Researchers Karen Hollewand and Rina Knoeff (RUG) will talk to you about menstruating men and other women's issues. They look at the gender health gap through a historical lens and ask themselves how history can help us to close that gap. 

Women are victims of a millennia-old tradition that views women’s bodies as inferior. As a result, women are taken less seriously in medical research and in the consulting room. For example, menstruation has been associated with impurity and witchcraft for centuries, so PMS and menopause now receive too little attention. Recent attention to women’s health is filled with these and other clichés about typical “female ailments” and patriarchal men. 

In this lecture, Hollewand and Knoeff wonder whether all stories about the past are true. If menstruation was such a taboo, how can we explain that men also menstruated in the past? Why was an orgasm more important for women than for men in the past? How is it that doctors thought primarily non-binary centuries ago? How can a different perspective on history help us close the gender health gap?