To wonder why menstruation is the way it is

[Arina22]

I work in a female boarding school with teenagers.

Every week one of them is in terrible pain from her period. It ruins a big chunk of their lives.

I just wonder why on earth periods exist. Especially because if you take a certain medication, it makes the blood be reabsorbed by the body, and the body is totally fine. So there is no need for periods to exist at all

Most of evolution presumably you can just take yourself off into a cave or jog it out after a sabretooth tiger, not have to sit through some tedious work meeting while your pants leak through.

Mine were more painful when I was younger.

There also used to be a really good website called The Cycle Diet that talked about what to eat more of when you are due on (carbs and root vegetables and brocolli and chocolate - as these provide energy for hormone synthesis, help PMT and help clearing estrogen and provide magnesium which is good for relaxing muscles) - must admit the main one I do consistently is chocolate 😆

Not sure about poor diet causing period pains, in recent past diets would have been poorer. Quite possibly poor enough that women wouldn’t have had regular periods. Although hunter gatherer diets are generally said to have been far healthier than later farming diets.

The existence of the hymen is a nasty fucking joke as well. Imagine if that little indicator of female virginity never existed. One less excuse for the male apes to control.

I think it's just that women are more able to talk about it now.

My mother didn't have assisted conception; neither did any of my aunts or grandmothers. Period pain was just something that we were expected to suck up. (I'm 65.)

But on the other hand, a lot of us are driven to near insanity from velcro babies - can you imagine having them attached to us even longer?

At least I could have my hands free!

Mine have become less painful after my two but heavier for some reason!

I always remember in the Helen Forrester books, Two Pence to Cross the Mersey or one of the others, where she described the pain of her periods as a teen. No UPFs for her, just horrendous poverty in 1930s Liverpool. She has the occasional aspirin and sometimes passes out but just has to get on with it.

The blood “reabsorbs into the body”?

That really isn’t how hormonal contraceptives work!

Just the stage of evolution we are at. It works for reproduction and it’s not disabling enough ( generally) to push for more adaptive evolution. So as long as it’s not life or reproduction threatening the no evolutionary forces or energy is wasted on defining it… if that makes sense. It’s like we haven’t reached optimal design ! If we were to be designed! Very annoying. I always wonder how they survived in the old days, even my grandmother’s era in hardcore Ireland in the 1920’s where they had to use rags… I can’t imagine how they coped or hid it or what they did if they leaked! Awful.

I used to have painful periods but once I gave birth I never had a period pain again, have no idea why.

Definitely this.

At the very least we should have a zip to get a baby out, and should be able to control the loss of blood like we generally can for urine and bowel movements.

I don't think we did die that young when we were cave(wo)men - health actually declined when we started living in groups and farming.

The technology exists to extract periods. It's just suppressed because you can also use it to do early abortions. But theoretically we could all have an extractor at home and just whip the whole thing out in five minutes once a month.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_extraction

Bodies are imperfect systems. They aren’t designed.

Why do we menstruate when most mammals don’t? A key reason is the erm… “aggressive” nature of a human embryo/foetus. Our babies start literally
sucking the life out of us very quickly after conception. The menstrual blood build up is a protective layer between us and the baby. Despite how we think about it in most cultures, during pregnancy a woman’s body is really more in a state of conflict with the baby than in a state of harmony.

Period pain is very distinctive, we KNOW what it feels like, unlike a male dr presuming we don’t! Nob

I read a really interesting article about menstruation in pre-modern societies. Basically women would have had surprisingly few periods through their lives, as they would have spent most of their fertile years pregnant or breastfeeding (which would have lasted much longer and suppresses menstruation). So most women's experience would have been pretty awful, in that they would have been endlessly pregnant (and frequently miscarrying or having babies die before a year old) but they would not have had to deal nearly as much with the logistics of menstruation.

My doctor said a lot of the stereotypical advice for serious period pains was to have a baby 😆🤔😳 And I did have much better periods after my 3 DC, with far less pain.

The type of pain regularly meant I was off school, and it used to make me bend over double when it went down the front of my thighs. I'd think that if I ever had bad labour pains, I'd probably cope pretty well, but of course the irony was being induced with an epidural, then 3 c-sections 😆

Now, of course during bloody perimenopause, I get the most horrible javelin arse which is actually a lot more painful 😒

An interesting series of studies on immigrant women to the US finds that PMDD (premenstrual dysphoria disorder — mood swings, depression, irritability etc just before a period) only start to be reported in significant numbers by immigrants once they acculturate into the US. The duration of contact with US culture seems to directly correlate to reported PMDD.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032710006270

Same here. Very rarely, anyway. They were still quite heavy though and got heavier during peri. Now my last one was about 5 months ago so I might have finished (they had been coming every 3 months or so and had got a lot lighter and I wished they'd always been like that!)

I hear women who say they haven't had a period for years because they just take the pill but when I try the pill it makes me bleed for months. I'm 43 now periods used to be regular as clockwork but now they keep coming 9 days early. I guess it's the joy of getting older. I've always found periods strange and wondered why animals don't have them. Frustrating

A few of us do have an easy ride of it all. I don't think I've ever had a menstrual pain and clockwork light periods (albeit every 21 days). My mood used to be stable too. It's unfair that some women have horrible experiences.

My menapause has been horrendously crap though with crushing anxiety and most recently flushes every few mins so I suppose it hasn't been completely plain sailing.....

Never heard of that, but what an excellent idea.
5 minutes mild discomfort.
Perhaps one day Amazon will sell them.

If there is a god, and I ever get to meet her, I will be having words ..........

Bloody great design fault, along with a whole raft of other things: childbirth pain, shit smelling foul (could have chosen for it to smell lovely!), the comedy that is sex, adolescence, male/female incompatibility, and the whole perverse decision to base life on earth on the principle of kill or be killed - what is that about?!

I do agree OP. I suffer with panic disorder and for two weeks of the month I am relatively normal, then pre, during and post period I am on a rollercoaster of physical and mental symptoms. I think that surely after the menopause there will be relief?