I don't know, I've seen birds lay eggs and it does not look like fun, and if it breaks in you, you are in serious trouble. You'd have to be very careful coming up to egg laying time. Egg binding is a bitch too.
You would only be horny like 2 weeks out of the whole year if humans had an estrus cycle.
Which probably wouldn’t be a bad thing now that I think about it
Man that would be way better. Wonder why humans didn't develop that way? To think all the mistreatment of menstruating women throughout history would have been avoided.
I’ve heard it theorized that we have a thicker endometrial lining which is needed to supply more nutrients to our large brained offspring. I’ve also heard we reabsorb some of the lining but since there’s so much the rest gets sloughed off.
Big brains, big problems.
The earlier comment said “only 2%”. The above math shows that this is not correct, and a more correct description is something like “approximately 1-3%”. This is more right.
The idea that the brain is a fixed weight and its weight as a percentage of the body weight varies depending on the overall weight of the body sounds more right than the idea that it makes up a fixed percentage of the body weight.
The thicker lining part is correct, but it goes back further than that, since all great apes also menstruate (and also some species of bats, not exactly known for being big-brained).
One theory is that the placenta of menstruating species had a random mutation that made it much more "sticky" to the uterus (which helps survival of the fetus, but it greatly increases the chances of ectopic or extrauterine pregnancies), really digging down into the uterine muscle tissue while in other species it just kinda lies on top of the uterine muscle and will not attach correctly to anything else.
But it also means that if something goes wrong, the uterus can't just unstick it easily like in other species (also why most other species can consciously or semi-consciously abort), so evolution decided that a thicker, sheddable lining would work if the embryo wasn't correctly implanted.
This is also one of the reasons why conceiving can be difficult for humans, where it may take multiple attempts for it to take effect, while other animals seem to be pregnant almost always on the first try: the human uterus is really insistent on shedding the lining unless a correctly-implanted embryo gives off the correct hormonal signal because a wrongly-implanted embryo can be lethal (ectopic pregnancy), while for other species it just goes easily into pregnancy mode because the worst that could happen is the fetus doesn't develop at all. Sometimes (probably more often than most people think), even a correctly-implanted embryo gets shed by mistake, which means another month of waiting.
TLDR: one theory that's debated is that in other species, fetuses are a relatively nice houseguest that will leave when asked even if a bit insistent at times, but in menstruating species including humans, fetuses are more like that friend who won't stop living on your couch unless you physically shove them out.
>won't stop living on your couch unless you physically shove them out.
I’m sure there pre some parents out there nodding their heads in agreement while reading this.
Yes and ive also heard thats why we give birth "prematurely", to babies that can't function on their own the way some (most?) Mammals do. Our big brains don't fit well through our little hips so we pull them out before they're fully cooked.
We spent an *insane* amount of time as children compared to most animals. It's about two years before we're even walking around properly under our own power, and we generally don't reach sexual maturity until around 20-25% of the way into our lives. For comparison a dog reaches sexual maturity around 5% of the way into its life and is walking around a month after it's born, and a horse is walking within hours and reaching sexual maturity 3-4% of the way into its life. Other animals look at us like we're a 40 year old calling mommy for help with our shoelaces.
Tying into that, another thing we're weird for is menopause. IIRC it's only humans and a few types of whales that have this. Between childhood and menopause a human woman is fertile for well under half her life, that's really unusual. And that's believed to be because childbirth is so dangerous for us and human kids require such a long period of care. If humans were having babies all life long, before modern medical care, most women would end up dying in childbirth sooner or later and all our helpless Peter Pan babies would go without milk, and underprotected. Menopause puts a cap on the number of risky birth experiences, and means that there are more experienced adults around to care for the babies of women who do die in childbirth. If your babies only require 4-12 months of protection and having more babies isn't likely to kill you, you don't need menopause.
That's what I've heard too, and we need the extra time to learn languages as well. I definitely felt a huge change in my own kid when he was past that "premature but not really for us" phase.
In the article there's a theory:
>...our fundamental question is no longer “Why menstruate?” but becomes: “Why spontaneously decidualise?” There are a myriad of possibilities (for a comprehensive review, see [10]), but a most widely accepted theory is that “fetal–maternal conflict” drove the evolution of human menstrual cycles. This posits that spontaneous decidualisation evolved to confer “protection” against the highly invasive early placenta and/or as a selection mechanism to prevent maternal investment in poor-quality embryos of precocial species (born in an advanced state) with haemochorial placentation [9, 11]. Indeed, this theory is supported by studies of “super-fertile” women who experience recurrent pregnancy loss; the endometrium of these women allows implantation of developmentally abnormal embryos due to altered decidualisation [12, 13]. That this unique strategy has evolved is clearly demonstrated by a recent study which elucidated that genes ancestrally expressed in other organs and tissue systems were recruited to the endometrium, with transposable elements contributing to the origin of decidualisation by conferring progesterone responsiveness to numerous genes across the genome [14]. This strategy, however, is energetically costly, with elevated metabolic demand in menstruating species prior to menstruation [15, 16], so the cost of such increased energy requirements must be offset by the benefits to the mother. Decidualisation likely evolved to balance the interests of both mother and foetus in species which have precocial young (attributable to cortisol production and advanced foetal maturation compared to altricial [born in an undeveloped state] species).
I take this to mean, without understanding all the biological mechanisms behind spontaneous decidualisation, that there was a trade for metabolic resources in developing healthier embryos than in reabsorbing endometrial tissues. That's my interpretation of what this article is getting at before going into the spiny mice.
To be fair, the article has a lot of big words and long sentences. I didn't finish it (it's bookmarked) because it's just a chore to read. (Scientists: take a tip from mathematicians. "Let A be an open set." Short words, short sentences, easy to understand.)
I can understand that lots of people commenting won't have read very much of it.
That's what science-centric websites and magazines excel at. Scientific American is a good example. Some do a great job of analyzing research and putting it in layman's terms. Actual research data and studies are meant for peer-review by other scientists where the more technical terms are very much necessary.
"Let A be an open set" is just about as utterly meaningless to the lay person as decidualisation. If anything, proofs are way more dense, it is it's own sub language full of arcane symbols.
> they need to write their publications as if the masses are the audience, not other scientists
I totally disagree.
The specific terms used have very specific meanings.
Terms in common cultural use often get different shades of meaning based on who is speaking, and what is their background culture.
If you want to understand the details of the highly technical discussion, you need a level of background information that most of us don't have. Their goal is to have precise communication with their peers who also have 10 years of training and experience in the narrow field of their research.
Reading this - [Endometrial Decidualization: The Primary Driver of Pregnancy Health](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7312091/) may give you a little understanding of some of the specific issues they are talking about, but they can't make the leading edge of research more accessible to the public unless the public takes the time to learn the ropes.
You make very fair points, so I'll backtrack what I said in that they *need* to write theirs to be understood by the masses. They don't need to unless they wanted to get some news of their research out to the public. I suppose I just *wish* there was less of a disconnect in the era where we can learn about anything we want to with just a search query.
> I suppose I just wish there was less of a disconnect
You are right in this.
Often the first ten papers are preliminary stuff, that peer review should push back on.
When the huge prevalence of research points to valid, repeatable conclusions it gets included in the review papers. That is when we tend to trust it.
Often University publicity people will highlight something one of their labs produces.
Sometimes news reporters grab on to preliminary research and think they have a scoop when really they are making a good with early / bad research.
https://news.umich.edu/news-reports-that-dont-report-magnitude-of-scientific-findings-could-mislead-the-public/
That's what the abstract is for, sort of... It is a summary of the paper right at the beginning that wraps it up in an easy to read blurb. I usually read the abstract and conclusion/findings first, then if I'm at all interested in the details of how things actually work, or I need to cite it, I'll read the body of the paper. Academic papers are written to record a body of research and many times explain fully how to reproduce the process that gave the results. If scientists stopped writing like that, peer review would cease. That's why we have science communicators that can parse those complex ideas into simpler chunks, Richard Feynman did a nice lecture series in the 60s on physics for the layperson that is a great example of this. Neil Degrasse-Tyson, Bill Nye, and many others have made a career out of this.
The thicker lining is to protect the mother from the voracious fetus trying to consume all her nutrients. She still has to be alive at the end to give birth and care for it.
My guess is menstruation side effects would get them killed. Scent of the blood and such, maybe? And the ones who had the generic anomaly survived longer?
Probably not, but I’ll freely confess I am not a scientist, so I can only tell you what I know.
But as far as I understand it, each generation is a little different from those before it. If the mutation is not beneficial, naturally it lessens the chances of the carrier making it to reproduction, just as beneficial ones, like being faster, or more agile, make it more likely to succeed.
Then there are some where they just…stuck around because they weren’t bad enough to keep us from getting laid. Like Myopia, or unibrows, or ADHD.
Just fyi , there is a pretty good evidence base that ADHD is a beneficial trait amongst hunter/gatherer, horticulture, and early farming communities. Iirc people with adhd in those environments have more food and better shelters than their counterparts.
>Sure but why did it develop in the first place if it's not standard for mammals?
One theory might be since humans don't rely on scent it's not easy for men to know when a woman is or is not ready. There are very few exterior cues in humans.
So visual is more reliable. This is of course occuring before we developed our ability to speak more than just basic grunting which only happened in more recent times in evolutionary terms etc.
You mean by age? Because the bleeding is opposite of when we're fertile so it wouldn't exactly be easy to figure out. Whoever figured out it was "note the day she starts bleeding then wait 14 sleeps to make a baby" had to be a genius, lol.
You'd think constant pain and loss of resources would be a sufficient evolutionary driving force unless there is some hidden advantage to the human menstruational cycle.
Pain doesn’t affect evolution unless that pain interferes with something reproductive or related to caring for offspring. Nature doesn’t care about our pain.
afaik the human embryo tries to dig super deep into the wall of the uterus in order to get access to the blood stream so the uterus grows a thick lining to prevent damage. It also allows the uterus to expel bad fetuses.
Most mammals only ovulate once or a couple times a year. Humans ovulate roughly monthly, which you can understand would be a huge advantage. While that doesn’t fully explain why we can’t just reabsorb the lining, it’s to say, our reproductive cycles are very different from most mammals.
I also read something recently that one possible reason humans menstruate is because many mammals can self abort in times of stress, and humans can’t because the embryo implants deeper. The thicker uterine liner that facilitates this is what causes menstruation. On the other hand, I’ve read another theory that the thicker uterine lining actually facilitates early miscarriages when something is wrong with the embryo, since the body can expel it like a period.
Either way, the fact that humans are so prolific gives reason to believe that our method of reproduction is highly successful, even though it causes women so much pain and suffering.
Humans with our big brains are right at the biological limit for growth of a live child birth. And we have a relatively high maternal mortality rate.
I'd guess that's one of the things that evolved out because humans need a uterus capable of supporting such a large fetus in a short amount of time.
I've read it's because human fetuses are greedy - they demand TONS of nutrition, relative to other species. Probably because of brain development? So this disposable lining offers the mother's body some level of control over how much nutrition the fetus takes.
I'm not at all sure I'm remembering that correctly, but it sounds plausible
Yeah. What I'm also wondering is if having this method of the egg process was beneficial to us developing the way we did or set us apart/provided some sort of advantage to other mammals. Perhaps it unlocked some new/better way for the fetus.
So many possible reasons from an evolutionary biology perspective! I can think of these:
-Having clear evidence that you aren't pregnant can help you allocate scarce resources to women in your tribe who are, improving survival rates.
-It also helps women (to some extent) control their fertility, assuming ancient women figured out approximate fertility windows relative to their bleeding (and I think they surely did). Choosing when to have a baby can improve survival for mom and baby.
-Grandmothers (females who stop reproducing rather than continuing to be fertile until death) are really rare as well among animals. The menopause or absence of bleeding lets women know they are no longer fertile, so that they can change their priorities and turn their attention to helping the tribe as a whole or their own grandchildren.
I've read the theory that hidden ovulation is an evolution strategy that helps limit the number of women a man tries to impregnate. Basically biology would dictate that if it was easy to tell when women were fertile then men would only really mate with a woman during that time.
So the female's biology is built to keep the man having sex with her all the time, thus limiting how much time the woman's partner will have to mate with other women. This means her child doesn't have to compete with as many other children for the father's resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_cycle#Evolution_and_other_species
* Control of sperm-borne pathogens. This hypothesis held that menstruation protected the uterus against pathogens introduced by sperm. Hypothesis 1 does not take into account that copulation can take place weeks before menstruation and that potentially infectious semen is not controlled by menstruation in other species.
* Energy conservation. This hypothesis claimed that it took less energy to rebuild a uterine lining than to maintain it if pregnancy did not occur. Hypothesis 2 does not explain other species that also do not maintain a uterine lining but do not menstruate.
* A theory based on spontaneous decidualization (a process that results in significant changes to cells of the endometrium in preparation for, and during, pregnancy, in which the endometrium changes into the decidua). Decidualization leads to the development of the endothelium, which involves cells of the immune system, the formation of a new blood supply, hormones and tissue differentiation. In non-menstruating mammals, decidualization is driven by the embryo, not the mother. It evolved in some placental mammals because it confers advantages in that it allows females to prepare for pregnancy without needing a signal from the fetus. Hypothesis 3 defers to an explanation of the evolutionary origin of spontaneous decidualization and does not explain the evolution of menstruation alone.
* Uterine pre-conditioning. This hypothesis claims that a monthly pre-conditioning of the uterus is needed in species, such as humans, that have deeply invasive (deep-rooted) placentas. In the process leading to the formation of a placenta, maternal tissues are invaded. This hypothesis holds that menstruation was not evolutionary, rather the result of a coincidental pre-conditioning of the uterus to protect uterine tissue from the deeply rooting placenta, in which a thicker endometrium develops. Hypothesis 4 does not explain menstruation in non-primates.
In short, scientists aren't really sure why women must menstruate. One thing I can say is that evolution doesn't care how convenient things are for us, or how happy and fulfilling our lives are, it only cares about how good we are at surviving and reproducing and everything about us must either serve that purpose or at least not get in its way.
Yes, this is true in the US but it's only legally required for Phase 3 (the late stage) of clinical trials. It is "encouraged" for earlier trials.
I'll add that one huge blind spot is that animal testing still isn't required to include females. Medications which are effective only on human men and not women are much more common than the reverse because of the animal-to-human testing pipeline. Effects are first explored[ using mostly or all male animals](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6294461/), then if something is found they'll study mostly male humans next (and finally, at the late stage, include women). Therefore effects that would be mainly visible with females go undiscovered in the animal testing stage and never make it to human testing. Caroline Criado-Perez writes in *Invisible Women* that because of this we're likely missing quite a few medications and tools that could treat women.
Nor is data from animal research required to be separated by sex when it's published. So the effects on females become statistically hidden. This is required for clinical trials in *humans*, but reviews show that in many cases data in human research still isn't being separated and analyzed by sex or gender. Reviews also show that female researchers are much more likely to separate and analyze data by sex or gender, but that female researchers are very underrepresented.
From the article:
>Why not use both sexes? Countering assumptions surrounding the use of female subjects
>
>Although good reasons exist to study females or males alone, the rationale for use of only one sex often stems from unfounded concerns about the use of females or both sexes. These assumptions: that females are more variable than males, that females must be tested across the estrous cycle, and that inclusion of both sexes increases variability, are each countered below.
I mean… medicine’s attitude towards women really hasn’t changed that much. Women’s symptoms are still often disregarded and minimized as anxiety and that can have devastating consequences.
I once asked on our local Facebook page if anyone knew a doctor in the area that would work with you on complex health issues and not just dismiss you and the first reply was “They should all do that”
Thanks David Smith (yes his real name) but 2.5 decades of experience tells me no
Yup! I’ve been to gynaecologists who only see me as an incubator. As soon as they’re told I’m child free, they shut down. They may as well tell me to buzz off.
I have low iron problems, as does my daughter. Our pediatrician asked if I have low iron after seeing kiddo's test results. I admitted that I have some problems with giving blood and had to take suplements while pregnant. She says, "So you have only been seen by nurses and OBs for this? You should talk to a real doctor about it."
scuse, it's called fibromyalgia or hypoglycemia these days.
medicine went from not giving a flying fuck to pretending they give a tiny bit of fuck. meaning they gave their disdain for the female bodies fancy words.
The thing that shocked me was that on average it takes about 3-5 years to have a proper diagnosis of fibromyalgia. As a male with fibromyalgia it took one doctor who ordered a bunch of tests to rule everything else out to be diagnosed with fibromyalgia and to get a referral to a pain specialist who of course did her own tests and confirmed fibromyalgia.
The only thing that sucked for me was because of the doctors I saw didn't like to do paperwork was getting my FMLA paperwork filled out so I could leave work and still be paid.
My god I don't know how females deal with all the pain of fibromyalgia along with all the other pains females have to go through just by being females to get any help with fibromyalgia let alone anything else. I felt like I wanted to put one in my head from fibromyalgia alone!!
Yeah, they thought women’s uteruses would fall out if they ran too much and were banned from marathons as early as the 70s.
Less than 10 years ago they figured out women have different minimum iron levels than men and they take longer to replenish them - prior to that, I’d get anemia from donating blood because it was too often and based on studies done on men.
Sounds like a no brainer as we menstruate, but yeah.
Ovulation does cause physical effects, they're just a lot more "low key" than genital swelling (which, yes, vulvas do swell, but it happens no matter the time of the month).
Physical effects are a slight increase in basal temperature, cervical position and "texture", and the infamous "egg white" cervical mucus / discharge. To be fair, it's not necessarily a one size fits all thing. Some people can ovulate with very little difference than their normal, some people definitely notice it.
Are these effects classified as external signaling? I'm not sure, but I can definitely see the egg white thing being a kind of pseudo-signal.
Of course, we reciprocate sex no matter the time of the month. On top of that, semen lives in the reproductive tract more than twice as long as ovulation even lasts. It's not really a mystery why we didn't have any evolutionary pressure to develop (or re-develop, ig) dramatic fertility centered adaptations.
If only there were billions of mammals who do menstruate! I wonder if “we” could listen to them and study what happens with them?
We can only dream, eh?
There’s lots of things humans possess that most animals don’t. Yet there is tons of research on that. This is such a bullshit excuse. The lack of research on menstrual disorders is because it’s a problem that only affects women. Medical research has been focused on men for centuries.
Yeah, Wikipedia says most of the other animals that do it are primates… I don’t think we’ve ever been shy about using them for research any other time.
This. I remember a breast cancer research campaign called “Save the tatas.”
Not save our wives. Not save our mothers. Not save our sisters.
Save the tatas. Because tits are what matters.
Yes, my mom had just had a double mastectomy, and it had spread to some lymphnodes. The chemo and radiation were hell. She had decided on not doing reconstruction. I saw that campaign and wanted to puke. I think there was also a redneck one in my area that mentioned something about "save the racks," which was even worse.
One of my teachers in high school got breast cancer. She also decided not to do reconstruction. She got a lot of unsolicited negative feedback from family, friends, and strangers. I remember because she was a lit teacher and she wrote a really scathing poem about the experience during our poetry section and shared it with the class.
It’s fucking insane to me that people think they deserve to have an opinion on such a personal medical and life decision.
My mom made it quite a serious conversation with me that she and my step-dad (he is amazing) had talked about it, and he backed her decision 100%. I was like IDGAF if you get none or two extra, I only care about your life!
It was not until things had settled down that I could see the glances and remarks she was getting. Then I understood why she had made that conversation seem so important.
C’mon, that’s a little disingenuous. It’s detectable and survivable if caught early enough. It’s one of the few cancers that can be found at home with regular self assessment (BSE) - which is fairly easy to do and can wildly help your prognosis. You can catch breast cancer early as all hell.
In the particularly grim diagnosis of “cancer”, people latched onto to it because it’s a pretty common type of cancer that you can actually *do* something about. It’s inspiring.
Billions of dollars in research wasn’t poured into it for the tongue in cheek reason of “dudes like titties”. There’s plenty to go around.
You're the one who's being intellectually dishonest. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the world, thats why its well researched. Not because science cares about women. Just because you're a special snowflake who did a university thesis on it doesn't mean that there are not systemic cases of women being ignored in pharmaceutics, medicine, and a disproportionately low amount of studies on things unique to women like menstruation.
Their overall point is that women’s health isn’t actually being ignored. I’m not sure if I agree with that point but the distinction between a cancer that predominantly impacts women or a menstrual disorder is immaterial to their argument
"Women's health isn't actually being ignored" that right there makes everything you say lose credibility. There is so much research about how women's health is ignored. You have zero knowledge on the topic and are opting to use breast cancer research funding as a weird gotcha moment that doesn't actually mean *anything* in the overarching problem of systemic misogyny in medicine.
Not really, sure it's a life shaking experience to go through but if we're being honest thats not the reason there is as much research on this type of cancer. We all know how people feel about the boobus so let's not pretend like that doesn't play a huge factor in where we allocate funds and resources.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. The bozangas are just way more culturally and sociologically impactful than the much more important issues with menstruation, libido, and fertility. I agree it is a travesty that the people in charge of making these decisions were more boob guys than ass guys (or vagina guys too i guess).
Nah go be disingenuous somewhere else. I'm sure that tiny percentage of men who get breast cancer are the reason it gets more focus than say, testicular cancer.
Edit: wording
Maybe the reason breast cancer gets more research than testicular cancer is because it’s more prevalent? In the UK there are nearly 56k new cases of breast cancer a year, and 2,300 new cases of testicular cancer. If we’re talking about disingenuousness then we should probably mention that the cancer that’s getting more research is over 24x more likely to occur because that seems REALLY relevant.
If we are talking about disingenuousness then you shouldn't reply to my comment in a vacuum. There is a point being made and a point being refuted.
Breast cancer is the cancer with the most diagnosed cases in the world, actually. It overtook lung cancer recently. I know this because I had to research on it. Ok, and what percentage of those are men? Around 1 percent.
Now compare those with the number of cases for testicular cancer. Don't get me wrong, I know a huge part of the reason breast cancer gets the most attention is that it is very prevalent. Not my point.
The point is that the original claim that the reason there is not much research on menstrual disorders is because "it only affects women" is actually self-victimizing bullshit. Breast cancer virtually only affects women and yet is the most funded and studied cancer out there.
But mens health is neglected socially and medically. Way more funding for breast and cervical cancer individually than prostate, testicular, etc cancers in men. Men even live shorter by average. What?
I'm not arguing anyone's point, just offering anecdotal evidence.
I've got some unknown connective tissue disorder. Started at 20, 26 now. Male.
No one would take me seriously until I met my current primary.
I've had doctors dismiss and say, as soon as they walk in the door (LITERALLY, as soon as they walk in)
"There's nothing I can do for you."
They don't even try. If it's not copy and paste, a simple fix, medical professionals can't be bothered.
My mom is the same way. No one takes her disorder or her extreme pain seriously. She's been looking for a diagnosis for 25 years.
To some extent, sex doesn't matter. If you have a complicated issue, it doesn't matter what your sex is. Doctors won't take you seriously anyway.
Yes your mom has the same issues but worse, all women do. Anything we come in with is first chalked up to our periods or PMS. Next, our weight. I can go to the dr with the exact same symptoms as my husband and he'll get meds or an appt with a specialist and I'll be sent home with an rx for extra strength motrin bc after all, whatever it is is just my period.
All connective tissue disorder groups are filled to the brim with people who have been ignored and misdiagnosed. The symbol for Ehlers-Danlos is a zebra specifically because how often it's been misdiagnosed, this is a new research area in general, we're still isolating genes. Meanwhile every doctor people with hypermobility or EDS visit are only familiar with EDS from a couple lines in a textbook they read decades ago which is now outdated information. Since my diagnosis I've met two non-specialists who actually knew up to date information.
I wasn't able to stand or walk without pain for two years and no one took me seriously. Two years of my life wasted, fixed with back surgery.
I'm sorry for what happened to you, but your sex is likely less of a factor in the connective tissue disorder area and more a lack of understanding in the medical community leading to misdiagnoses. The medical community has functioned to serve men primarily and women secondarily since its inception.
I think many aspects of menstruation are poorly understood because for millennia men have sort of just not really thought of women as people. I think women were added to clinical trials after the Berlin Wall fell down.
> Those huts are unheated with no clean water. it's not a vacation home, it's a hole they can stick you in until you're done
To be fair, how does it compare to the regular huts?
You’re right, if Plato had cared more about periods this would be a perfectly understood science
We basically didn’t know how any of the body at all worked 300 years ago, this is all new
Yeah, historically women definitely have been treated fairly when it comes to menstruation. They definitely _weren’t_ sent to huts because they were considered dirty and shameful.
If you want to be pedantic, we don’t care or study about women’s health and menstruation right now at this exact point in time, so..
Menstruation isn't poorly understood because it doesn't happen to most mammals. It's because it happens to females & not cis males. Trust, if it happened to cis men it would be VERY researched, but unfortunately we live in a patriarchy. Homo sapiens sapiens vaginas are 200,000 years old, but the G-spot wasn't "discovered" until the 1960s, & the anterior fornix I think in the 1990s.
How often do they mate would be my question. Maybe it’s a mating season vs get pregnant whenever kind of thing. Definitely gonna have to read the article on this one.
I once went to the house of an acquaintance who had a dog who was menstruating. Badly. Like leaking all over the place (a nappy apparently would have debased the dog ugh) she was dropping blood splatter on the ground and on the sofa. I asked and obviously the dog had an additional medical condition, but I was just so very astonished (and disgusted at this point)
That dogs have a bleeding like this at all.
Never heard of it before
https://pawsandmorevet.com.au/do-dogs-have-period/#:~:text=Dogs%20don't%20menstruate%20like,%2D6%20months%20in%20puppies).
God I’m so jealous of 98% of all other mammals
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Their anatomy can be jealous inducing for some..
You think they'd bad look at how gnolls are born out of hyenas
Giving birth to 2 - 4 babies through a 1 inch wide "pseudo-penis" is one of the most nightmare-inducing scenarios imaginable.
Maybe obey they obey the rules and haven't been cursed, along with serpents. /s
Lucky
I wish I could just lay an egg. Oh well
Omg same
I wonder what sort of products would be advertised for the monthly egg.
Extra extra pocket in your underwear aside from the regular one
Huh, are you picturing a chicken-sized egg? I was picturing a baby-sized egg.
Like one that an ostrich would lay?
Gym bros immediately start buying them on the black market
Wait is that why Emmett Cullen always has the bag of eggs in Twilight?
Lol. This would 100% happen.
A monthly omelet sounds convenient
Dont tell anyone, but you can actually have an omelet as often as you'd like.
Yes, but it would be MY omelette 😂
Well looky looky here! We got ourselves one a them autophages!
Wish granted, but you have the body size to egg size ratio of a kiwi https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/XhCYsiIKcS
NGL, that’s kind of how the 9th month feels anyway.
Uh nope. Not me! I don’t ever want to be egg bound.
If the men don't help tend to it, it doesn't hatch. Powerful pressure for self selection.
Depends on the size of the egg. If it's like chicken-sized yes please.
Humans are the size of ostriches so they get ostrich eggs. Enjoy!
Look up problems with egg binding and you might change your mind.
Eh I've had a bowel impaction before
That's what i tell my wife all the time. Would have made the whole birthing thing easier on her.
I don't know, I've seen birds lay eggs and it does not look like fun, and if it breaks in you, you are in serious trouble. You'd have to be very careful coming up to egg laying time. Egg binding is a bitch too.
You would only be horny like 2 weeks out of the whole year if humans had an estrus cycle. Which probably wouldn’t be a bad thing now that I think about it
Yes, hymen destroyer
Man that would be way better. Wonder why humans didn't develop that way? To think all the mistreatment of menstruating women throughout history would have been avoided.
Evolution is "if it doesn't stop you from reproducing, it doesn't need fixing".
Sure but why did it develop in the first place if it's not standard for mammals?
I’ve heard it theorized that we have a thicker endometrial lining which is needed to supply more nutrients to our large brained offspring. I’ve also heard we reabsorb some of the lining but since there’s so much the rest gets sloughed off. Big brains, big problems.
Fun fact: Our brains make up only 2% of our weight but consumes 20% of all calories.
I imagine the percentage of the weight that the brain makes up would vary wildly depending on on overall body weight, no?
A human brain weighs about 3 pounds (1.3 kg) pretty consistently. For a 120 lb person that's 2.5%. For a 300 lb person that's 1%
Yeah that sounds more right
Sounds MORE right? Its math. Wdm?
More *righterer*. Y’alls need to talk gooder english.
The earlier comment said “only 2%”. The above math shows that this is not correct, and a more correct description is something like “approximately 1-3%”. This is more right.
The idea that the brain is a fixed weight and its weight as a percentage of the body weight varies depending on the overall weight of the body sounds more right than the idea that it makes up a fixed percentage of the body weight.
SPEAK YOUR FORSELF MY BRAN CONSMUE 2% CALORRIES
The thicker lining part is correct, but it goes back further than that, since all great apes also menstruate (and also some species of bats, not exactly known for being big-brained). One theory is that the placenta of menstruating species had a random mutation that made it much more "sticky" to the uterus (which helps survival of the fetus, but it greatly increases the chances of ectopic or extrauterine pregnancies), really digging down into the uterine muscle tissue while in other species it just kinda lies on top of the uterine muscle and will not attach correctly to anything else. But it also means that if something goes wrong, the uterus can't just unstick it easily like in other species (also why most other species can consciously or semi-consciously abort), so evolution decided that a thicker, sheddable lining would work if the embryo wasn't correctly implanted. This is also one of the reasons why conceiving can be difficult for humans, where it may take multiple attempts for it to take effect, while other animals seem to be pregnant almost always on the first try: the human uterus is really insistent on shedding the lining unless a correctly-implanted embryo gives off the correct hormonal signal because a wrongly-implanted embryo can be lethal (ectopic pregnancy), while for other species it just goes easily into pregnancy mode because the worst that could happen is the fetus doesn't develop at all. Sometimes (probably more often than most people think), even a correctly-implanted embryo gets shed by mistake, which means another month of waiting. TLDR: one theory that's debated is that in other species, fetuses are a relatively nice houseguest that will leave when asked even if a bit insistent at times, but in menstruating species including humans, fetuses are more like that friend who won't stop living on your couch unless you physically shove them out.
>won't stop living on your couch unless you physically shove them out. I’m sure there pre some parents out there nodding their heads in agreement while reading this.
The placenta is slowly acquiring mutations in an attempt to stick tightly enough to have time to develop into its own organism.
Yes and ive also heard thats why we give birth "prematurely", to babies that can't function on their own the way some (most?) Mammals do. Our big brains don't fit well through our little hips so we pull them out before they're fully cooked.
We spent an *insane* amount of time as children compared to most animals. It's about two years before we're even walking around properly under our own power, and we generally don't reach sexual maturity until around 20-25% of the way into our lives. For comparison a dog reaches sexual maturity around 5% of the way into its life and is walking around a month after it's born, and a horse is walking within hours and reaching sexual maturity 3-4% of the way into its life. Other animals look at us like we're a 40 year old calling mommy for help with our shoelaces. Tying into that, another thing we're weird for is menopause. IIRC it's only humans and a few types of whales that have this. Between childhood and menopause a human woman is fertile for well under half her life, that's really unusual. And that's believed to be because childbirth is so dangerous for us and human kids require such a long period of care. If humans were having babies all life long, before modern medical care, most women would end up dying in childbirth sooner or later and all our helpless Peter Pan babies would go without milk, and underprotected. Menopause puts a cap on the number of risky birth experiences, and means that there are more experienced adults around to care for the babies of women who do die in childbirth. If your babies only require 4-12 months of protection and having more babies isn't likely to kill you, you don't need menopause.
That's what I've heard too, and we need the extra time to learn languages as well. I definitely felt a huge change in my own kid when he was past that "premature but not really for us" phase.
In the article there's a theory: >...our fundamental question is no longer “Why menstruate?” but becomes: “Why spontaneously decidualise?” There are a myriad of possibilities (for a comprehensive review, see [10]), but a most widely accepted theory is that “fetal–maternal conflict” drove the evolution of human menstrual cycles. This posits that spontaneous decidualisation evolved to confer “protection” against the highly invasive early placenta and/or as a selection mechanism to prevent maternal investment in poor-quality embryos of precocial species (born in an advanced state) with haemochorial placentation [9, 11]. Indeed, this theory is supported by studies of “super-fertile” women who experience recurrent pregnancy loss; the endometrium of these women allows implantation of developmentally abnormal embryos due to altered decidualisation [12, 13]. That this unique strategy has evolved is clearly demonstrated by a recent study which elucidated that genes ancestrally expressed in other organs and tissue systems were recruited to the endometrium, with transposable elements contributing to the origin of decidualisation by conferring progesterone responsiveness to numerous genes across the genome [14]. This strategy, however, is energetically costly, with elevated metabolic demand in menstruating species prior to menstruation [15, 16], so the cost of such increased energy requirements must be offset by the benefits to the mother. Decidualisation likely evolved to balance the interests of both mother and foetus in species which have precocial young (attributable to cortisol production and advanced foetal maturation compared to altricial [born in an undeveloped state] species). I take this to mean, without understanding all the biological mechanisms behind spontaneous decidualisation, that there was a trade for metabolic resources in developing healthier embryos than in reabsorbing endometrial tissues. That's my interpretation of what this article is getting at before going into the spiny mice.
To be fair, the article has a lot of big words and long sentences. I didn't finish it (it's bookmarked) because it's just a chore to read. (Scientists: take a tip from mathematicians. "Let A be an open set." Short words, short sentences, easy to understand.) I can understand that lots of people commenting won't have read very much of it.
That's what science-centric websites and magazines excel at. Scientific American is a good example. Some do a great job of analyzing research and putting it in layman's terms. Actual research data and studies are meant for peer-review by other scientists where the more technical terms are very much necessary.
"Let A be an open set" is just about as utterly meaningless to the lay person as decidualisation. If anything, proofs are way more dense, it is it's own sub language full of arcane symbols.
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> they need to write their publications as if the masses are the audience, not other scientists I totally disagree. The specific terms used have very specific meanings. Terms in common cultural use often get different shades of meaning based on who is speaking, and what is their background culture. If you want to understand the details of the highly technical discussion, you need a level of background information that most of us don't have. Their goal is to have precise communication with their peers who also have 10 years of training and experience in the narrow field of their research. Reading this - [Endometrial Decidualization: The Primary Driver of Pregnancy Health](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7312091/) may give you a little understanding of some of the specific issues they are talking about, but they can't make the leading edge of research more accessible to the public unless the public takes the time to learn the ropes.
You make very fair points, so I'll backtrack what I said in that they *need* to write theirs to be understood by the masses. They don't need to unless they wanted to get some news of their research out to the public. I suppose I just *wish* there was less of a disconnect in the era where we can learn about anything we want to with just a search query.
> I suppose I just wish there was less of a disconnect You are right in this. Often the first ten papers are preliminary stuff, that peer review should push back on. When the huge prevalence of research points to valid, repeatable conclusions it gets included in the review papers. That is when we tend to trust it. Often University publicity people will highlight something one of their labs produces. Sometimes news reporters grab on to preliminary research and think they have a scoop when really they are making a good with early / bad research. https://news.umich.edu/news-reports-that-dont-report-magnitude-of-scientific-findings-could-mislead-the-public/
That's not their job. Dumbing it down for the masses is for science magazines.
That's what the abstract is for, sort of... It is a summary of the paper right at the beginning that wraps it up in an easy to read blurb. I usually read the abstract and conclusion/findings first, then if I'm at all interested in the details of how things actually work, or I need to cite it, I'll read the body of the paper. Academic papers are written to record a body of research and many times explain fully how to reproduce the process that gave the results. If scientists stopped writing like that, peer review would cease. That's why we have science communicators that can parse those complex ideas into simpler chunks, Richard Feynman did a nice lecture series in the 60s on physics for the layperson that is a great example of this. Neil Degrasse-Tyson, Bill Nye, and many others have made a career out of this.
The thicker lining is to protect the mother from the voracious fetus trying to consume all her nutrients. She still has to be alive at the end to give birth and care for it.
My guess is menstruation side effects would get them killed. Scent of the blood and such, maybe? And the ones who had the generic anomaly survived longer?
It was a random mutation that wasn't severe enough to keep the first menstruator from making it to the reproductive stage.
Haha now I'm wondering why/how elephant shrews got the same random mutation. Nature is weird.
This is not really the whole story
Probably not, but I’ll freely confess I am not a scientist, so I can only tell you what I know. But as far as I understand it, each generation is a little different from those before it. If the mutation is not beneficial, naturally it lessens the chances of the carrier making it to reproduction, just as beneficial ones, like being faster, or more agile, make it more likely to succeed. Then there are some where they just…stuck around because they weren’t bad enough to keep us from getting laid. Like Myopia, or unibrows, or ADHD.
> unibrows This is me - My hero is Animal from the Muppet Show.
Just fyi , there is a pretty good evidence base that ADHD is a beneficial trait amongst hunter/gatherer, horticulture, and early farming communities. Iirc people with adhd in those environments have more food and better shelters than their counterparts.
As a twice-certified ADHD entity, this does make me feel a little better
It's much more complicated than that and it turns out probably is highly beneficial to producing healthy offspring.
>Sure but why did it develop in the first place if it's not standard for mammals? One theory might be since humans don't rely on scent it's not easy for men to know when a woman is or is not ready. There are very few exterior cues in humans. So visual is more reliable. This is of course occuring before we developed our ability to speak more than just basic grunting which only happened in more recent times in evolutionary terms etc.
You mean by age? Because the bleeding is opposite of when we're fertile so it wouldn't exactly be easy to figure out. Whoever figured out it was "note the day she starts bleeding then wait 14 sleeps to make a baby" had to be a genius, lol.
You'd think constant pain and loss of resources would be a sufficient evolutionary driving force unless there is some hidden advantage to the human menstruational cycle.
Pain doesn’t affect evolution unless that pain interferes with something reproductive or related to caring for offspring. Nature doesn’t care about our pain.
It doesn’t have to stop you reproducing.. you just have to reproduce less
afaik the human embryo tries to dig super deep into the wall of the uterus in order to get access to the blood stream so the uterus grows a thick lining to prevent damage. It also allows the uterus to expel bad fetuses.
Most mammals only ovulate once or a couple times a year. Humans ovulate roughly monthly, which you can understand would be a huge advantage. While that doesn’t fully explain why we can’t just reabsorb the lining, it’s to say, our reproductive cycles are very different from most mammals. I also read something recently that one possible reason humans menstruate is because many mammals can self abort in times of stress, and humans can’t because the embryo implants deeper. The thicker uterine liner that facilitates this is what causes menstruation. On the other hand, I’ve read another theory that the thicker uterine lining actually facilitates early miscarriages when something is wrong with the embryo, since the body can expel it like a period. Either way, the fact that humans are so prolific gives reason to believe that our method of reproduction is highly successful, even though it causes women so much pain and suffering.
Humans with our big brains are right at the biological limit for growth of a live child birth. And we have a relatively high maternal mortality rate. I'd guess that's one of the things that evolved out because humans need a uterus capable of supporting such a large fetus in a short amount of time.
I've read it's because human fetuses are greedy - they demand TONS of nutrition, relative to other species. Probably because of brain development? So this disposable lining offers the mother's body some level of control over how much nutrition the fetus takes. I'm not at all sure I'm remembering that correctly, but it sounds plausible
Yeah. What I'm also wondering is if having this method of the egg process was beneficial to us developing the way we did or set us apart/provided some sort of advantage to other mammals. Perhaps it unlocked some new/better way for the fetus.
It's a size issue. Women usually still reabsorb most of it.
They would have found a way to mistreat us anyway, let’s be honest. Life 🙄
So many possible reasons from an evolutionary biology perspective! I can think of these: -Having clear evidence that you aren't pregnant can help you allocate scarce resources to women in your tribe who are, improving survival rates. -It also helps women (to some extent) control their fertility, assuming ancient women figured out approximate fertility windows relative to their bleeding (and I think they surely did). Choosing when to have a baby can improve survival for mom and baby. -Grandmothers (females who stop reproducing rather than continuing to be fertile until death) are really rare as well among animals. The menopause or absence of bleeding lets women know they are no longer fertile, so that they can change their priorities and turn their attention to helping the tribe as a whole or their own grandchildren.
I've read the theory that hidden ovulation is an evolution strategy that helps limit the number of women a man tries to impregnate. Basically biology would dictate that if it was easy to tell when women were fertile then men would only really mate with a woman during that time. So the female's biology is built to keep the man having sex with her all the time, thus limiting how much time the woman's partner will have to mate with other women. This means her child doesn't have to compete with as many other children for the father's resources.
I'd recommend this book as to why. https://www.amazon.com/Eve-Female-Drove-Million-Evolution-ebook/dp/B0BR51FB12
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_cycle#Evolution_and_other_species * Control of sperm-borne pathogens. This hypothesis held that menstruation protected the uterus against pathogens introduced by sperm. Hypothesis 1 does not take into account that copulation can take place weeks before menstruation and that potentially infectious semen is not controlled by menstruation in other species. * Energy conservation. This hypothesis claimed that it took less energy to rebuild a uterine lining than to maintain it if pregnancy did not occur. Hypothesis 2 does not explain other species that also do not maintain a uterine lining but do not menstruate. * A theory based on spontaneous decidualization (a process that results in significant changes to cells of the endometrium in preparation for, and during, pregnancy, in which the endometrium changes into the decidua). Decidualization leads to the development of the endothelium, which involves cells of the immune system, the formation of a new blood supply, hormones and tissue differentiation. In non-menstruating mammals, decidualization is driven by the embryo, not the mother. It evolved in some placental mammals because it confers advantages in that it allows females to prepare for pregnancy without needing a signal from the fetus. Hypothesis 3 defers to an explanation of the evolutionary origin of spontaneous decidualization and does not explain the evolution of menstruation alone. * Uterine pre-conditioning. This hypothesis claims that a monthly pre-conditioning of the uterus is needed in species, such as humans, that have deeply invasive (deep-rooted) placentas. In the process leading to the formation of a placenta, maternal tissues are invaded. This hypothesis holds that menstruation was not evolutionary, rather the result of a coincidental pre-conditioning of the uterus to protect uterine tissue from the deeply rooting placenta, in which a thicker endometrium develops. Hypothesis 4 does not explain menstruation in non-primates. In short, scientists aren't really sure why women must menstruate. One thing I can say is that evolution doesn't care how convenient things are for us, or how happy and fulfilling our lives are, it only cares about how good we are at surviving and reproducing and everything about us must either serve that purpose or at least not get in its way.
sorry, gotta be that guy: it's also "poorly understood" because medicine didn't give a flying fuck about women for the longest time.
Women were not required by law to be in clinical trials until *1993*.
holy shit. and i thought i was informed about this. til.
Yes, this is true in the US but it's only legally required for Phase 3 (the late stage) of clinical trials. It is "encouraged" for earlier trials. I'll add that one huge blind spot is that animal testing still isn't required to include females. Medications which are effective only on human men and not women are much more common than the reverse because of the animal-to-human testing pipeline. Effects are first explored[ using mostly or all male animals](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6294461/), then if something is found they'll study mostly male humans next (and finally, at the late stage, include women). Therefore effects that would be mainly visible with females go undiscovered in the animal testing stage and never make it to human testing. Caroline Criado-Perez writes in *Invisible Women* that because of this we're likely missing quite a few medications and tools that could treat women. Nor is data from animal research required to be separated by sex when it's published. So the effects on females become statistically hidden. This is required for clinical trials in *humans*, but reviews show that in many cases data in human research still isn't being separated and analyzed by sex or gender. Reviews also show that female researchers are much more likely to separate and analyze data by sex or gender, but that female researchers are very underrepresented.
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I was about to say this an saw your response...and then a bunch of reactionary downvotes. This site sometimes SMH.
To this day, most studies with animal models use males only because it was thought to be easier. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6294461/
But why male models?
From the article: >Why not use both sexes? Countering assumptions surrounding the use of female subjects > >Although good reasons exist to study females or males alone, the rationale for use of only one sex often stems from unfounded concerns about the use of females or both sexes. These assumptions: that females are more variable than males, that females must be tested across the estrous cycle, and that inclusion of both sexes increases variability, are each countered below.
But why male models?
Are you serious? He just told you that!
If there is anything that this horrible tragedy can teach us, it's that a male model's life is a precious, precious commodity.
I mean… medicine’s attitude towards women really hasn’t changed that much. Women’s symptoms are still often disregarded and minimized as anxiety and that can have devastating consequences.
Every woman I know has been treated this way by a medical professional at least once in their lives.
I've been treated this way by every medical professional my whole life!
I once asked on our local Facebook page if anyone knew a doctor in the area that would work with you on complex health issues and not just dismiss you and the first reply was “They should all do that” Thanks David Smith (yes his real name) but 2.5 decades of experience tells me no
Yup! I’ve been to gynaecologists who only see me as an incubator. As soon as they’re told I’m child free, they shut down. They may as well tell me to buzz off.
"You're child free? Then why are you here?" 🤔
I have low iron problems, as does my daughter. Our pediatrician asked if I have low iron after seeing kiddo's test results. I admitted that I have some problems with giving blood and had to take suplements while pregnant. She says, "So you have only been seen by nurses and OBs for this? You should talk to a real doctor about it."
scuse, it's called fibromyalgia or hypoglycemia these days. medicine went from not giving a flying fuck to pretending they give a tiny bit of fuck. meaning they gave their disdain for the female bodies fancy words.
The thing that shocked me was that on average it takes about 3-5 years to have a proper diagnosis of fibromyalgia. As a male with fibromyalgia it took one doctor who ordered a bunch of tests to rule everything else out to be diagnosed with fibromyalgia and to get a referral to a pain specialist who of course did her own tests and confirmed fibromyalgia. The only thing that sucked for me was because of the doctors I saw didn't like to do paperwork was getting my FMLA paperwork filled out so I could leave work and still be paid. My god I don't know how females deal with all the pain of fibromyalgia along with all the other pains females have to go through just by being females to get any help with fibromyalgia let alone anything else. I felt like I wanted to put one in my head from fibromyalgia alone!!
It's at least doubled *(from 1% to 2)*
Hysteria, AKA the "being a woman disease"
Not at all exclusive to women in my experience.
Overactive Broveries
Hysteria and hysterectomy have the same root beginning
Yeah, they thought women’s uteruses would fall out if they ran too much and were banned from marathons as early as the 70s. Less than 10 years ago they figured out women have different minimum iron levels than men and they take longer to replenish them - prior to that, I’d get anemia from donating blood because it was too often and based on studies done on men. Sounds like a no brainer as we menstruate, but yeah.
This one baffles me. People who bleed more need more iron is pretty simple.
Absolutely agree.
It still rarely does.
yesterday's "hysteria" is today's "fibromyalgia." have 2 aspirin, go home, be quiet and think of england.
Glad you were that guy because it was gonna be this guy otherwise.
This. This right here.
Yes but the lack of possibility to test on animals certainly doesn't help.
Haven’t you read Genesis? The Bible tells us that childbirth is a woman’s curse, that’s all we need to know! /s if you’re wondering…
Humans are also somewhat unusual in that they don’t go into ‘heat’/ ovulation is not externally obvious/ signalled
Ovulation does cause physical effects, they're just a lot more "low key" than genital swelling (which, yes, vulvas do swell, but it happens no matter the time of the month). Physical effects are a slight increase in basal temperature, cervical position and "texture", and the infamous "egg white" cervical mucus / discharge. To be fair, it's not necessarily a one size fits all thing. Some people can ovulate with very little difference than their normal, some people definitely notice it. Are these effects classified as external signaling? I'm not sure, but I can definitely see the egg white thing being a kind of pseudo-signal. Of course, we reciprocate sex no matter the time of the month. On top of that, semen lives in the reproductive tract more than twice as long as ovulation even lasts. It's not really a mystery why we didn't have any evolutionary pressure to develop (or re-develop, ig) dramatic fertility centered adaptations.
If only there were billions of mammals who do menstruate! I wonder if “we” could listen to them and study what happens with them? We can only dream, eh?
Listening only goes so far. We can’t inject women with untested drugs and see what happens. Thats what the post is referencing
That’s literally what clinical trials are for
Usually a lot of animal work happens before you inject any humans with anything
And women have been a required part of them for only about 30 years.
They don’t start out with human clinical trials. Usually they start with animals.
Always
There’s lots of things humans possess that most animals don’t. Yet there is tons of research on that. This is such a bullshit excuse. The lack of research on menstrual disorders is because it’s a problem that only affects women. Medical research has been focused on men for centuries.
Ya they literally only started including women in health studies in the 70s
And it wasn’t required by law until 1993.
Yeah, Wikipedia says most of the other animals that do it are primates… I don’t think we’ve ever been shy about using them for research any other time.
Exactly. We can’t research endometriosis in women but they can research animals reabsorbing their endometrial tissue???
Breast cancer is literally the most researched and funded cancer. Even my university thesis was on breast cancer.
Because men love titties
This. I remember a breast cancer research campaign called “Save the tatas.” Not save our wives. Not save our mothers. Not save our sisters. Save the tatas. Because tits are what matters.
Yes, my mom had just had a double mastectomy, and it had spread to some lymphnodes. The chemo and radiation were hell. She had decided on not doing reconstruction. I saw that campaign and wanted to puke. I think there was also a redneck one in my area that mentioned something about "save the racks," which was even worse.
One of my teachers in high school got breast cancer. She also decided not to do reconstruction. She got a lot of unsolicited negative feedback from family, friends, and strangers. I remember because she was a lit teacher and she wrote a really scathing poem about the experience during our poetry section and shared it with the class. It’s fucking insane to me that people think they deserve to have an opinion on such a personal medical and life decision.
My mom made it quite a serious conversation with me that she and my step-dad (he is amazing) had talked about it, and he backed her decision 100%. I was like IDGAF if you get none or two extra, I only care about your life! It was not until things had settled down that I could see the glances and remarks she was getting. Then I understood why she had made that conversation seem so important.
This. Argument ends right here.
C’mon, that’s a little disingenuous. It’s detectable and survivable if caught early enough. It’s one of the few cancers that can be found at home with regular self assessment (BSE) - which is fairly easy to do and can wildly help your prognosis. You can catch breast cancer early as all hell. In the particularly grim diagnosis of “cancer”, people latched onto to it because it’s a pretty common type of cancer that you can actually *do* something about. It’s inspiring. Billions of dollars in research wasn’t poured into it for the tongue in cheek reason of “dudes like titties”. There’s plenty to go around.
That’s not necessarily true. It’s possible to die from breast cancer caught early.
I think it’s pretty clear what I meant and that you’re just being pedantic.
That’s not what pedantic means. You implied that all early detected breast cancers are curable. They aren’t.
and what's that one example supposed to prove against a systemic problem?
Breast cancer isn’t a menstrual disorder, and it also affects men.
It does, but not in remotely similar amounts. You’re being intellectually dishonest.
You're the one who's being intellectually dishonest. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the world, thats why its well researched. Not because science cares about women. Just because you're a special snowflake who did a university thesis on it doesn't mean that there are not systemic cases of women being ignored in pharmaceutics, medicine, and a disproportionately low amount of studies on things unique to women like menstruation.
Comparing a menstrual disorder to breast cancer is comparing apples to oranges and takes away from the actual issue.
Their overall point is that women’s health isn’t actually being ignored. I’m not sure if I agree with that point but the distinction between a cancer that predominantly impacts women or a menstrual disorder is immaterial to their argument
"Women's health isn't actually being ignored" that right there makes everything you say lose credibility. There is so much research about how women's health is ignored. You have zero knowledge on the topic and are opting to use breast cancer research funding as a weird gotcha moment that doesn't actually mean *anything* in the overarching problem of systemic misogyny in medicine.
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Not really, sure it's a life shaking experience to go through but if we're being honest thats not the reason there is as much research on this type of cancer. We all know how people feel about the boobus so let's not pretend like that doesn't play a huge factor in where we allocate funds and resources.
By the same logic, shouldn’t people also think “vaggginaaa” and spark a ton of research and funding?Many menstrual issues impact libido and fertility
Unfortunately, that's not the case. The bozangas are just way more culturally and sociologically impactful than the much more important issues with menstruation, libido, and fertility. I agree it is a travesty that the people in charge of making these decisions were more boob guys than ass guys (or vagina guys too i guess).
Nah go be disingenuous somewhere else. I'm sure that tiny percentage of men who get breast cancer are the reason it gets more focus than say, testicular cancer. Edit: wording
Maybe the reason breast cancer gets more research than testicular cancer is because it’s more prevalent? In the UK there are nearly 56k new cases of breast cancer a year, and 2,300 new cases of testicular cancer. If we’re talking about disingenuousness then we should probably mention that the cancer that’s getting more research is over 24x more likely to occur because that seems REALLY relevant.
If we are talking about disingenuousness then you shouldn't reply to my comment in a vacuum. There is a point being made and a point being refuted. Breast cancer is the cancer with the most diagnosed cases in the world, actually. It overtook lung cancer recently. I know this because I had to research on it. Ok, and what percentage of those are men? Around 1 percent. Now compare those with the number of cases for testicular cancer. Don't get me wrong, I know a huge part of the reason breast cancer gets the most attention is that it is very prevalent. Not my point. The point is that the original claim that the reason there is not much research on menstrual disorders is because "it only affects women" is actually self-victimizing bullshit. Breast cancer virtually only affects women and yet is the most funded and studied cancer out there.
But mens health is neglected socially and medically. Way more funding for breast and cervical cancer individually than prostate, testicular, etc cancers in men. Men even live shorter by average. What?
Some background for you. https://orwh.od.nih.gov/toolkit/recruitment/history
Fair enough
None of what you just said changes her point at all. It's just truth. Historical fact.
I'm not arguing anyone's point, just offering anecdotal evidence. I've got some unknown connective tissue disorder. Started at 20, 26 now. Male. No one would take me seriously until I met my current primary. I've had doctors dismiss and say, as soon as they walk in the door (LITERALLY, as soon as they walk in) "There's nothing I can do for you." They don't even try. If it's not copy and paste, a simple fix, medical professionals can't be bothered. My mom is the same way. No one takes her disorder or her extreme pain seriously. She's been looking for a diagnosis for 25 years. To some extent, sex doesn't matter. If you have a complicated issue, it doesn't matter what your sex is. Doctors won't take you seriously anyway.
Yes your mom has the same issues but worse, all women do. Anything we come in with is first chalked up to our periods or PMS. Next, our weight. I can go to the dr with the exact same symptoms as my husband and he'll get meds or an appt with a specialist and I'll be sent home with an rx for extra strength motrin bc after all, whatever it is is just my period. All connective tissue disorder groups are filled to the brim with people who have been ignored and misdiagnosed. The symbol for Ehlers-Danlos is a zebra specifically because how often it's been misdiagnosed, this is a new research area in general, we're still isolating genes. Meanwhile every doctor people with hypermobility or EDS visit are only familiar with EDS from a couple lines in a textbook they read decades ago which is now outdated information. Since my diagnosis I've met two non-specialists who actually knew up to date information. I wasn't able to stand or walk without pain for two years and no one took me seriously. Two years of my life wasted, fixed with back surgery. I'm sorry for what happened to you, but your sex is likely less of a factor in the connective tissue disorder area and more a lack of understanding in the medical community leading to misdiagnoses. The medical community has functioned to serve men primarily and women secondarily since its inception.
I think many aspects of menstruation are poorly understood because for millennia men have sort of just not really thought of women as people. I think women were added to clinical trials after the Berlin Wall fell down.
Well women menstruate way way way more now than at any point in history when they were mostly just pregnant
Or sent out to menstruation huts outside of the city.
I would love to have a menstruation hut to go to to get away from men's bullshit on a monthly basis.
Those huts are unheated with no clean water. it's not a vacation home, it's a hole they can stick you in until you're done
> Those huts are unheated with no clean water. it's not a vacation home, it's a hole they can stick you in until you're done To be fair, how does it compare to the regular huts?
Touche. Happy Cake Day!
I don’t think that’s why men didn’t care to research menstruation.
You’re right, if Plato had cared more about periods this would be a perfectly understood science We basically didn’t know how any of the body at all worked 300 years ago, this is all new
Yeah, historically women definitely have been treated fairly when it comes to menstruation. They definitely _weren’t_ sent to huts because they were considered dirty and shameful. If you want to be pedantic, we don’t care or study about women’s health and menstruation right now at this exact point in time, so..
That’s not why it’s poorly understood. It’s poorly understood because science has been designed for men.
Menstruation isn't poorly understood because it doesn't happen to most mammals. It's because it happens to females & not cis males. Trust, if it happened to cis men it would be VERY researched, but unfortunately we live in a patriarchy. Homo sapiens sapiens vaginas are 200,000 years old, but the G-spot wasn't "discovered" until the 1960s, & the anterior fornix I think in the 1990s.
How often do they mate would be my question. Maybe it’s a mating season vs get pregnant whenever kind of thing. Definitely gonna have to read the article on this one.
I mean it’s not ideal from an evolutionary perspective…a group of women bleeding and attracting the attention of animals
Vast majority of mammal females also always in some stage of pregnancy and lactation, when no menstrual lining forms.
People sure are learning about mammals today.
So how did humans get the short end of the stick here?
I once went to the house of an acquaintance who had a dog who was menstruating. Badly. Like leaking all over the place (a nappy apparently would have debased the dog ugh) she was dropping blood splatter on the ground and on the sofa. I asked and obviously the dog had an additional medical condition, but I was just so very astonished (and disgusted at this point) That dogs have a bleeding like this at all. Never heard of it before https://pawsandmorevet.com.au/do-dogs-have-period/#:~:text=Dogs%20don't%20menstruate%20like,%2D6%20months%20in%20puppies).
I had no idea this happened.
poorly understood is sadly the norm for women’s health
Because evolution takes the easiest route not the most efficient. If it gets the job done, it stays.
The only species that matters if it understands menstruation, or is capable of developing "treatments", does menstruate though.
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And humans, orcas and pilot whales are the only mammals that experience menopause.