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A man nearly fainted. The woman sitting next to him barely flinched. That single moment, captured on video by period pain relief company Somedays, cracked the internet open. Attached to the same simulator, set to the same intensity, the two participants produced a contrast so stark it left millions of viewers speechless. Period pain had long been dismissed as something women simply deal with. This video made that dismissal impossible to sustain.
The simulator works by delivering small electrical impulses directly to the abdominal muscles, triggering contractions that replicate the sensation of period cramps or early-stage labor. Somedays, a Vancouver-based period pain relief company, designed its simulator to run from level one up to level ten. Standard cramps register around a five. Women with conditions like endometriosis can experience a ten on a monthly basis. The device does not simulate the nausea, fatigue, or back pain that often accompanies menstruation. It captures only the cramps, and that alone proved too much.
The man in the video held on until level four before his composure started to crack. By the time the intensity climbed further, he was hunched over, barely able to stay upright, and admitted he would call in sick to work if he felt this way on a regular day. Meanwhile, the woman beside him, who lives with endometriosis, sat calmly through each escalation. Her body, trained by years of unmanaged pain, registered the machine’s output as familiar. That familiarity carried its own weight.
The Condition His Body Couldn’t Name
When the simulation ended, conversation turned to endometriosis — a disease most men in the video had never heard of. The condition causes tissue resembling the uterine lining to grow outside the uterus, including on the ovaries, fallopian tubes, and surrounding organs. During menstruation, that tissue bleeds with nowhere to go, generating severe inflammation and pain. An estimated one in ten women of reproductive age lives with the condition globally, yet diagnosis routinely takes close to a decade. The man in the video admitted he had no idea it existed.
That ignorance carries real consequences. Both the woman participant and the Somedays facilitator disclosed that doctors had dismissed their symptoms as teenagers, telling them their pain was normal or that adolescents simply could not have endometriosis. “I was told teenagers couldn’t get it,” the woman said during the video. “It took me 8 years to get diagnosed,” the facilitator replied. Those delays are common. The average diagnostic delay for endometriosis is between seven and ten years, often because symptoms are normalized rather than investigated. Missed diagnoses mean years of untreated pain.
The man’s discomfort at level four gave him a brief, controlled window into what those years feel like. For women with endometriosis, that intensity is not a simulation — it is a Tuesday. Endometriosis pain can be severe enough to cause vomiting, prevent sleep, and make walking difficult. Yet the condition remains chronically underfunded in research relative to its prevalence. What the simulator offered, in a few charged minutes, was a measurable gap between the pain women are told to accept and the pain men struggled to endure for seconds at a time.
The Gap Between Tolerating and Being Believed
Audience reaction to the video divided along a familiar line. Many women in the comments recognized the woman’s composure as a learned survival skill, shaped by years of being told their pain was exaggerated. “I feel so sorry for her,” one viewer wrote. “The fact that she doesn’t react isn’t good at all. Imagine how painful her endometriosis must be.” The calm was not strength in the conventional sense. It was adaptation — the body’s response to pain that received no adequate medical answer and left the person with no functional choice but to continue.
Others focused on the man. Some commenters praised him for lasting as long as he did; others pointed out that the simulation excluded the full physical toll of menstruation. “That’s just the cramps, not the bathroom issues, puking, dizziness, exhaustion,” one commenter wrote. “And we still keep going on with life.” The observation cut to the center of what the video was really demonstrating: the simulator offered a floor-level sample of an experience women manage in full, in professional environments, at school, and at home, without accommodation or acknowledgment.
The calls for broader participation grew pointed. Several viewers argued that male managers and supervisors should be required to try the simulator before approving or denying medical leave requests. “I think any male in a managerial position should be required to do this,” one commenter wrote, “so they can understand what it is like.” The suggestion was half-joking, but the frustration behind it was not. Period pain is among the most common reasons working women seek relief, yet workplaces remain largely structured around the assumption that menstruation does not impair function.
Why Validation Requires More Than a Viral Moment
Lux Perry, founder and CEO of Somedays, built the simulator specifically to move the conversation past self-reporting. According to Perry, period pain is routinely dismissed and invalidated across institutions — at the doctor’s office, in education, at the workplace, and at home. She told CTV News that watching men drop to their knees at intensities women live with every month had been “an extremely validating experience for the millions of us that struggle with it.” Validation, in this case, required an outside body to feel what women had been describing for years.
That dynamic points to a deeper structural problem. Period pain affects roughly 80 percent of menstruating people at some point in their lives, yet research funding, medical training, and workplace policy consistently treat it as a secondary concern. Melissa Berton, executive director of The Pad Project, told USA Today that society still carries significant blind spots when it comes to how menstruation is treated within overall patient health. A simulator can close the empathy gap in the room where it sits. It cannot close the research gap or rewrite the clinical bias that leaves conditions like endometriosis undiagnosed for nearly a decade.
The man in the video walked away having felt, briefly, what the woman beside him feels on a recurring basis, and still could not quite believe what she had described. That gap, between experiencing something for three minutes and living with it indefinitely, is precisely what the viral moment exposed. Women with endometriosis do not get to tap out. Their composure under a level ten is not a sign that the pain is manageable. It is a record of how thoroughly they have been left to manage it alone.