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[silver_wolf101]

The moon has always been reminiscent of women, with the menstrual cycle being compared to the ebb and flow of the ocean, controlled by the moon's pull. The phases of the moon are compared to the way a woman's body changes throughout the course of the month. There are thirteen lunar months in a year

Comments

wow, I am really tired, and it's possible I'm both misreading your arguements and mis-stating my own

[sheepfairy]

I suspect that hormone injections into the food supply probably have an even bigger impact on early developement than fat content does. And... okay, there are problems with that, obviously (in addition to three year olds hitting puberty, there was a case where young boys drinking form a well corrupted with hormones began developing female secondary sexual characteristics, but that was obviously an isolated case), but... has anybody actually ever discovered any real health risks associated with starting your periods earlier? I mean, it's certainly not what's happened in the past, but that doesn't necessarily make it 'unnatural'. Human society and living conditions are changing, so that it turn would obviously change human physiology some. But a lot of these changes are seen as being obviously bad, when honestly we have no idea. I mean on the one hand a modern diet in the West can have a lot of negative health effects, but we still certainly live a lot longer than our ancestors did (although I guess that has a lot more to do with medical advances than a change in diet; there's actually a well supported theory that near-starvation can actually extend your lifespan, although that's obviously a little risky to advertise, since there are plenty of anorexics and others who probably don't know how to balance the line between 'near-starvation' and actually starving to death).

I just said that PMS has experienced one hell of a lot of medicalization over the years primarily due to promise of profit.

I also have kind of complicated response to this, because while I do think the medical industry likes to over commercialize, and that tends to affect people - I guess my complaint with the industry is more that their PMS painkillers and etc. tend to not work very well, or at least no better than cheaper, non-medical alternatives. Like, say, a tablet of midol usually does me no more good than a soda/coffee/tea with caffiene would have (or you could be like my family, which includes medical doctors, and whenever somebody complains of PMS just tell them to drink more booze). And I don't really think the pain or the emotional component of premenstrual disorder where wholly developed by the medical industry, although I won't deny that they may have exaggerated it some. But, I mean, our understanding of psychology and depression and the way hormone fluctuations influence the brain is all very recent science; I wouldn't be surprised if any emotional problems caused my menstruation in olden days were just dismissed as the natural tendency of women to be weak and whiny and over-emotional.

And, God, I wish I could find the article on the birth control thing - apparently the man who first developed it was Catholic, and he was trying to imitate the rhythm method (since that was the only method the church allowed). It was considered natural, because it didn't involve killing sperm or eggs or damaging a fetus or your internal organs; it just limited you to a few 'safe' days. The pill was supposed to just expand the number of 'safe days' - but they wanted to maintain a 'natural' cycle, so they inserted a week of placebos into the pill cycle to instigate a menses.

The thing is, there's no egg produced when you're on birth control - there's no need for you to have a menses at all, really. I think even under a steady stream of hormones you have a couple a year - there was that birth control pill that came out a while ago, I forgot what it was called, where you only had four periods a year. And a lot of people flipped out about how 'unnatural' that is and how it was demonizing a woman's period blood or whatever, even though there's no real medical reason to mistrust it. Plenty of women who have their hormones affected by pregnancy and heavy breastfeeding can go over a year without menses.

(PS - I did like no research for this, it's all stuff I just remember having read about at some point, so take it all with a huge grain of salt!)