To think periods are a terrible design flaw in the human race

[CrumpledCrumpet]

Humans are quite remarkably cleverly designed creatures. Binocular vision, opposable thumbs, walking upright - we’ve got it all going on. But honestly, who came up with periods?

AIBU to think this is a massive design fault and someone needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with something better?

@JCWildWest

Also echo other posts on mortality of childbirth. I'd of defo died having my DD and her too if it wasn't for modern medicine. It's like we aren't designed to reproduce very effectively

I don't know if I would have done but I might well have had a nasty infection which could have carried me off. I had antibiotics in labour because my waters had broken too early. I didn't need a blood transfusion or anything though. However, I only had one child partly because I decided that I was not well designed for childbirth and wasn't doing it again.

Your poor dd. It is a horrible thing to contemplate in your teens - that you have years and years of your life with periods. The thing that really gets me about them is the lack of control, if you just went to the loo when you needed to expel some blood it would be fine, but it just drips/gushes/pours out.

We have been taught by recent society to see menstruation as a negative thing.

It is actually a very powerful thing. It is an indicator of good health. It is a good, important thing.

Howdareyou I agree re Margaret Beaufort, and indeed other young husbands/brides. The Church taught that 'continence' (respectful self control) was pretty important. But once royal and aristocratic women did start to have sex, if they did not die or were phyiscally damaged pretty quickly, the stats do say that wet-nursing made things pretty horrendous. Just to take one well-documented example, Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV, bore 10 children in less than 20 years.

But you are right about life expectancy figures. From the middle ages onwards - prehistoric might have been different - once someone had survived childhood and the teenage years, they had a pretty good chance of living to 50-60, especially if they were a man. The highest death rates were the under 5s (beacuse of infectious disease) , and then in the under 15s (accidents/childhood illnesses). Childbirth and pregnancy seem to have been the most common causes of death among women of childbearing years.

But an argument for evolution on the other hand. Those whose bodies can't deal with this design flaw have fertility issues and therefore any genes involved in this don't get passed on. Until you start adding in medical treatments and IVF of course...

Another design flaw then as I only developed endometrosis symptoms several years after having two DDs, without any fertility issues or complications.

Yes it's quite astonishing how long some people lived without the benefit of modern medicine - Elizabeth I being one of them. We are frightened of bacterial infections these days, but they obviously didn't kill that many people before antibiotics, although were probably a major cause of death in/around childbirth.

I'm surprised nobody has claimed it's because God is a misogynistic bastard yet.

I suspect that living in unventilated, crowded rooms also meant that disease got a hold very easily; that would have applied less to the wealthy in the Middle Ages just as in the nineteenth century, but probably more in towns after the Industrial Revolution, and in earlier times when whole families lived in a one-roomed cottage in the countryside. And hospitals probably didn't help much before they had worked out about and then come to believe in germs, given that many doctors would go from one patient to another without washing at all.

And then there is all the difficulty about sewerage... A lot of disease comes from contaminated water.

Add in deaths in childbed and infancy and it's amazing the species survived, really.

Human women really got the crap deal with very invasive pregnancies. Menstruation and the many ways it gets fucked up is a side effect of evolution trying that out on us. So rude.

@stingofthebutterfly

I'm surprised nobody has claimed it's because God is a misogynistic bastard yet.

Oh, if there was one it's worse than that.

God is a bodger. Cobbled Woman together from a bit nicked from the original owner whilst he had a kip, forgot to add a failsafe to the operating programme so she had free thought, buggered up the spawning programme algorithm so they weren't produced until they were technically too big to emerge, then it was discovered that the self cleaning mode was messy and inefficient.

Naturally, what with misogyny, rather than blame God for being a frankly shit engineer who needed a decent project manager (and already had form for this by working like mad for six days and then sitting back and doing nowt for millennia, by which point things were so FUBAR they had to be flooded and started again), should have created a reasonable Schedule of Works so that there was enough time to execute the work perfectly over the course of six months, leaving plenty of time for snagging and dealing with the issues of most of the central project being either too bloody hot or too damn cold most of the year - it was men who refused to blame the crap engineer in chief and said 'It must be something you did wrong'.

I did butterfly

It's only recently.in the last 100 years with the invention of contraception that women have started to have regular periods.

Prior to contraception, women would have been almost constantly pregnant or breastfeeding.so would have had very few periods across their life compared to modern women.

@1concernedmummy why would they be constantly pregnant or breastfeeding? They could choose not to have sex. Unless they lived in those societies where they were forced to get married and have sex

For example I haven't used contraception in three years now. I choose not to have sex. I haven't had sex in 3 years. I love my life. As women, we don't HAVE to have sex.

Fuck 'it's a good indicator of health', I have always been very fit and healthy and hate periods

Prior to contraception, women would have been almost constantly pregnant or breastfeeding.so would have had very few periods across their life compared to modern women.

Except women can be infertile and still menstruate, which is another fucked up thing about it - all these potential malfunctions developed as part of our more invasive pregnancies & it's not even that good of an indicator of fertility...

@Fomofo but menstruation is a good indicator of health. That is a solid fact.

I was just reading a book about world war two last week. It was written by a woman who was imprisoned and starved in Auschwitz.
She said that the women there were so starved and sick, that they all stopped having periods. Because their bodies were too weak.

She also said that when the women stopped having periods, that they all felt less female.

We are lucky that we have enough food, and that we are healthy enough to be able to have periods. For our cycles to work

@JuergenSchwarzwald

We're actually not designed to die at 30 or straight after having kids. It was living in towns and poor hygiene that reduced our life expectancy - in the hunter gatherer age we actually lived longer and the older women helped look after the kids.

If we were meant to die at 30 we'd die at 30 regardless of modern medicine and hygiene because our hearts would just give out.

This! The average life expectancy way back when also seems short cos it takes into account very high infant mortality, which drags the average down. If you got past about 5 years old you were likely to live to a decent age.

YANBU though OP. I'd like to speak to whoever was in charge of user experience for brains and ask if they could release a patch for all the bugs mine has... 🤣

Mufasa, yes thanks I'd rather take other indicators of health over bleeding every month thanks - a design flaw indeed

1concerned that's not really true. Have a read of some of the earlier postings up-thread. For many, many hundreds of years, ordinary women did not marry until their mid-late 20s. That meant at least five, maybe ten, years of periods - unless they were malnourished of course. And - in so far as we can tell, from when detailed records began - maybe one in six women never married. Again, if they were poorly nourished, they might not have had regular periods as we understand them today.

Probably the majority of adult women reached meonpause, if they did not die in childbirth or from related causes. (That might have been around one in ten, perhaps more.) They might have died around the time they were 60. But it's not true - apart perhaps from in prehistoric times - that in the past everyone died young. If you survived infantile infections and childhood accidents and diseases, you were pretty tough and stood a pretty good chance of living until you were at leat 50, maybe more.

@Fomofo I am fine with bleeding every month. Who said bleeding was bad. I enjoy it.
I sit down and enjoy my cycle. The cleansing of my womb. It feels natural feminkne and important to me

Yeah, love having to make sure I don't bleed everywhere, sure blokes would love it too

It's a seriously bad deal, the period pain, the sore boobs, the bleeding, the need for rags/tampons (although my H says here where I live the blood just flowed down the women's legs at that time of the month. He's recently retired & its something he remembers from his youth, like women hoiking up their skirts & pissing standing up.)
I digress; So risking rape & pregnancy underage & being shunned, but still holding the proverbial baby, being pregnant ,vomiting, blood pressure & all the many lethal possibilities, death at birth, the fanny tearing, then breast feeding, the nappies, sleepless years.
The whole cycle, & then, do it over & over again,
THEN Peri/ & Menopause, losing hair, dry fanny, mood swings, saggy face & belly fat,
So that your H then leaves for a younger model.

Meanwhile the men get horny, ball ache & shag. it ends there.

Surely, just ONE of the jobs could be done by the man, like breast feeding ?
Its unfair, its not right, a total bum deal

I don't mind my period as much as I fucking hate the mood / hormone cycle.

I want to feel the same, every day!

I get bad backaches, blasting like a beached whale, even have a day where I am irrationally angry. So thank god for the pill!

,@Fomofo it's all about your attitude. If you talk about it in a negative way , you're more likely going to experience it in a negative way.

I think about it in a positive way and I have a really nice time each month. I meditate, journal, sit with my body and I appreciate my good health and feminity.

If we are menstruating it means we have enough food for a start and that our bodies are working well. It is a nice time for me.

[quote Mufasa1118],@Fomofo it's all about your attitude. If you talk about it in a negative way , you're more likely going to experience it in a negative way.

I think about it in a positive way and I have a really nice time each month. I meditate, journal, sit with my body and I appreciate my good health and feminity.

If we are menstruating it means we have enough food for a start and that our bodies are working well. It is a nice time for me.[/quote]
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