Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

2012-04-04

2012-04-04 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
2012-04-04
Votey panel for 2012-04-04
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This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic shows a mother explaining menstruation to her daughter. The mother says "And then once a month, you'll bleed from the vagina for three to five days." The daughter laughs it off dismissively: "Oh HA HA. Yeah, right Mom. Nice try." The caption at the bottom reads: "There is a reason women tend to trust their mothers." The humor comes from the fact that menstruation, when described plainly and matter-of-factly to someone hearing about it for the first time, sounds so bizarre and implausible that the daughter assumes her mother must be joking or trying to scare her. The caption implies that women eventually learn to trust their mothers precisely because all those seemingly unbelievable warnings turn out to be true.

The votey panel breaks the fourth wall with a caption reading "50%+ of you now:" followed by a man saying "Ew." This is a meta-commentary on the comic's readership, joking that more than half of the (presumably male-skewing) audience is having a squeamish reaction to the frank discussion of menstruation, reinforcing the cultural taboo around openly discussing a completely normal biological process.

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