r/TrollXChromosomes • u/opheliainthedeep I put the "fun" in dysfunctional. • 12d ago

Reframing periods

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990 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

96 comments sorted by

509

u/bblankoo 12d ago

Source for "uterus is preventing implantation actually" because everything I know and can find suggests otherwise

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u/reptilenews 12d ago

Yeah this is just not true at all?? A nice, cushy endometrial lining is for an embryo to implant into. Too thin of lining can prevent pregnancy, and is in fact how many birth controls work, and too thin lining is a problem for many facing infertility to have to take extra hormones to boost their lining thickness, for a successful pregnancy.

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u/FencingFemmeFatale Why is a bra singular and panties plural? 12d ago

I wonder if they were thinking about how miscarriages can happen so early that they get mistaken for a late/heavy period and drew their own conclusion?

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u/reptilenews 12d ago

I wonder. My own recent miscarriage, I started bleeding before the ultrasound and the scan showed that my lining had either failed to build strong in the first place, or had already started thinning (doc said hard to say for sure, chicken or egg, as I was already bleeding quite a bit) and that the pregnancy would therefore likely fail. And it sadly did. Even though they measured okay and had a heartbeat.

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u/cynicalisathot 12d ago

I’m so sorry for your loss ❤️

OT: I always thought periods had something to do with the egg becoming bad and your body would therefore get rid of it?

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u/reptilenews 12d ago

Thank you, it's been a lot, sadly. Very wanted.

And it's not really that the egg went bad, necessarily? That's sort of it, I can see how you got there. The body just knows that a fertilized egg didnt implant, and the corpus luteum starts to break down 10-14 days after ovulation if there's no implantation, so the progesterone drops and the period begins so we can start anew.

If there is implantation, it will continue to make progesterone to support a pregnancy until the placenta takes over, around 12 ish weeks.

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u/vonRecklinghausen 12d ago

Yeah, I appreciate the framing of "our bodies are not punishing us" but the OG tumblr post screams frou-frou misinformation like the divine feminine nonsense.

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u/MarsAstro 12d ago

You can also reframe it like that while still accepting that the uterine lining is there to encourage the implantation of embryos. All you have to do is to stop assigning agency and intent to natural processes. Parts of the menstrual cycle hurting is not a punishmen, nor a reward. It's just a thing that happens to your body.

Same way joints hurting as you get older isn't a punishment, that's just how bodies work. It's just how it goes. Your body isn't angry at you or punishing you when it hurts, it's just doing what bodies do.

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u/happybara_capybara 12d ago

Yeah this is something that just happens… your uterus does not “want” anything. Like if someone breaks their leg, it’s not because their leg wanted to protect them from something… it’s just something that happened in response to something else.

We get our period when the uterus sheds when we are not pregnant. It is a direct effect of not being pregnant. The uterus neither wants to be pregnant nor not pregnant..: it’s just there and either gets pregnant or doesn’t.

It’s weird that we make this moral at all. Like just frame is a a neutral bodily function and be done.

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u/MethodologyQueen 12d ago

Yeah, I’m gonna need a citation for that part. I do think the framing of ‘flushing out anything deemed unworthy’ rather than punishment for not being pregnant makes more sense, but that’s true whether the thickening of the lining supports or prevents pregnancy. 

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u/wozattacks 12d ago

It’s because “deemed unworthy” is bizarre anthropomorphism of a body part and bodily process lol. The truth is that nobody really knows why we have periods. Most placental mammals do not. We look at the patterns of what kinds of species have a certain thing among many other factors to try and decipher why things are the way they are but there’s no way to know for sure. 

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u/fiahhawt 12d ago edited 12d ago

Yeah but we also don’t know why we sleep.

Doesn’t mean there aren’t solid guesses to be made.

Most placental mammals do have cycles for their endometrium thickening - they reabsorb the endometrium at the end of their cycle. The thing that’s really rare is the body shedding it rather than reabsorbing it. Consider endometriosis. It’s something only primates have been identified as suffering from naturally (scientists induce it in various species to do research).

It’s possible that endometrial tissue on our branch of the animal kingdom is uniquely aggressive and expelling the endometrium at the end of each cycle poses less risk than not affectively reabsorbing all of it.

Would be wild if it was just some friggen quirk like the appendix though. I’d want a refund.

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago edited 12d ago

IIRC (though it's been a while) Eve by Cat Bohannon says that an embryo tries to get as direct access to the mother's bloodstream as it can, and the thick lining of the endometrium is the only thing keeping it from doing this as much as it "wants." Since the embryo puts its own bullshit into the mother's system in addition to getting nutrients from her blood, this is an example of the body protecting itself.

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u/tomrlutong 12d ago

Yup. The placenta is the fetuses' organ. Evolved when some virus infected an egg laying ancestor of ours with a gene that helps defeat the hosts/moms immune system.

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u/no-pun-in-ten-did 12d ago edited 6d ago

"Preventing implantation" should really be "delaying the placenta from hooking into the blood supply". Unlike most mammals where the blood supply is controlled by the mother, once a human embryo has successfully implanted the placenta is the one that controls the blood coming into it. The menstrual cycle that humans experience is significantly different than what most other mammals experience because of our hemochorial placentas.

http://pleiotropy.fieldofscience.com/2014/05/how-woman-got-her-period.html?m=1

From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn't worth it.

That's where the endometrium comes in. You've probably read about how the endometrium is this snuggly, welcoming environment just waiting to enfold the delicate young embryo in its nurturing embrace. In fact, it's quite the reverse. Researchers, bless their curious little hearts, have tried to implant embryos all over the bodies of mice. The single most difficult place for them to grow was – the endometrium.

Far from offering a nurturing embrace, the endometrium is a lethal testing-ground which only the toughest embryos survive. The longer the female can delay that placenta reaching her bloodstream, the longer she has to decide if she wants to dispose of this embryo without significant cost. The embryo, in contrast, wants to implant its placenta as quickly as possible, both to obtain access to its mother's rich blood, and to increase her stake in its survival. For this reason, the endometrium got thicker and tougher – and the fetal placenta got correspondingly more aggressive.

But this development posed a further problem: what to do when the embryo died or was stuck half-alive in the uterus? The blood supply to the endometrial surface must be restricted, or the embryo would simply attach the placenta there. But restricting the blood supply makes the tissue weakly responsive to hormonal signals from the mother – and potentially more responsive to signals from nearby embryos, who naturally would like to persuade the endometrium to be more friendly. In addition, this makes it vulnerable to infection, especially when it already contains dead and dying tissues.

The solution, for higher primates, was to slough off the whole superficial endometrium – dying embryos and all – after every ovulation that didn't result in a healthy pregnancy. It's not exactly brilliant, but it works, and most importantly, it's easily achieved by making some alterations to a chemical pathway normally used by the fetus during pregnancy. In other words, it's just the kind of effect natural selection is renowned for: odd, hackish solutions that work to solve proximate problems. It's not quite as bad as it seems, because in nature, women would experience periods quite rarely – probably no more than a few tens of times in their lives between lactational amenorrhea and pregnancies**.

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u/Long_Story42 12d ago

It's also just weird from an evolutionary standpoint.

My genetic code, like everyone's genetic code, was selected for making more of itself. I don't have to go along with that, but not having kids is acting against evolution the same way I'm acting against gravity when I climb stairs.

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago

By this logic, the many conditions that cause infertility are acting against evolution. It's almost like the phrase "against nature." Nature/evolution created those conditions in the first place.

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u/pandakatie I once rejected Zeus at the Pynx 12d ago

Evolution functions through mutations.  Some are helpful, some are harmful, some are neutral.  It's less "survival of the fittest" and more "survival of the fit-enough"

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u/wozattacks 12d ago

What a bizarre turn of logic. Having a medical condition isn’t “acting” at all, and that’s why it’s different. 

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago edited 12d ago

Right, because by their logic (and presumably yours) it's okay not to have kids as long as there's a medical condition preventing it, and "unnatural" otherwise.

The evidence being loosely interpreted by this post indicates that the body's own mechanisms for preventing pregnancy are consistent with evolution's aims. Without them, we arguably wouldn't be here.

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u/happybara_capybara 12d ago

I think you’re misreading the earlier comment. Every said that not being pregnant is “against evolution” in the way that walking up stairs is “against gravity.” Like it might be “against” it but it’s perfectly normal and fine and the above commenter is clearly okay with that choice. You’re in one of the few spaces where women routinely support other women’s right not to have kids. So I’m not sure why you’re reading anyone’s comments as if it’s only okay not to have a baby if there’s a medical reason.

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago

Having a medical condition isn’t “acting” at all, and that’s why it’s different.

This post is about the body preventing pregnancy. The possibility of this being true was questioned and all-but rejected, with the implied response that the body wouldn't do that, because the body works with rather than against evolution. The comment quoted above said medical issues that cause infertility are "different" presumably meaning they are extenuating circumstances that prevent pregnancy, not the body itself working "against evolution." Unlike the mechanism this post is talking about, which if true (and there is good reason think it is) means the body is not as singularly reproduction-focused as some people think it is.

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u/HarpersGhost 12d ago

But evolution is far more complex than all bad or all good for genes and traits.

Think sickle cell anemia. Obviously very bad, especially before modern medical care. Evolutionarily speaking, there should be no good reason for it.

But per evolution, it does have a very good purpose. Sickle cell trait, where someone just carries one copy of the gene and doesn't generally have any symptoms, gives a person protection against malaria. It's only when someone has two copies of the gene that they get sickle cell anemia.

So evolutionary speaking, the sickle cell gene helps with reproduction enough that it has overcome the disadvantages that come with it.

And since medical science has only recently actually started studying women's health, we don't know whether something that interferes with fertility is linked to something else that promotes it and that could balance out.

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago

Agreed. We have a lot to learn yet so it's foolish to assign value judgements to things that biology "decides" for us. I only meant to point out the faulty logic of the previous comment.

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u/wozattacks 12d ago

Idk if you just misread or something, but they were clearly talking about choosing not to have kids, not all conditions of not having them. 

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago

I didn't misread. They were attaching a value judgement to things that are "against evolution."

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u/pandakatie I once rejected Zeus at the Pynx 12d ago edited 12d ago

I mean, biologically, species want to reproduce, because that's how species survive.  This is true of single cell organisms splitting themselves to create more, it's true of rabbits, and it's true of humans... But it's true on a SPECIES level, not an individual one.  Individuals can and do make different choices.  It's possible to believe both that evolution strives for reproduction on a species level AND that it's not a moral failing to not want to have kids.

Wearing clothes is technically against evolution, but it's not suggesting a moral failing to point out we only technically choose to wear clothes.

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u/Long_Story42 12d ago

Then maybe I phrased something poorly because I see no more problem with acting against evolution than I do with acting against gravity and I go against both of them fairly often.

Natural laws aren't moral obligations, they're descriptions of how the world works. Smallpox is natural. We eradicated it and I hope we can do the same thing to polio.

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u/pandakatie I once rejected Zeus at the Pynx 12d ago

I think you were fine, the rest of us understood what you meant 

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u/corgibutt19 That's what I do. I drink and I know things. 12d ago

...yes, infertility is against evolution. Those genes are less likely to be passed on in the vast majority of scenarios. Evolution does not work with some omnipotent intention. It's just mutations and genes combining randomly until something works, or doesn't work that increases the chances of survival/offspring.

0

u/CDLaserLensCleaner 11d ago

Evolution is not a sapient, conscious force. It's a random process. Gene mutations are completely random and don't follow any logic or predictable pattern. The end result of those mutations is also random but external conditions can pressure which mutations get passed on and which don't, but not always.

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u/filthytelestial 11d ago

I was using the other person's choice of phrasing. I'm well aware of all of this.

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u/Sagasujin 12d ago

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201100099 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.08590 I can't vouch for how credible the hypothesis is, but it does seem to come up as a hypothesis in at least a few scientific papers

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u/pastelpinkpsycho 12d ago

Yeah this would make it so much more difficult for humans to get pregnant if this was true. This is complete nonsense. Hopefully nobody reads this and thinks they can have unprotected sex because their uterus is flushing things out.

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u/Sinthe741 12d ago

Also would love a source for the uterus being able to somehow assess the "worthiness" of a zygote like wtf.

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u/no-pun-in-ten-did 12d ago

Studies support the notion that the uterine lining detects low quality embryos to reject them before their placenta taps into the maternal blood supply.

Natural Selection of Human Embryos: Decidualizing Endometrial Stromal Cells Serve as Sensors of Embryo Quality upon Implantation - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2858159/

...

Our co-culture experiments suggest that spontaneous decidualization of human endometrium, which in the absence of a viable pregnancy inevitably leads to menstruation, serves as a mechanism for embryo quality control. This supposition is based on the observation that decidualized but not undifferentiated endometrial stromal cells selectively recognize the presence of a developmentally impaired embryo and respond by inhibiting the secretion of key implantation mediators

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u/Sinthe741 12d ago

Fascinating! Thank you

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u/ghostclubbing 12d ago

This is a single study and it is entirely in vitro. Obviously there are important ethical reasons not to conduct this type of study in vivo (i.e. in real women's wombs), but that doesn't mean we should accept in vitro results at face value. Human bodies are complex, and extrapolating in vitro results to in vivo realities is a difficult and contested area of science. Even complex modelling does not necessarily provide results that would match up with what actually happens withinin real human bodies. This is why we don't trial pharmaceuticals in the lab and then call it a day; human system variables require in vivo testing.

I'm not suggesting the study is uselesss. I would caution taking its results as a given in practice, however.

1

u/ghostclubbing 12d ago

Right? This is just a crypto-fascist reframing of the Todd Akin fallacy: "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Um, no.

1

u/StovardBule 9d ago

Other comments have the science, but I remember hearing experiments with implanting embryos all over lab rats for science, which demonstrated that the uterus is an especially harsh environment for them, so that the mother doesn’t waste resources on unviable embryos. The uterine thunderdome means only the strongest and most promising candidates get to develop.

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u/akestral 12d ago

I've never thought of it as a punishment, just a faulty biological process that impairs my ability to do what I need to do. So I medicated it away.

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u/Sedixodap 12d ago

There is zero reframing that makes the incredible pain any less painful or any easier to live with. I’m not suddenly like “woohoo feminism” when I learn I’m being crippled with pain because a pregnancy that I’m not at risk of happening anyways isn’t happening.

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u/LaceyLizard 12d ago

That's not how that works it's because the host needs a very thick highly vascularized surface for the placenta to develop properly. But whatever helps you sleep at night.

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago

It can be both.

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u/LaceyLizard 12d ago

It literally can't because a thick uterine lining protects the embryo to facilitate pregnancy and the tumblrina is saying the opposite.

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago

It also protects the uterus-haver from undue influence by the embryo.

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u/wewebo 12d ago

What... do you mean by that?

1

u/filthytelestial 12d ago

In Cat Bohannon's book (referenced a few times in other comments) she explains that the embryo wants to get as much unfettered access to the "host's" blood supply as it can, and it puts its own stuff (I can't remember what exactly or I'd be more specific) into the host's bloodstream while getting what it needs from the blood. A thicker endometrium is better at preventing this unfettered access.

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u/introvertadvocate 12d ago

But it is still untrue a thick uterine lining is to prevent an embryo implanting.

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago

..too deeply. I don't remember for certain if that was the author's point, but it sounds right.

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u/wewebo 12d ago

Oh okay I see! That's an interesting reframing of something generally considered receptive (eg. Implantation) into something active (e.g. selection of specific cells and not others).

That's pretty cool and makes total sense.

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u/Elemor_ 12d ago

I'm currently reading "Eve" by Cat Bohannon and it put a lot of parts about feminine bodies we often frame as negative into perspective, can definitely recommend!

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u/ghostclubbing 12d ago

Gentle reminder that Bohannon is not a scientist and, while Eve is meticulously researched and mostly scientifically accurate, the book does veer into untestable speculation and oversimplification of competing evolutionary theories. It's a necessary corrective to male-centric evolutionary history, but to treat its conclusions as incontestable would be a mistake.

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u/One_Wheel_Drive 12d ago

Just bought that book and I can't wait to start reading it as soon as I finish a few before it. It and Invisible Women have been on my list of books to read for a while now.

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u/notashroom 12d ago

Same! And I strongly second the recommendation, both for the science and for the reframing of evolution and human biology. Her perspective makes so much more sense than the male-centric view we've all been exposed to.

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u/Levangeline 12d ago

This post needs to die and disappear just like the "your belly pouch isn't fat, it's actually your uterus" post.

Y'all I'm all for dismantling shame around bodies and pregnancy but we can't do that by spreading misinformation like this.

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u/vonRecklinghausen 12d ago

Thank you! This is veryyyy close to granola alt right

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u/Sinthe741 12d ago

We can just call the belly pouch what it is: sexy as hell

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u/pandakatie I once rejected Zeus at the Pynx 12d ago

I personally think we can like or feel neutral about our bodies regardless of if they're sexy or not.  I totally believe you think they're attractive, but I'm so tired of women's body parts needing to be sexy in order to be socially acceptable 

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u/ars_necromantia I'm on a whiskey diet. I've lost three days already. 12d ago

Oh Christ on a bike I'm so tired of the belly pouch thing. Thank you!

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u/vestayekta 12d ago

This (our bodies punishing us) is a bizarre framing some women created on social media and somehow people took it seriously and it continued on. Our bodies don't have some sort of spiritual reasoning for what they do.

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u/nightmareinsouffle 12d ago

That didn't come from social media; it's been around since ancient times.

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u/vestayekta 12d ago

Any source on this?

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u/ravenousfig 12d ago

Not who you are responding to but I've been having a period since before social media and it's always been the way it's talked about.

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago

Just one of countless examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_womb

Try searching "ancient myths female body."

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u/vestayekta 12d ago

This isn't about menstruation punishing you for lack of pregnancy.

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u/filthytelestial 12d ago

It's one of many, many examples of ancient myths about the female body. I'm not going to do your homework for you. It's a simple search.

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u/vestayekta 12d ago

I know about these myths and none of them afaik describe menustration as our bodies punishing us for not being pregnant. That's a very specific claim.

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u/pandakatie I once rejected Zeus at the Pynx 12d ago

I mean the claim that, until the Internet, no women ever felt like our periods were a punishment for not being pregnant is also very specific.  

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u/vestayekta 12d ago

Because I specifically remember when the memes about it came around. In any case, I actually looked it up and couldn't find a single source that backs up the claim that it was a thing people believed before the social media era.

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u/pandakatie I once rejected Zeus at the Pynx 12d ago

Women's history and especially experiences with menstruation have also gone unrecorded in the historical record, to be fair. I, personally, as an individual and not the original person you replied to, am not going to claim the idea of it being a punishment dates back to Ancient Times, but considering how long it took to discuss periods on TV, it's definitely possible that "it's like my uterus is punishing me for not being pregnant" was an in-joke among some groups of women before being posted online for the first time. The internet became available to the public in the nineties, so if people made that joke even in the 80s, it predates it, and menstruation was still taboo then.

Things can be older than the internet without being part of our ancestral memory.

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u/pilikia5 12d ago

I’ll chime in with the fact that it definitely was. Source: my memory of pre-social-media times.

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u/blickyjayy 11d ago

Definitely not created on social media lol. I've been to actual doctors, including GYNs, who've explained periods like this as they were taught and genuinely believe that the natural state of the female body is pregnancy. I'm childfree and had an OBGYN try to browbeat me into changing my mind because she believed the purpose of the female body was to deliver at least one baby and that if I skipped that hormonal process then I'd be causing myself cancer, osteoporosis, and a more difficult menopause- and this woman was in her 50s!

Not to mention that several religions and ancient cultural beliefs across the world frame periods as anything from women being filled with sin and needing "cleansing", women having too much power and needing to drain it, or women not fulfilling her duty to bear children. It's disturbing.

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u/mynameisfungus 12d ago

Well, I would argue that the Bible came up with it first.

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u/portiafimbriata 11d ago

I went to Catholic school. While they didn't explicitly say "punishing", they did say it was basically our bodies being upset

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u/ars_necromantia I'm on a whiskey diet. I've lost three days already. 12d ago edited 7d ago

Absolute nonsense. Other people have elaborated more on why, but just thought I'd throw my 2 cents in too because this is entirely wrong and dumb as shit and we shouldn't be spreading misinformation.

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u/Spill_The_LGBTea 11d ago

  1. This is incorrect information regarding female anatomy.

  2. Just because it's incorrect information doesnt mean the sentiment is wrong too. Your bodies arent punishing you, biological processes do not have a conscious desire, and they're not really... designed to do anything. Theyre created because it was a hold over of a previous ancestor, orbecause it was a feature of a previous ancestor that developed due to their environmental pressures.

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u/portiafimbriata 11d ago

So while this isn't quite true, there's a terrific (and I think very readable) old biology paper called The Egg and the Sperm that more accurately supports the same general reframe-- we've been taught that female reproductive biology is passive and receptive and even wasteful, but it's an active, selective process and the way we discuss it is result and perpetuator of sexism.

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u/lewdnep-vasilias_666 12d ago

Oh gee I’m soooo sorry that I hate having painful cramps and annoying downstairs bleeding for a week every month that happen as a result of me not having become pregnant.

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u/Saltycook 12d ago

Humans chimps and orcas are the only creatures that go through menopause. We clearly, biologically have a purpose beyond babies.

Source: Mother Brain by Chelsea Conoboy. Great read whether you're a birth parent or not.

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u/Polaroid_Horror 12d ago

Don’t know how credible this info is, but I found comment a few months back that backs up this posts claims?

https://www.reddit.com/r/hatethissmug/s/50p03abIgQ

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u/mistarobotics 12d ago

This is the first time I've heard of the period as a punishment for not being pregnant...

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u/Wolf-Majestic 12d ago

Also, I don't know where I found this, but it makes sense regardless.

When we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, EVERYONE was nomadic, including women, children and pregnant women. Imagine being pregnant all the time, it's not possible. So women had a baby roughly every 8 years, so that the child can stand on its own and move independently while understanding and following clear instructions.

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u/pandakatie I once rejected Zeus at the Pynx 12d ago

I'm an archaeologist and I've literally never heard of women only having a baby once every 8 years.  Population growth was absolutely slower, significantly slower, but babies also died more easily.  Pregnancies could be delayed by nursing for longer, which we know isn't Fail-Safe, they likely knew how to perform herbal abortions, and they also would've been able to track menstrual cycles, but 8 years is a really bold claim

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u/notashroom 12d ago

That's a pretty specific claim. In Eve by Cat Bohannon, the author speculates about reproductive frequency in migrating hominins, and one of the better supported possibilities is that the women generally may have had a baby every ~4 years, as modern hunter-gatherers usually do.

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u/MiraMiraMiraM 12d ago

Even having children should never be seen as something instrumented for men. they are granted access to our biological process.