One hundred and twenty-one Mexican college students and 100 middle-aged Mexicans completed a questionnaire concerning beliefs about and attitudes toward menstruation. Younger people, both men and women, viewed menstruation as requiring less secrecy than did the middle-aged people. Younger women were less likely than older women to view menstruation as having proscriptions and prescriptions. However, younger men were more likely than older men to view menstruation as restricting, annoying, and disabling. Regarding gender, young men were more likely than young women to view menstruation as disabling and restricting. However, older men were less likely than older women to view menstruation as annoying and restricting. These findings are discussed in light of sociocultural differences between genders and age cohorts.Menstruation is a physiological phenomenon with multiple psychosocial elements that can have repercussions on how a woman experiences her own menstrual cycles. The cultural, social, and family environments in which people grow up have influence on their beliefs about and attitudes toward menstruation. In fact, there are several differences in attitudes toward menstruation that have been documented in women from different countries. Anson (1999) demonstrated that the attitudes toward menstruation of Israeli, North American, Indian, and Australian undergraduate students do differ from each other; Israeli women perceived menstruation as the most debilitating and bothersome. In a more recent study, it was shown that Indian women college students viewed menstruation as more natural than did American women students, and they also denied the effects of menstruation more than did American women. On the other hand, American women viewed menstruation as more debilitating than did Indian women (Hoerster, Chrisler, & Rose, 2003). Finally, another recent study shows important differences in specific aspects of attitudes toward menstruation between British and Indian undergraduates. British women showed greater agreement with items about premenstrual physical and mood changes, whereas Indian women showed greater agreement with the idea that women are more tired than usual and not expecting so much of themselves while menstruating (Bramwell, Biswas, & Anderson, 2002).Moreover, there are also differences in the attitudes toward menstruation of subcultural groups even within largely homogeneous cultures. In Western societies, such as the United States, studies conducted in the 1980s showed differences in attitudes toward menstruation that were related to gender and age. In these studies (Brooks-Gunn & Ruble, 1986;Chrisler, 1988), men were more likely than women to view menstruation as debilitating, but women were more likely than men to view it as bothersome. College students were more likely 273
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