, because they have never menstruated.
It is no coincidence that folktales circle this threshold. Think of Little Red Riding Hood — clothed in red, walking into the woods, leaving safety, facing danger, and finally entering her grandmother’s house. Some have read it as a story of vigilance, a young girl encountering the forces that threaten her, yet still finding her way to the wisdom of another woman waiting inside.
Like the Red Tent, it suggests that the passage is not just personal but communal — that a girl entering her cycle belongs in the company of women she knows. Yet in the West, that communal space has been stolen. Girls bleed alone. Many of us did. The warmth of the Red Tent was replaced with cold bathrooms and closed doors.
Periods became something to conceal, endure, or medicate away. Men, meanwhile, either avoided the subject entirely or distorted it into ridicule, making themselves present where they should have simply stepped aside.
And still, Aunt Flo did her work. She blessed us, in spite of her meanness, with training no man receives: to flex with cycles, to read signals, to endure discomfort, and to plan life around rhythms bigger than ourselves. These are not punishments. They are initiations.
They prepare us not only for childbirth, but for all the unpredictability life hurls at us. Half the population lives this reality, every month year after year.
It is time to create space again — space that is warm, communal, and supportive. The Red Tent was never a luxury; it was medicine. True preventative health begins here, with women, with flow, with the assets hidden inside the meanest, messiest teacher we’ll ever have.
About the Author:
Catherine Broué is a systems physiologist. After two decades in ICU and dialysis, she turned to the deeper question of real health, guided by mentors and the insights of Bohr and Buteyko. Her work centres on the body’s true regulators — breath and the central nervous system — and the return to parasympathetic dominance.