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Oh, waking up and finding you're bleeding out of your lower parts and panicking (back in the days before everyone was educated since age six about such things) was, as you can imagine, so much fun. Then "oh yeah this will happen for the better part of a week every month for the next forty years or so"?
But it's much less visible than what happens to boys. Though for girls, growing breasts does get you male attention, and creepy adult males leering at thirteen year olds is rare but does happen.
I imagine that suddenly being sexualised by your school classmates, maybe even your friends, to be a weird and difficult thing to sort out.
The male side is not all bad. I remember being pretty stoked about the rather sudden increase in strength. But the smell, the voicecracks, the fact that I was no longer "cute"... Then there was the increasing expectations that I was supposed to be confident, good at sport, have suitable levels of self control... All while experiencing new emotions with no one providing good advice on what to do. The flood of sexual desire in particular and just being told to essentially figure it out yourself, while knowing that losing control of yourself at the wrong time would be heavily punished, was distressing to say the least.
I still appreciate the strength boost. And while I am rarely cute, at least women find the physical changes attractive, assuming decent grooming and exercise practices.
I used to share Goodguy's perspective that periods are harder than anything I experienced. These days, I prefer to not compare suffering. Men and women go through different things with different pros and cons. And hopefully the advantages of adulthood makes puberty worth it.
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