Why are so many 'straight' men grossed out by women's bodies?

It's not actually normal to be weirded out by periods, childbirth, and vaginas. And it's certainly not a sign that a dude is straight.

What do you call someone who is disgusted by most aspects of women’s bodies?

Straight isn’t the first word I would choose. Yet over and over again, I hear of self-identified straight men who seem to find women revolting, while idealizing men. Here’s some of the many ways readers have told me this manifests:

• Being disgusted by vaginas to the point that he won’t give oral sex, makes crude comments above vaginas, thinks it is normal to be revolted by vaginas, or shames his partner for the way her vagina looks/feels/smells/tastes.

• Finding childbirth gross and dirty. Somehow, the most powerful thing a woman can do has been turned into a source of shame and disgust by many a misogynist man.

• Thinking the overwhelming majority of states a woman’s body can be in—pregnant, menstruating, over 30, menopausal—are disgusting and shameful.

• Refusing to have sex with a partner when she is getting her period.

• Viewing women’s periods as gross or dirty: telling a woman to hide her pads or tampons, refusing to buy her pads or tampons, or being grossed out by any mention of periods.

• Viewing pregnancy as “fatness” or disgusting.

• Pressuring a newly postpartum woman to immediately look the way she did before having children.

So what’s going on here? All evidence suggests that it is men, not women, who smell, neglect their bodies, and fester into disgustingness. Yet it’s women who spend their whole lives feeling disgusting and inferior. As usual, misogyny is at the rotten core of this mess.