About a year ago I collected a bunch of demographic data sets about this subject for a class project on endocrine disrupting chemicals. Along with the average ages of menarche and thelarche(budding of breast tissue) decreasing we also have rapidly increasing numbers of highly precocious puberty(as early as 6year-olds, sometimes), and increasing prevalence of every kind of disease that is linked to hormone disruption in women. There are literally hundreds of biochemical systems in women’s bodies that are regulated by the same hormones that govern sexual development. There has also been nearly 4 decades of 1% per year decline in age-adjusted testosterone levels for men. Obviously, this decrease also goes with all sorts of health issues like a decrease in overall immunity, strength, bone density, muscle mass, sperm count, and just an overall shittier health. Not all of the data is demographic either, but demographic data establishes a widespread phenomenon. There is just as much chemical analysis and lab testing data to establish direct causal links between pollutant levels, hormone disruption, developmental issues in different animal species and also behavioral patterns associated with the hormone levels.
Can people reading here grasp just how many different kinds of social impact all of these chemical changes must be having? Your hormonal health directly affects every major decision in your life, both directly and indirectly. An early thelarche causing lifelong sexual trauma and making more women distrust and dislike men in general is just barely scratching the surface, in my opinion. This is not even to mention the many social causes exacerbating many of the hormonal disruptions, like lowered paternal involvement directly reducing age of menarche.
Putting together that project (with input from many mentors that are a lot more learned than I am) was the most devastatingly depressing experiences I have ever had in my life. Most professors, scientific researchers and engineers I have mentioned this data to are either already aware of it or are not particularly surprised by it. I have felt like an absolute lunatic as I try to explain to people twice my age, people who have multiple degrees in chemistry, medicine, or other STEM subjects, why this data has unbelievably far reaching consequences and why they should take it more seriously. I have tried and almost entirely failed at this so far. Perhaps I really am a lunatic and don’t know what I am talking about here, but there is never any convincing argument to the contrary to all the concerns I have raised. My argument is mainly based on the chemistry and the clear demographic data on the subject, which no one has denied. The best counter I got so far was- “well if it was such a major issue then wouldn’t there be a lot more noise about it? Since no one is talking about it it must not be that big of an issue”. I will put together another “lunatic” essay about it on my Substack soon-ish(I am in the middle of exams) for anyone wanting to read it, but frankly I don’t have a lot of hope that anything will be done about it, since the people that are best placed to do anything about it seem not to be bothered at all.
Ironically, this is one of the reasons I was disappointed that the Cass Report discovered that there are possibly many health risks for puberty blockers. Puberty blockers made sense for a lot of these confused girls who were not ready to be sexualized. I hoped it was unintentionally delaying menarche to a more appropriate age. But in retrospect, correcting one chemical endocrine disruption with a different chemical was never going to be as healthy as stopping the first endocrine disruption.
If you continue your research and publish it, or even post it on Substack, you can count on at least one reader who will avoid giving their child what endocrine disrupting chemicals you identify, if that is even possible these days.
I am not an expert in any of the subjects I am talking about here- perhaps that is why I can look at all the different aspects of it- but what I am planning to write about is how all the trends fit together.
Lots of variables are at play here, as well as nonlinear dynamics and feedback loops. To make matters worse, social factors are presumably involved (difficult to quantify and include in a model). Data on environmental pollutants and exposure levels are also basically non extant prior to the 90s. It's going to be as tough a puzzle to solve as the question of anthropogenic climate change.
Some random thoughts/observations that may be of use:
Nutrition and caloric intake are one driving factor in determining the average age of menarche in a given population. Physiological stress can cause an individual woman to cease menstruation. (common in female distance runners)
Female hormonal cycles are altered by the presence/density of other females. Synchronization of cycles can occur in a house full of women, for example.
I was an adolescent in the early 90s. Girls went through puberty beginning in the 6th grade. It seemed nearly universal by 7th grade (age 12-13) For the Black population, this was shifted 1-2 years earlier.
For the Boys, it was similar to the girls, but shifted later by about 1 year.
As for the decrease in testosterone: The elimination of male spaces, especially work places must play a role. Competition/team work in male exclusive environments raises T levels in men, at least temporarily. 'Winning' competition (against other men) has an even greater effect. Possession of physical territory/successfully defending said territory has a similar effect. De-territorialisation has the opposite effect. What is mass immigration if not de-territorialisation of native male population? Atomisation is a characterized by, among other things, de territorialisation. No one 'owns' the local environment - we are all merely transient residents of the same crappy hotel.
Obesity lowers testosterone levels in men....and low t-levels cause men to gain fat mass. Not sure about the arrow of causation on this one. Might be bidirectional. Either way, the high carb, high sugar common diet must play a role at the population level.
As someone who studied chemistry i have often thought how insane we are as a society in how little regulation and safety for chemicals that gets put into our environment.
A chemical or diet related cause you would expect to vary a bit across regions unless it's ubiquitous (plastics?)
Fascinating that girls without dad's tend to have earlier menarche pointing to other environmental reasons but nothing today hasn't happened before has it, ie stressors etc?
Edit: female birth control, hrt in the water supply?
An old frogtwitter poster, that Walt probably remembers, named @menaquinone4 introduced the topic into the alt-right sphere back in the day. Since then, I've been vastly fascinated with the subject of Endocrine Disruptors and their more than plausible effects in modern society. Especially BPA which I think there is quite an amount of solid scientific evidence of its effects.
However, aside from you guys, I've not seen many people discuss this despite it has wide implications in many modern health and societal trends as you suggests.
Anecdote from father of three young adult women: my daughters’ and their female friends were physically mature, i.e. breasts and waists and hips of adult women, by age 12-13, and still were mentally and behaviorally children. It seems plausible to me that this is occurring earlier than it has in the past and that this has negative consequences for the girls. This is a serious subject with serious consequences, and you are right to raise it. You were also right to attempt to move the conversation into domains, and among female commentators, where it will be accepted and taken seriously. Has Mary Harrington or Louise Perry written about this?
I understand that this is something that has particular focus on women but this idea that we need to defer to some group to talk about a social issues needs to stop. How is this not just identitarianism?
Someones views and behaviour should be judged on their merits. The seclusion of special feminine issues is part of the reason why gender ideology has taken hold. Feminism down played biological explanations because it was inconvenient to their social theories.
It’s not a matter of deference. It’s a matter of recognizing that a mass audience has these filters, and they’re not going to listen to a female focused issue like this if it doesn’t come from a woman. You can say that’s wrong, but that’s a reality. if you’re trying to sell breakfast cereal, you have to sell to the audience that you have, to the market that exists. Walt is absolutely right that for this issue to get traction and for people to take it seriously it needs to be women raising the issue. He has a good intuition about what the public needs to hear and how an issue needs to be presented, in this case.
I'm sure if the set and setting was right I could have this conversation, I'm a bit puzzled by the sensitivity? Menarche is not exactly a dirty word...
Your mileage may vary. If you know a better way to do something important, go ahead and try to do it. No kidding. No snark. Let 100 flowers bloom.
My gut instinct on this is that if some man tried to raise the question of why young women are experiencing their first periods earlier and earlier, the focus would not be on the question of what’s happening to the girls, but on why some creepy guy wants to talk about it, and that would be a distraction from the main issue. On the other hand, if some obviously serious and intelligent and well intentioned woman like, say, Mary Harrington, began to investigate this question it would get a lot more traction, and her motives would not be questioned. I don’t see anything condescending about recognizing that reality.
I think you're reading too much into it, I would be happy to talk about the issue of menarche with anybody and I'm a man. That's why we have medical language.
Sure, I can write about this! My basic summary is along these lines:
--I had my first period at age 11. I remember vividly to this day that I was wearing underwear with Disney pictures on it I was so young.
--I know that my home life was chaotic, and my best friend is constantly pointing out sign and symptoms of CPTSD with me. There's several years of my life before that early menarche where I literally remember Simpsons episodes in way, way more vivid detail than anything that actually went on in my life, like I was constantly dissociating. I joked about this one time with my older brother and he responded completely seriously that watching the Simpsons was "a safe space" from the total chaos around us.
--I also remember a shift in energy with my family roughly around 1995ish. I've gotten up the nerve to ask about it, and my parents kind of tend to blame each other and never give any answers that are satisfactory.
--Since moving to Sioux Falls, I've become more aware of how abnormal the place I grew up was. The guy across the street from me blew up his house when I was 2. I read a substack article about a movie that's incredibly horrifying unless you basically grew up in a 3rd world country-- and then when I watched it, I had the "3rd world" reaction of laughing at it instead of being horrified. I don't know if the stress of growing up in that part of the country contributed to the issue.
--I also remember consistently acting about 2 years younger than I actually was socially through most of the time I was growing up. I tended to have younger friends and get made fun of for having more childish, nerdy interests. I also remember being kind of terrified of the idea of dating as far back as 6th or 7th grade?
--I really have no clue how this happened to me at age 11, but I remember struggling with severe depression for years after that and couldn't explain why. I remember the specific moment that the depression began, though. Every year, the elementary school I went to would have a camp out at a park, and there were specific places in the woods that everyone liked to play in. One of these was "Frog Pond", where we'd wade around catching tadpoles. Another one was "Crayfish Creek". Same idea, lots of wading into the water and interacting with the wildlife. This camp out was a thing I looked forward to every year. Then, in 6th grade, I was already getting my period and couldn't go in the water with the other kids because I was wearing a pad that weekend. To this day, I cry thinking about it. I felt isolated from the other kids even though they didn't know what was going on and I didn't say anything about it. I was the only girl in the entire school dealing with periods, and for a year or two before that I'd had horrible, stabbing pains on my sides as my breasts grew in. I didn't just feel isolated from my childhood friends at that moment; I felt isolated from my entire past and like I was being forced to leave behind a part of my life too soon. I remember leaning into nerdy, tomboyish things after that-- Dungeons and Dragons, video games, sci-fi movies, stupid adult cartoons. I couldn't stand thinking about "girly" stuff a lot of the time. Years later, I would camp at Occupy Wall Street and dress like a boy the entire time and cut my hair short. I hung out with the queerest people in NYC, and peaked with this kind of thing around 2017 when I used they/them pronouns interchangeably with she/her pronouns and identified as "pansexual and solo poly". I absolutely couldn't "own" any kind of "normal", monogamous, straight sexuality despite not really being trans or anything either.
I don't know if I can give any scientific insight on this, but I can certainly write something emotional and talk about what would help me personally open up to the idea of a romantic relationship.
Upon rethinking this article, I'm not sure there's any future in it. This might be one of those ideas that you've alluded to before which is reasonably debated in the hands of some but unsafe for normies. Modern society has engineered a fiction in which only pedophiles (publicly) find underaged girls hot and enforces it via social death. To counter with the notion it's natural for men to find underaged girls hot due to earlier acquisition of secondary sexual characteristics runs the risk of mixing with the naturalistic fallacy, which is monstrously widespread in society, and create a consensus that it's "fine" to comment on the rack of your daughter's middle school friends because it's "natural." The fact that the naturalistic fallacy is untrue does little to stop its popularity.
Society has attempted to stop this problem with a sledgehammer. It may well be that the issue is better handled by a defter touch of the issue, which writers feminist and non-feminist alike may attempt to refine while trying to avoid the elephant in the room. But the fence exists for a reason.
There is a piece on Substack written from a feminine perspective, "A Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangement", that touches on some of the consequences of the issue without specifically pinning the issue on early puberty specifically that I found to be fairly interesting.
I appreciate this topic being broached, it’s important.
From my perspective and ‘becoming-woman’ experiences, I think I would have benefitted from a culture than has a mother in it. There’s alot of talk about absent fathers but if a girl can only draw her meaning/identity from a predominantly masculine symbolic then it is no wonder she feels alienated and lost with these developments. We need an initiation into becoming-woman just as men have desired that for themselves in becoming men. Menstruation was not really spoken about when I was growing up, it was an almost meaningless inconvenience, alongside boobs. I think the suggestion of gender segregation in regards to this cultural and imaginative lack has potential. I’m not talking about gender segregated toilets (I think this is where feminism goes to die tbh), I’m thinking more along the lines of the creation of a female to female culture where we feel safe creating meaning and talking about our bodies, giving us the confidence to relate to men in ways that don’t feel as hostile. Because ofcourse we are not always in a state of being alluring spectacles, even our cycles mean we have fluctuating modes of desire, we don’t feel consistently the same in our bodies through out the month. Me and my friends often discuss ‘monster mode’ (luteal phase) 😂 these experiences are not adequately symbolised.
You might be onto something here re: initiation into womanhood. Periods are not really celebrated; they are, like you said, more cast as annoyances, and we learn how to manage the annoyance. We need to bring back Red Tent culture 😄 It would keep younger girls feeling protected with the army of women mentors surrounding them, as well as the inherent safety in sex segregation. Plus, less shame ("I hate being a girl!") and more pride in what our bodies can do would be very beneficial for self-esteem, which affects so much sexual behavior down the line.
Trans women don't bleed, so they would have no reason to be there. And trans men, while they might still menstruate, would ruin the feminine energy in the tent, so unfortunately I'm gonna have to be a TERF about this one.
Personally, I always felt like disgusting garbage when I had my period. It wasn't even an annoyance, it was "omfg someone just kill me already, my existence is disgusting"
Now you mention it, I think I underplay it when I describe it as an annoyance, I had/have extremely heavy menstruation (probably undiagnosed endo). Because no one spoke about it (not to mention prepared us for it) it, I assumed the same uniform experience was happening to everyone, just silently. No matter what preparation I made at school, I’d often bleed through onto chairs (mortifying for a young person). This would then lead to being put on contraceptives at 13, not because i was sexual active but to stop the problem of menstruation.
One of the things I’ve noticed about many of my female friends and family is our sense of humour being vulgar and bodily, making visceral bodily references, and I wonder if this comes from the fact we lack a more substantial cultural symbolic that expresses our bodily experiences. Bodies that are made very present to us (via puberty and menstruation) yet just not spoken about. Also a shared love of horror movies and gore seems to be suspiciously common 🤔
If I had a daughter I’d want her to know all about it, the cyclical effects, the hormones that alter mood, pain management etc. sexual difference has the potential to be such a positive and visionary project, I may mourn for the suppressed feminine of my youth, but better late than never
It was probably the early stages of endo in my case, too, but get this-- I started showing symptoms in 1997 or 1998, and didn't have endo surgery until the end of 2022.
I definitely agree with you on the fixation on horror thing! Also, I noticed as far back as the '90s that a lot of girls-- myself included-- were very drawn to the idea of witchcraft. I was at an all girl's Catholic school for a while and me and my friends still formed a coven and constantly talked about witchcraft lol.
Important post. I'm a couple of years away from having to navigate these waters with my own kids, but I'm not looking forward to it.
Thirty years later I can still remember a high school classmate whose hormones and genetics had lined up so that she looked much older than she was. Not only did she develop early, she was tall and athletic, and as a high school freshman she could easily have passed for a college sophomore. I was two years older and didn't know her well, but everyone in our high school heard nonstop rumors about her being a huge slut, which I'm sure in hindsight were untrue (and probably started by other girls.) It must have been a hellish social experience. Generalize that to a much larger group of girls and it's no wonder we're seeing so much mental illness among young women. Feminism isn't the solution, but it's reacting to a real problem.
There's a lot to be said for old-fashioned Victorian values which drew a sharp distinction between respectable and disreputable women, and where there were serious social penalties to harassing or attacking the reputation of a woman known to be respectable. But there's no way we're ever going to get that past back.
As you say, this is an impossible subject for men to discuss publicly in good faith. And while optics aren't everything, the online (male) right has an optics problem here: like flies to shit, talk of pubertal age inevitably attracts creepy spergs who insist that if the female is in estrus, it should be permissible to mate with her, because anything else would be un-Darwinian.
Women police any talk of this because they don't want to let covert pedos into the overton window. This is an understandable impulse, but by heavy-handedly censoring literally *any* talk of this hugely consequential development they are only hurting their daughters.
This made me realize something. I was highly selective when choosing a relationship partner, and when me and my wife started seeing each other I immediately felt that her "personality" was different from the girls I met and dated before. Later, she told me she went through puberty unusually late, within the 'historically normal' time frame, much later than most of her female friends.
Maybe part of her "personality" that I liked was that, unlike most if not all other girls I met and dated before, she was not damaged, traumatized and sex-negative in ways described here. She was conservative, but also definitely not sex-negative. Maybe looking for late bloomer girls could be a useful dating & mating advice for guys.
Also, I am wondering whether boys/men have the same issue. Spermarche (first ejaculation) occurs between the age of 12 and 15 (source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3944237/ ), and from this point, boys basically become incels as they're is hardly able to find a girl to have sex with (most often it's even legally prohibited). Prolonged inceldom also leads to trauma, frustration and sex-negativity, and even in very liberal societies that allow teenage casual sex, each boy lives a couple of years as incel anyway.
Puberty for boys is almost as complicated a process as it is for girls. One difference is that girls become fertile and reach full sexual maturity in a relatively small window of age, whereas boys can become fertile and then stay sexually immature for almost a decade after. Sexual maturity here is everything from finishing physical growth and getting full facial hair to emotional maturity and a developed sexual sense of self. With decreasing levels of testosterone, you have this window widening for boys-or actually, I should say men here as they are in their mid 20s by the time they finish maturing- as it starts at roughly the same age but ends later and later.
Good point on the wives. My wife was also a late bloomer, and considerably more sane than previous girlfriends. Now I'm hoping it's at least partly genetic and my daughter will have that benefit.
Not sure if I buy the male thing as much. Getting less sex than you would like is the human male condition. Every man is an incel at some point in his life.
But there is a truth there in that the emergence and recognition of unfulfillable sexual desire is when I clearly delineate my very happy childhood ending and my much less happy adolescence beginning. I noticed that a long time ago. I'm not sure if we're all euphemizing what's unpleasant about being a male teenager, but for me that was basically 100% of it. All the other annoyances, changes, and stresses were extremely minor in comparison.
Big if true, but I would need some more convincing. Are there any correlational studies on this? Are women with early menarche more likely to be feminists, or more likely to have negative opinions about men, or more likely to have mental health problems or lower overall life satisfaction? Or are there too many confounders (e.g. unhealthy girls have later menarche)?
There are too many confounding variables to quantify this relationship in a scientific way. Some aspects of life (especially those pertaining to sentiment and internal narratives) are too messy and abstract to rely on anything other than anecdotal evidence.
But whenever I show this data to a smart and high openness woman and present my theory I never hear anything other than "yeah that makes sense." I suggest you try the same thing.
Every study I've seen, and simple observation, tells me that girls hit puberty earlier now merely because of increased adiposity. They're fatter. And you don't need to be actually "fat" but even normal sized kids these days are generally much softer than they used to be. Before roughly the 80s and 90s, teenagers were almost universally rail thin. Like, REALLY skinny by today's standards.
The women in my family are all tall and slim with basically the same body type. My older sister looked like a literal skeleton when she was 13, in the 80s. I looked skinny but not like a skeleton, in the 90s. Our mom looked like a concentration camp victim at 13, in the 60s. My sister's daughter, born in the 2000s, looked slim but not at all skinny, and she definitely had softness. I know lots of teenagers who are more plump than their parents, which basically didn't exist in the past.
I also think pre adolescent and adolescent girls have been getting hit on by adult men for all of history and that's nothing new. I was a super late bloomer and got my period and developed way after my friends, around 14. Regardless of that fact and being totally flat chested, I STILL had friends dads and strange men on the street leering and saying disgusting things to me, and was trapped in a corner and molested by two older boys at a public pool. My mom has similar tales from the 50s and 60s, and like I said, she resembled a blonde concentration camp victim with zero boobs, and it still happened. I don't think these things are new, they just weren't talked about previously. And yes of course a teenage girl with big gravity defying boobs is going to get it all the worse.
Btw, women absolutely DO consider that their own fathers are disgusting pigs just like their friend's dad and their math teacher and their uncle and their neighbor...but the thought is so horrifying and profoundly upsetting and depressing to think about that it's best to put it out of your mind, because what else can you do? I mean how exactly do you think it would have made you feel if you found out in junior high that your mom was likely furiously masturbating to 13 year old boys? And so was everyone else's mom? Like wtf do you do with that information??
Anyway, I appreciate your concern with and interest in the issue. I do disagree that it's environmental beyond just increased levels of adiposity. And I disagree that it's the stating and harassment from men (virtually all adult men, not much of an issue with boys your own age). Ask literally any woman alive, even 75 year olds, and they will tell you they were cat called and harassed more from age 13 to 17 than any other age.
Personally I think it's bc of porn and women now having to know exactly what guys are watching and getting off to...every guy, all the time. It's another thing you really can't deal with other than just choosing to not think of it. Before the 90s, this was something most women were ignorant of or could easily avoid. Before the 70s, it didn't even exist. Now, you can't help but know about it and know exactly how absolutely fucking depraved it is, and it's every guy everywhere all the time. That is an enormous difference in a few decades, and profoundly psychologically unsettling for women/girls. I'm surprised they're not ALL asexual/lesbians whatever.
There are studies that control for adiposity and it only explains a small part of the decrease in age of menarche. It’s actually quite likely that increased obesity in young women is the result of precocious puberty and not its cause. Hormones affect adiposity much more than adiposity affects hormones.
About getting attention from men despite having no boobs, there are quite a lot of things that signal sexual maturity more than boobs do. Boobs are just a stand-in to use in an argument, but realistically, your facial characteristics, shape of your hips, length of eyelashes, body hair, redness and clarity of skin and various body odors are much more salient in sexual signaling than boobs- especially because boobs can be artificially enhanced or hidden away in baggy clothes.
Ha. Yeah I got tons of attention from adult men at 14 but it wasn't til I started artificially enhancing with a major padded bra in high school that the boys my age paid attention. ;) I do get that the cause and effect of body fat isn't clear, but there's definitely a strong association in international studies done everywhere. To the point where they can almost predict how many months earlier you're likely to get your period for every one point increase in BMI.
Plus it's well known that a lot of extreme athletes who keep very low body fat, like gymnasts and ballerinas, often don't get their period til they're like 16.
I certainly remember being rail thin and flat chested in junior high while all my friends looked like full grown women. And all those girls with D cups in 7th grade seemed to like the attention...they got boyfriends early, they got married early, they're all normal now. So I still say the increasing numbers of asexual, nonbinary, trans etc young women who are rejecting sex with men entirely is mostly about porn and the internet revealing too much to everyone about what other people are really like. But I do grant that separate from that, early puberty is not a good thing. I have a mentally challenged niece who went through puberty at age 10 and she's mentally about 6...it has been very bad.
Strong predictive value of a correlation doesn’t always mean a strong correlation. Adiposity is predictably associated with early puberty, where you can predict the number of months of precocity based on BMI, but it doesn’t explain the entirety of the phenomenon-not even close. That’s why you get a weak but highly consistent correlation between the two variables.
What do you think about all the de-transitioners coming forward that say that they either developed too early and felt dysmorphia because of it or the ones that felt insecure in their perfectly normal bodies because all the other girls their age were hyper feminine and much more sexually mature? This seems to me very much like a drastic population level shift causing issues on both ends of the spectrum.
I think any time you're on the extreme on either end and don't "fit in" or are different from your peers and what's portrayed in the media, it's very difficult for teenagers, especially girls.
At puberty you become exquisitely attuned to social status and the opinion of your peers and it's mortifying to be out of step (unless it's for something admired...the boys who got tall and matured earlier than others certainly seemed to socially benefit from it). I was absolutely OBSESSED and perpetually mortified by being flat chested and not getting my period til two years after most of my friends. Though honestly I was much more tortured and upset about not living up to the standards of models and actresses than I was about my own peer group. But it preoccupied 90% of my thoughts at the time, and I wouldve murdered my own family to get myself a nice pair of boobs. My recollection is that the well developed girls in 7th and 8th grade mostly flaunted it, but they were in the realm of normal. There were probably girls who had developed in more like 4th or 5th grade who were embarrassed and hiding it so perhaps I didn't notice. Of course this was the 90s so no one had ever heard of such a thing as trans or NB...I can easily imagine that if one is an outlier on any measure that's generally considered socially undesirable, that a tween girl would look for any possible avenue to escape her circumstances. It's easy for me to imagine thinking to myself at 13 "hey I'm tall and thin and flat, I'd make a really good looking guy, maybe I should try that". I did listen to Jordan Peterson's interview with a detrans girl and she mentions that a lot of her motivation was being flat chested and not curvy and feeling like she didn't live up to feminine ideals. It would be interesting if someone did a study looking at how many female teenaged transitioners fall within the average/median range for things like height, weight, and development level, and how many fall more towards the tail on both sides of the curve.
I mean...couldn't possibly be because there is massively more food, everywhere, all the time now?? People used to eat meals, and that was it. Moms didn't carry snacks and drinks everywhere. Gas stations didn't sell food and snacks. Literally only grocery stores, farm stands, and restaurants sold food...other than popcorn (which was way smaller) at the movies or hot dogs at a sporting event. I remember those days and I'm not that old! There is food and candy and snacks and drinks filled with sugar sold and available literally everywhere all the time now. Every mom I know literally carries snacks on her everywhere she goes. That was not a thing pre 1990s. People were just expected to be hungry sometimes and it wasn't considered the end of the world.
I'm just saying...Occam's razor. This trend is not limited to the US. It has occurred all over the world including very remote and not very westernized places. The biggest difference is people all over the world have far more food available to them than ever in history. Most places were subject to ocassional famine most of history and there were still some through the 1990s...in the 80s children in the millions still literally starved to death. There hasn't been a real famine in the entire world in over a decade (warnings and fund raisers about famine risk notwithstanding, you don't see skeletal 7 year olds with distended bellies like was a common sight on TV in the 80s). People are fatter everywhere because they're well fed.
People underestimate how much better tasting food is these days too.
Even compared to the aughts, food today is MUCH tastier thanks to massive advances in industrial gastronomy. Compared to the 80s it's like a completely different country. Makes compulsive snacking a lot easier. Even in like 1998 your option to get fat was like Lunchables or Kid Cuisine. Or for adults, compare a Hungry Man to a Devour bowl. Night and day.
Thankfully there have recently been a lot of advances specifically in making low calorie food not taste like shit and that is taking a lot of the edge off the problem. These days the healthiest protein bars / shakes taste delicious, whereas even 15 years ago they were disgusting. But I think like 2005-2015 in particular was kind of a danger zone when it comes to culinary tech.
And lol I was the weirdo drinking protein drinks in the 90s, and I remember gagging them down and sometimes almost puking, they tasted so bad. Now they're great.
Oh totally. Food is completely different. Other than your basics, it was awful in the past. And there were no options outside of big cities. The level of diversity and quality and options now is off the charts compared to 1980s and prior, there's no comparison. Before the 1990s, you couldn't even get a salad anywhere but big cities that wasn't just iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing. Grocery stores had bananas, oranges, and apples and maybe some plums and berries in the summer, but that was it. No one had ever heard of a kiwi. No one ate sushi. Most towns had a low quality pizza and Italian place and a crappy Chinese place and like a Long John Silver's and Ponderosa and that was it. Food used to be one of the big distinctions between a major metro and everywhere else, same with access to cool clothes. Now you can get great quality food and fashion and lots of others things no matter where you live.
It’s occurred all over the world in places where the diet changes to American processed food.
The widespread obesity happening in America and its vassal states is not simply due to an abundance of food. Food scarcity hasn’t been an issue in the US since the Great Depression, almost 100 years ago.
I'm not talking about obesity...yes that's an issue in most western nations now. But I'm talking about just more food and nourishment in general, worldwide. In places like Peru and Afghanistan, everywhere. It isn't about being "fat" it's about not being rail skinny with no extra calories, as women need a certain level of body fat to get their period. Don't think I'm talking about obesity, but actual lack on malnourishment. 20 year olds in many nations are now far taller than their parents and grandparents were too, because they have enough food. And age of first menses is dropping worldwide. Globally, we have produced about 1% more food every year PER CAPITA since the 1990s, meaning even with population growth food production goes up even more and there is simply far more food. So plenty of girls that 40 years ago didn't have enough body fat til they were older, because they were actually semi malnourished, now reach that point earlier. And in the US or other places where obesity is an issue, a plump elementary age girl might get there even earlier. But don't mistake me saying this is just because of being overweight or obese, that's not at all the case.
But people really seem to forget just how thin people were in the past...they didn't much muscle mass either. Look at old photos of the public and men are all skinny with very little muscle OR fat. And kids that people think are normal weight today still have more body fat than they used to. I have photos of my friends and I at age 11 in bathing suits circa 1990 and out of ten girls every one is rail thin...not a single bit of soft arm flesh or belly pudge among them, which today you'd see on at least some kids in a group of ten. And btw, we were freaking hungry all the time too.
Your comment made me text my mom and sister to ask, because we were all very skinny kids. My mom got hers at 10 or 11, still in elementary school in the 60s or early 70s. I was surprised to hear that. I got mine at 12 in the mid-90s. My younger sister hasn't responded, but my hazy memory says she got hers around 11 or 12, too. After reading Sai's comment after yours, I'm really curious about this fat/hormone link, either way. None of us started gaining weight until my mom during menopause (aside from some normal fluctuation). My mom and sister were those kinds of women who walked out of the hospital in their normal pants after having babies.
Yeah, same in my family. I have pics of my mom on the beach in the 70s post babies and she was thin as a model. Though we all got ours later around 13/14. I was one of the kids embarrassed about not having it and having all my supplies ready years before I needed them.
I like watching music documentaries from the 60s and 70s, which generally feature a lot of concert footage of young people, and that's where the weight/fat difference is hugely striking. Huge crowds of people in their teens and 20s and everyone is skinny. It's actually much more noticeable wrt the men than it is the women, because they have no fat OR muscles...they're all just skinny birds compared to nowadays.
Would make an awful lot of sense from the evolutionary point of view, no? Body reaches a certain weight and figures it's mature enough to start reproducing. If that comes way earlier than it did in the environment of evolutionary adaptation due to much higher calorie loads...well, you can guess.
I think they've shown you're not attracted to people you grow up with (Westermarck effect), which is probably why incest isn't much more common.
I was actually underweight when I experienced menarche at age 11. As in, I was somewhere around 70-80 lbs. I was still underweight for a few years after that. So no, it's not just a weight thing when that happens. For me, this happened in the late 1990s-- not far off from the 20th century time period you're talking about.
Where did you grow up and you have reason to believe there was a particular environmental exposure there? I.e. was it just you or something happening to other girls in that area? Did your mom get hers around the same age? I think 11 is within the realm of normal...that's 6th grade definitely some girls had theirs then but 12 seemed more common. You are suddenly triggering for me a memory I had completely forgotten about...there was one girl I was in school with who was very short and skinny and childlike in all ways (personality and appearance), who got hers very early like 10 or 11. She didn't have a father in her home. I'd forgotten about her.
I grew up in Rochester, NY. It's entirely possible that there were weird chemicals in the environment-- Kodak and Xerox were based there. It was also the "murder capitol of New York" even in the 1980s/1990s when NYC was at its peak level of violence. My mom didn't grow up there (she grew up in Rome NY) and got hers closer to age 13. It was really hard to compare this to what other girls were going to because the school I went to was REALLY small-- there were only 4 of us in the 6th grade class, and I was the only 6th grade girl. We shared a classroom and teacher with the 4th and 5th grade, kind of like a one room school house type arrangement. The reason for going to private school was that the public schools within city limits (as opposed to the suburbs) had an appalling reputation with everything from test scores to stuff like kids getting into fights, etc. I grew up with the impression that public school was terrifying LOL (this is hilarious because I work in the Sioux Falls public schools now). So before 7th grade, I had no one to compare notes with. In 7th grade, a lot of my peers were getting their first periods and talking about it a fair bit.
I've actually heard the "absent father" explanation before, but that doesn't quite check out for me. My parents are still married to this day. My dad had a well-paying job so my mom could stay home. On weekends, my dad would take me and my brothers to places like Mendon Ponds, Discovery Zone, the Science Museum and Planetarium, etc. Basically every weekend when I was a kid was a fun outing of some sort, so he was more involved than most fathers probably.
However, I remember my home life being really stressful from the mid-'90s onwards. My parents fought with each other constantly. My dad was stressed out because the company he worked for changed management and the new boss was absolutely horrible, but he didn't want to change jobs. My mom started going through "the change" when my younger brother was still a toddler. In the early '90s, we all used to sit together and eat dinner as a family, and by the end of the decade I would be eating in the living room with my younger brother watching "The Simpsons" during dinner every single night and my older brother would watch the bigger TV in the basement. None of us wanted to start sitting together again. I'm unscrambling exactly what happened to this day.
That's funny, I grew up in upstate NY too. Not Rochester, but a similar post industrialist town with shut down factories and major corporations that probably used to dump chemicals in the rivers, very similar. Though in other ways, we're the opposite. My parents were divorced, I went to public school, I was WAY mentally and emotionally ahead of my physical development and always wanting to be an emancipated adult, not a kid.
One thing is similar...home and parents were a nightmare and claustrophobic awkward emotionally borderline unbearable situation from age 13 to 17. But honestly I kind of thought that's just how it was with everyone, especially girls. Puberty and adults are not a good mix, and a daughter going through puberty and mom going through menopause is an explosive mix.
Me and all my friends were all at absolute WAR with our moms at that age. I think it was more normal for people not to get along with their parents back then. Parents didn't try to be their kids' friends and they weren't. When I see how close and open and nice to each other and indulgent parents are with their teenagers these days, it's astonishing to me (even my own dad with my half brother who was born when I was in high school...he's was a totally different type of parent). At least at my school, we 100% viewed our parents as our enemies and prison wardens, and we were all nightmares for them. My mom always talks about how one day around age 17 I finally emerged from my room and had a conversation with her, and she was so shocked she didn't even know what to do. We all get along great now but those years were rough.
Good post, but I'm not sure why you frame this as a 'feminist issue', when it would be more appropriate just to call it a 'women's issue'. As we can see from the rather unhinged comments of a Mzz Grundy elsewhere in this thread, all we can expect feminists to do is to mine this biological problem for political ammunition, at the price of deepening every social and psychological wound caused by it.
but most women who call themselves feminists aren't gross political lesbians etc.
for 80% of self-described feminists, feminism literally just means "boys should be nice to me" or "I grew up in a blue state"--calling it feminist is a good rhetorical inroad with those broads
Setting 18 as the age of majority is a fairly new thing, even in Western civilization. We need to remember that as recently as 1860, the average lifespan was <40. Children were rushed along into adulthood out of sheer necessity.
Improved sanitation, health care and nutrition has changed all that, of course and I certainly do not advocate rushing children into sexual activity, but I am not sure that supporting offspring to the age of 30 is helpful either.
Good hypothesis and worth investigating. But I don't think this is a feminist issue, nor should it be (feminism = ideological lens on gender issues). Instead, it should be an issue of rational, constructive discourse with people concerned about the well-being of both sexes.
it's just rhetoric; calling it feminist is a tactical choice to slip a foot in the door with more normie women who might otherwise reject it out of hand
Hear, hear. Feminism is a broad church and has achieved much but in current times I wonder if the goal of some feminists is to have a secure bubble to share low-quality arguments without fear of counter proposals.
« Normal people are too stupid and bigoted to let a man express any opinion on something as sensitive as this. The only reason I’m willing to start the discussion is that I’m incredibly autistic and disagreeable. » I wish I had your eloquence. You are truly the Cicero of our times.
About a year ago I collected a bunch of demographic data sets about this subject for a class project on endocrine disrupting chemicals. Along with the average ages of menarche and thelarche(budding of breast tissue) decreasing we also have rapidly increasing numbers of highly precocious puberty(as early as 6year-olds, sometimes), and increasing prevalence of every kind of disease that is linked to hormone disruption in women. There are literally hundreds of biochemical systems in women’s bodies that are regulated by the same hormones that govern sexual development. There has also been nearly 4 decades of 1% per year decline in age-adjusted testosterone levels for men. Obviously, this decrease also goes with all sorts of health issues like a decrease in overall immunity, strength, bone density, muscle mass, sperm count, and just an overall shittier health. Not all of the data is demographic either, but demographic data establishes a widespread phenomenon. There is just as much chemical analysis and lab testing data to establish direct causal links between pollutant levels, hormone disruption, developmental issues in different animal species and also behavioral patterns associated with the hormone levels.
Can people reading here grasp just how many different kinds of social impact all of these chemical changes must be having? Your hormonal health directly affects every major decision in your life, both directly and indirectly. An early thelarche causing lifelong sexual trauma and making more women distrust and dislike men in general is just barely scratching the surface, in my opinion. This is not even to mention the many social causes exacerbating many of the hormonal disruptions, like lowered paternal involvement directly reducing age of menarche.
Putting together that project (with input from many mentors that are a lot more learned than I am) was the most devastatingly depressing experiences I have ever had in my life. Most professors, scientific researchers and engineers I have mentioned this data to are either already aware of it or are not particularly surprised by it. I have felt like an absolute lunatic as I try to explain to people twice my age, people who have multiple degrees in chemistry, medicine, or other STEM subjects, why this data has unbelievably far reaching consequences and why they should take it more seriously. I have tried and almost entirely failed at this so far. Perhaps I really am a lunatic and don’t know what I am talking about here, but there is never any convincing argument to the contrary to all the concerns I have raised. My argument is mainly based on the chemistry and the clear demographic data on the subject, which no one has denied. The best counter I got so far was- “well if it was such a major issue then wouldn’t there be a lot more noise about it? Since no one is talking about it it must not be that big of an issue”. I will put together another “lunatic” essay about it on my Substack soon-ish(I am in the middle of exams) for anyone wanting to read it, but frankly I don’t have a lot of hope that anything will be done about it, since the people that are best placed to do anything about it seem not to be bothered at all.
Ironically, this is one of the reasons I was disappointed that the Cass Report discovered that there are possibly many health risks for puberty blockers. Puberty blockers made sense for a lot of these confused girls who were not ready to be sexualized. I hoped it was unintentionally delaying menarche to a more appropriate age. But in retrospect, correcting one chemical endocrine disruption with a different chemical was never going to be as healthy as stopping the first endocrine disruption.
If you continue your research and publish it, or even post it on Substack, you can count on at least one reader who will avoid giving their child what endocrine disrupting chemicals you identify, if that is even possible these days.
I am not an expert in any of the subjects I am talking about here- perhaps that is why I can look at all the different aspects of it- but what I am planning to write about is how all the trends fit together.
If you are specifically looking for an endocrinological analysis of hormone disrupting chemicals, start here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2726844/#B25 and follow the sources listed.
Lots of variables are at play here, as well as nonlinear dynamics and feedback loops. To make matters worse, social factors are presumably involved (difficult to quantify and include in a model). Data on environmental pollutants and exposure levels are also basically non extant prior to the 90s. It's going to be as tough a puzzle to solve as the question of anthropogenic climate change.
Some random thoughts/observations that may be of use:
Nutrition and caloric intake are one driving factor in determining the average age of menarche in a given population. Physiological stress can cause an individual woman to cease menstruation. (common in female distance runners)
Female hormonal cycles are altered by the presence/density of other females. Synchronization of cycles can occur in a house full of women, for example.
I was an adolescent in the early 90s. Girls went through puberty beginning in the 6th grade. It seemed nearly universal by 7th grade (age 12-13) For the Black population, this was shifted 1-2 years earlier.
For the Boys, it was similar to the girls, but shifted later by about 1 year.
As for the decrease in testosterone: The elimination of male spaces, especially work places must play a role. Competition/team work in male exclusive environments raises T levels in men, at least temporarily. 'Winning' competition (against other men) has an even greater effect. Possession of physical territory/successfully defending said territory has a similar effect. De-territorialisation has the opposite effect. What is mass immigration if not de-territorialisation of native male population? Atomisation is a characterized by, among other things, de territorialisation. No one 'owns' the local environment - we are all merely transient residents of the same crappy hotel.
Obesity lowers testosterone levels in men....and low t-levels cause men to gain fat mass. Not sure about the arrow of causation on this one. Might be bidirectional. Either way, the high carb, high sugar common diet must play a role at the population level.
As someone who studied chemistry i have often thought how insane we are as a society in how little regulation and safety for chemicals that gets put into our environment.
A chemical or diet related cause you would expect to vary a bit across regions unless it's ubiquitous (plastics?)
Fascinating that girls without dad's tend to have earlier menarche pointing to other environmental reasons but nothing today hasn't happened before has it, ie stressors etc?
Edit: female birth control, hrt in the water supply?
An old frogtwitter poster, that Walt probably remembers, named @menaquinone4 introduced the topic into the alt-right sphere back in the day. Since then, I've been vastly fascinated with the subject of Endocrine Disruptors and their more than plausible effects in modern society. Especially BPA which I think there is quite an amount of solid scientific evidence of its effects.
However, aside from you guys, I've not seen many people discuss this despite it has wide implications in many modern health and societal trends as you suggests.
What’s the story on paternal involvement and menarche?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964498/#:~:text=However%2C%20there%20may%20be%20paternal,of%20menarche%20in%20their%20daughters
Paternal involvement is correlated with a more stable environment growing up and paternal abandonment or neglect is associated with earlier menarche.
Anecdote from father of three young adult women: my daughters’ and their female friends were physically mature, i.e. breasts and waists and hips of adult women, by age 12-13, and still were mentally and behaviorally children. It seems plausible to me that this is occurring earlier than it has in the past and that this has negative consequences for the girls. This is a serious subject with serious consequences, and you are right to raise it. You were also right to attempt to move the conversation into domains, and among female commentators, where it will be accepted and taken seriously. Has Mary Harrington or Louise Perry written about this?
Thank you--this is exactly the response I was hoping for.
I don't believe anyone has tackled this yet but I am lobbying Mary hard. She is the right voice to take this up.
I understand that this is something that has particular focus on women but this idea that we need to defer to some group to talk about a social issues needs to stop. How is this not just identitarianism?
Someones views and behaviour should be judged on their merits. The seclusion of special feminine issues is part of the reason why gender ideology has taken hold. Feminism down played biological explanations because it was inconvenient to their social theories.
Edit:typos
It’s not a matter of deference. It’s a matter of recognizing that a mass audience has these filters, and they’re not going to listen to a female focused issue like this if it doesn’t come from a woman. You can say that’s wrong, but that’s a reality. if you’re trying to sell breakfast cereal, you have to sell to the audience that you have, to the market that exists. Walt is absolutely right that for this issue to get traction and for people to take it seriously it needs to be women raising the issue. He has a good intuition about what the public needs to hear and how an issue needs to be presented, in this case.
Well that's fair enough I spose but borders on condescending. Of course there's a large body of men who will take this issue seriously
Try raising this issue with a 30th percentile agreeableness normie woman and report back your results.
I'm sure if the set and setting was right I could have this conversation, I'm a bit puzzled by the sensitivity? Menarche is not exactly a dirty word...
Your mileage may vary. If you know a better way to do something important, go ahead and try to do it. No kidding. No snark. Let 100 flowers bloom.
My gut instinct on this is that if some man tried to raise the question of why young women are experiencing their first periods earlier and earlier, the focus would not be on the question of what’s happening to the girls, but on why some creepy guy wants to talk about it, and that would be a distraction from the main issue. On the other hand, if some obviously serious and intelligent and well intentioned woman like, say, Mary Harrington, began to investigate this question it would get a lot more traction, and her motives would not be questioned. I don’t see anything condescending about recognizing that reality.
I think you're reading too much into it, I would be happy to talk about the issue of menarche with anybody and I'm a man. That's why we have medical language.
Sure, I can write about this! My basic summary is along these lines:
--I had my first period at age 11. I remember vividly to this day that I was wearing underwear with Disney pictures on it I was so young.
--I know that my home life was chaotic, and my best friend is constantly pointing out sign and symptoms of CPTSD with me. There's several years of my life before that early menarche where I literally remember Simpsons episodes in way, way more vivid detail than anything that actually went on in my life, like I was constantly dissociating. I joked about this one time with my older brother and he responded completely seriously that watching the Simpsons was "a safe space" from the total chaos around us.
--I also remember a shift in energy with my family roughly around 1995ish. I've gotten up the nerve to ask about it, and my parents kind of tend to blame each other and never give any answers that are satisfactory.
--Since moving to Sioux Falls, I've become more aware of how abnormal the place I grew up was. The guy across the street from me blew up his house when I was 2. I read a substack article about a movie that's incredibly horrifying unless you basically grew up in a 3rd world country-- and then when I watched it, I had the "3rd world" reaction of laughing at it instead of being horrified. I don't know if the stress of growing up in that part of the country contributed to the issue.
--I also remember consistently acting about 2 years younger than I actually was socially through most of the time I was growing up. I tended to have younger friends and get made fun of for having more childish, nerdy interests. I also remember being kind of terrified of the idea of dating as far back as 6th or 7th grade?
--I really have no clue how this happened to me at age 11, but I remember struggling with severe depression for years after that and couldn't explain why. I remember the specific moment that the depression began, though. Every year, the elementary school I went to would have a camp out at a park, and there were specific places in the woods that everyone liked to play in. One of these was "Frog Pond", where we'd wade around catching tadpoles. Another one was "Crayfish Creek". Same idea, lots of wading into the water and interacting with the wildlife. This camp out was a thing I looked forward to every year. Then, in 6th grade, I was already getting my period and couldn't go in the water with the other kids because I was wearing a pad that weekend. To this day, I cry thinking about it. I felt isolated from the other kids even though they didn't know what was going on and I didn't say anything about it. I was the only girl in the entire school dealing with periods, and for a year or two before that I'd had horrible, stabbing pains on my sides as my breasts grew in. I didn't just feel isolated from my childhood friends at that moment; I felt isolated from my entire past and like I was being forced to leave behind a part of my life too soon. I remember leaning into nerdy, tomboyish things after that-- Dungeons and Dragons, video games, sci-fi movies, stupid adult cartoons. I couldn't stand thinking about "girly" stuff a lot of the time. Years later, I would camp at Occupy Wall Street and dress like a boy the entire time and cut my hair short. I hung out with the queerest people in NYC, and peaked with this kind of thing around 2017 when I used they/them pronouns interchangeably with she/her pronouns and identified as "pansexual and solo poly". I absolutely couldn't "own" any kind of "normal", monogamous, straight sexuality despite not really being trans or anything either.
I don't know if I can give any scientific insight on this, but I can certainly write something emotional and talk about what would help me personally open up to the idea of a romantic relationship.
Upon rethinking this article, I'm not sure there's any future in it. This might be one of those ideas that you've alluded to before which is reasonably debated in the hands of some but unsafe for normies. Modern society has engineered a fiction in which only pedophiles (publicly) find underaged girls hot and enforces it via social death. To counter with the notion it's natural for men to find underaged girls hot due to earlier acquisition of secondary sexual characteristics runs the risk of mixing with the naturalistic fallacy, which is monstrously widespread in society, and create a consensus that it's "fine" to comment on the rack of your daughter's middle school friends because it's "natural." The fact that the naturalistic fallacy is untrue does little to stop its popularity.
Society has attempted to stop this problem with a sledgehammer. It may well be that the issue is better handled by a defter touch of the issue, which writers feminist and non-feminist alike may attempt to refine while trying to avoid the elephant in the room. But the fence exists for a reason.
There is a piece on Substack written from a feminine perspective, "A Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangement", that touches on some of the consequences of the issue without specifically pinning the issue on early puberty specifically that I found to be fairly interesting.
Here's the link: https://zinnia01.substack.com/p/a-partial-explanation-of-zoomer-girl
Never heard of this writer, but this is excellent.
I appreciate this topic being broached, it’s important.
From my perspective and ‘becoming-woman’ experiences, I think I would have benefitted from a culture than has a mother in it. There’s alot of talk about absent fathers but if a girl can only draw her meaning/identity from a predominantly masculine symbolic then it is no wonder she feels alienated and lost with these developments. We need an initiation into becoming-woman just as men have desired that for themselves in becoming men. Menstruation was not really spoken about when I was growing up, it was an almost meaningless inconvenience, alongside boobs. I think the suggestion of gender segregation in regards to this cultural and imaginative lack has potential. I’m not talking about gender segregated toilets (I think this is where feminism goes to die tbh), I’m thinking more along the lines of the creation of a female to female culture where we feel safe creating meaning and talking about our bodies, giving us the confidence to relate to men in ways that don’t feel as hostile. Because ofcourse we are not always in a state of being alluring spectacles, even our cycles mean we have fluctuating modes of desire, we don’t feel consistently the same in our bodies through out the month. Me and my friends often discuss ‘monster mode’ (luteal phase) 😂 these experiences are not adequately symbolised.
We need coaching by the og boob bearers
You might be onto something here re: initiation into womanhood. Periods are not really celebrated; they are, like you said, more cast as annoyances, and we learn how to manage the annoyance. We need to bring back Red Tent culture 😄 It would keep younger girls feeling protected with the army of women mentors surrounding them, as well as the inherent safety in sex segregation. Plus, less shame ("I hate being a girl!") and more pride in what our bodies can do would be very beneficial for self-esteem, which affects so much sexual behavior down the line.
I’m just checking out the red tent now, it’s a visionary project; awesome
Sounds like a great space for transwomen to insert themselves into.
Trans women don't bleed, so they would have no reason to be there. And trans men, while they might still menstruate, would ruin the feminine energy in the tent, so unfortunately I'm gonna have to be a TERF about this one.
Personally, I always felt like disgusting garbage when I had my period. It wasn't even an annoyance, it was "omfg someone just kill me already, my existence is disgusting"
Now you mention it, I think I underplay it when I describe it as an annoyance, I had/have extremely heavy menstruation (probably undiagnosed endo). Because no one spoke about it (not to mention prepared us for it) it, I assumed the same uniform experience was happening to everyone, just silently. No matter what preparation I made at school, I’d often bleed through onto chairs (mortifying for a young person). This would then lead to being put on contraceptives at 13, not because i was sexual active but to stop the problem of menstruation.
One of the things I’ve noticed about many of my female friends and family is our sense of humour being vulgar and bodily, making visceral bodily references, and I wonder if this comes from the fact we lack a more substantial cultural symbolic that expresses our bodily experiences. Bodies that are made very present to us (via puberty and menstruation) yet just not spoken about. Also a shared love of horror movies and gore seems to be suspiciously common 🤔
If I had a daughter I’d want her to know all about it, the cyclical effects, the hormones that alter mood, pain management etc. sexual difference has the potential to be such a positive and visionary project, I may mourn for the suppressed feminine of my youth, but better late than never
It was probably the early stages of endo in my case, too, but get this-- I started showing symptoms in 1997 or 1998, and didn't have endo surgery until the end of 2022.
I definitely agree with you on the fixation on horror thing! Also, I noticed as far back as the '90s that a lot of girls-- myself included-- were very drawn to the idea of witchcraft. I was at an all girl's Catholic school for a while and me and my friends still formed a coven and constantly talked about witchcraft lol.
Important post. I'm a couple of years away from having to navigate these waters with my own kids, but I'm not looking forward to it.
Thirty years later I can still remember a high school classmate whose hormones and genetics had lined up so that she looked much older than she was. Not only did she develop early, she was tall and athletic, and as a high school freshman she could easily have passed for a college sophomore. I was two years older and didn't know her well, but everyone in our high school heard nonstop rumors about her being a huge slut, which I'm sure in hindsight were untrue (and probably started by other girls.) It must have been a hellish social experience. Generalize that to a much larger group of girls and it's no wonder we're seeing so much mental illness among young women. Feminism isn't the solution, but it's reacting to a real problem.
There's a lot to be said for old-fashioned Victorian values which drew a sharp distinction between respectable and disreputable women, and where there were serious social penalties to harassing or attacking the reputation of a woman known to be respectable. But there's no way we're ever going to get that past back.
As you say, this is an impossible subject for men to discuss publicly in good faith. And while optics aren't everything, the online (male) right has an optics problem here: like flies to shit, talk of pubertal age inevitably attracts creepy spergs who insist that if the female is in estrus, it should be permissible to mate with her, because anything else would be un-Darwinian.
Hit the nail on the head.
Women police any talk of this because they don't want to let covert pedos into the overton window. This is an understandable impulse, but by heavy-handedly censoring literally *any* talk of this hugely consequential development they are only hurting their daughters.
This made me realize something. I was highly selective when choosing a relationship partner, and when me and my wife started seeing each other I immediately felt that her "personality" was different from the girls I met and dated before. Later, she told me she went through puberty unusually late, within the 'historically normal' time frame, much later than most of her female friends.
Maybe part of her "personality" that I liked was that, unlike most if not all other girls I met and dated before, she was not damaged, traumatized and sex-negative in ways described here. She was conservative, but also definitely not sex-negative. Maybe looking for late bloomer girls could be a useful dating & mating advice for guys.
Also, I am wondering whether boys/men have the same issue. Spermarche (first ejaculation) occurs between the age of 12 and 15 (source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3944237/ ), and from this point, boys basically become incels as they're is hardly able to find a girl to have sex with (most often it's even legally prohibited). Prolonged inceldom also leads to trauma, frustration and sex-negativity, and even in very liberal societies that allow teenage casual sex, each boy lives a couple of years as incel anyway.
Puberty for boys is almost as complicated a process as it is for girls. One difference is that girls become fertile and reach full sexual maturity in a relatively small window of age, whereas boys can become fertile and then stay sexually immature for almost a decade after. Sexual maturity here is everything from finishing physical growth and getting full facial hair to emotional maturity and a developed sexual sense of self. With decreasing levels of testosterone, you have this window widening for boys-or actually, I should say men here as they are in their mid 20s by the time they finish maturing- as it starts at roughly the same age but ends later and later.
Good point on the wives. My wife was also a late bloomer, and considerably more sane than previous girlfriends. Now I'm hoping it's at least partly genetic and my daughter will have that benefit.
Not sure if I buy the male thing as much. Getting less sex than you would like is the human male condition. Every man is an incel at some point in his life.
But there is a truth there in that the emergence and recognition of unfulfillable sexual desire is when I clearly delineate my very happy childhood ending and my much less happy adolescence beginning. I noticed that a long time ago. I'm not sure if we're all euphemizing what's unpleasant about being a male teenager, but for me that was basically 100% of it. All the other annoyances, changes, and stresses were extremely minor in comparison.
Big if true, but I would need some more convincing. Are there any correlational studies on this? Are women with early menarche more likely to be feminists, or more likely to have negative opinions about men, or more likely to have mental health problems or lower overall life satisfaction? Or are there too many confounders (e.g. unhealthy girls have later menarche)?
There are too many confounding variables to quantify this relationship in a scientific way. Some aspects of life (especially those pertaining to sentiment and internal narratives) are too messy and abstract to rely on anything other than anecdotal evidence.
But whenever I show this data to a smart and high openness woman and present my theory I never hear anything other than "yeah that makes sense." I suggest you try the same thing.
Thank you! I will.
Every study I've seen, and simple observation, tells me that girls hit puberty earlier now merely because of increased adiposity. They're fatter. And you don't need to be actually "fat" but even normal sized kids these days are generally much softer than they used to be. Before roughly the 80s and 90s, teenagers were almost universally rail thin. Like, REALLY skinny by today's standards.
The women in my family are all tall and slim with basically the same body type. My older sister looked like a literal skeleton when she was 13, in the 80s. I looked skinny but not like a skeleton, in the 90s. Our mom looked like a concentration camp victim at 13, in the 60s. My sister's daughter, born in the 2000s, looked slim but not at all skinny, and she definitely had softness. I know lots of teenagers who are more plump than their parents, which basically didn't exist in the past.
I also think pre adolescent and adolescent girls have been getting hit on by adult men for all of history and that's nothing new. I was a super late bloomer and got my period and developed way after my friends, around 14. Regardless of that fact and being totally flat chested, I STILL had friends dads and strange men on the street leering and saying disgusting things to me, and was trapped in a corner and molested by two older boys at a public pool. My mom has similar tales from the 50s and 60s, and like I said, she resembled a blonde concentration camp victim with zero boobs, and it still happened. I don't think these things are new, they just weren't talked about previously. And yes of course a teenage girl with big gravity defying boobs is going to get it all the worse.
Btw, women absolutely DO consider that their own fathers are disgusting pigs just like their friend's dad and their math teacher and their uncle and their neighbor...but the thought is so horrifying and profoundly upsetting and depressing to think about that it's best to put it out of your mind, because what else can you do? I mean how exactly do you think it would have made you feel if you found out in junior high that your mom was likely furiously masturbating to 13 year old boys? And so was everyone else's mom? Like wtf do you do with that information??
Anyway, I appreciate your concern with and interest in the issue. I do disagree that it's environmental beyond just increased levels of adiposity. And I disagree that it's the stating and harassment from men (virtually all adult men, not much of an issue with boys your own age). Ask literally any woman alive, even 75 year olds, and they will tell you they were cat called and harassed more from age 13 to 17 than any other age.
Personally I think it's bc of porn and women now having to know exactly what guys are watching and getting off to...every guy, all the time. It's another thing you really can't deal with other than just choosing to not think of it. Before the 90s, this was something most women were ignorant of or could easily avoid. Before the 70s, it didn't even exist. Now, you can't help but know about it and know exactly how absolutely fucking depraved it is, and it's every guy everywhere all the time. That is an enormous difference in a few decades, and profoundly psychologically unsettling for women/girls. I'm surprised they're not ALL asexual/lesbians whatever.
There are studies that control for adiposity and it only explains a small part of the decrease in age of menarche. It’s actually quite likely that increased obesity in young women is the result of precocious puberty and not its cause. Hormones affect adiposity much more than adiposity affects hormones.
About getting attention from men despite having no boobs, there are quite a lot of things that signal sexual maturity more than boobs do. Boobs are just a stand-in to use in an argument, but realistically, your facial characteristics, shape of your hips, length of eyelashes, body hair, redness and clarity of skin and various body odors are much more salient in sexual signaling than boobs- especially because boobs can be artificially enhanced or hidden away in baggy clothes.
Ha. Yeah I got tons of attention from adult men at 14 but it wasn't til I started artificially enhancing with a major padded bra in high school that the boys my age paid attention. ;) I do get that the cause and effect of body fat isn't clear, but there's definitely a strong association in international studies done everywhere. To the point where they can almost predict how many months earlier you're likely to get your period for every one point increase in BMI.
Plus it's well known that a lot of extreme athletes who keep very low body fat, like gymnasts and ballerinas, often don't get their period til they're like 16.
I certainly remember being rail thin and flat chested in junior high while all my friends looked like full grown women. And all those girls with D cups in 7th grade seemed to like the attention...they got boyfriends early, they got married early, they're all normal now. So I still say the increasing numbers of asexual, nonbinary, trans etc young women who are rejecting sex with men entirely is mostly about porn and the internet revealing too much to everyone about what other people are really like. But I do grant that separate from that, early puberty is not a good thing. I have a mentally challenged niece who went through puberty at age 10 and she's mentally about 6...it has been very bad.
Strong predictive value of a correlation doesn’t always mean a strong correlation. Adiposity is predictably associated with early puberty, where you can predict the number of months of precocity based on BMI, but it doesn’t explain the entirety of the phenomenon-not even close. That’s why you get a weak but highly consistent correlation between the two variables.
What do you think about all the de-transitioners coming forward that say that they either developed too early and felt dysmorphia because of it or the ones that felt insecure in their perfectly normal bodies because all the other girls their age were hyper feminine and much more sexually mature? This seems to me very much like a drastic population level shift causing issues on both ends of the spectrum.
I think any time you're on the extreme on either end and don't "fit in" or are different from your peers and what's portrayed in the media, it's very difficult for teenagers, especially girls.
At puberty you become exquisitely attuned to social status and the opinion of your peers and it's mortifying to be out of step (unless it's for something admired...the boys who got tall and matured earlier than others certainly seemed to socially benefit from it). I was absolutely OBSESSED and perpetually mortified by being flat chested and not getting my period til two years after most of my friends. Though honestly I was much more tortured and upset about not living up to the standards of models and actresses than I was about my own peer group. But it preoccupied 90% of my thoughts at the time, and I wouldve murdered my own family to get myself a nice pair of boobs. My recollection is that the well developed girls in 7th and 8th grade mostly flaunted it, but they were in the realm of normal. There were probably girls who had developed in more like 4th or 5th grade who were embarrassed and hiding it so perhaps I didn't notice. Of course this was the 90s so no one had ever heard of such a thing as trans or NB...I can easily imagine that if one is an outlier on any measure that's generally considered socially undesirable, that a tween girl would look for any possible avenue to escape her circumstances. It's easy for me to imagine thinking to myself at 13 "hey I'm tall and thin and flat, I'd make a really good looking guy, maybe I should try that". I did listen to Jordan Peterson's interview with a detrans girl and she mentions that a lot of her motivation was being flat chested and not curvy and feeling like she didn't live up to feminine ideals. It would be interesting if someone did a study looking at how many female teenaged transitioners fall within the average/median range for things like height, weight, and development level, and how many fall more towards the tail on both sides of the curve.
The increased adiposity itself is due to endocrine disruptors…
I mean...couldn't possibly be because there is massively more food, everywhere, all the time now?? People used to eat meals, and that was it. Moms didn't carry snacks and drinks everywhere. Gas stations didn't sell food and snacks. Literally only grocery stores, farm stands, and restaurants sold food...other than popcorn (which was way smaller) at the movies or hot dogs at a sporting event. I remember those days and I'm not that old! There is food and candy and snacks and drinks filled with sugar sold and available literally everywhere all the time now. Every mom I know literally carries snacks on her everywhere she goes. That was not a thing pre 1990s. People were just expected to be hungry sometimes and it wasn't considered the end of the world.
I'm just saying...Occam's razor. This trend is not limited to the US. It has occurred all over the world including very remote and not very westernized places. The biggest difference is people all over the world have far more food available to them than ever in history. Most places were subject to ocassional famine most of history and there were still some through the 1990s...in the 80s children in the millions still literally starved to death. There hasn't been a real famine in the entire world in over a decade (warnings and fund raisers about famine risk notwithstanding, you don't see skeletal 7 year olds with distended bellies like was a common sight on TV in the 80s). People are fatter everywhere because they're well fed.
People underestimate how much better tasting food is these days too.
Even compared to the aughts, food today is MUCH tastier thanks to massive advances in industrial gastronomy. Compared to the 80s it's like a completely different country. Makes compulsive snacking a lot easier. Even in like 1998 your option to get fat was like Lunchables or Kid Cuisine. Or for adults, compare a Hungry Man to a Devour bowl. Night and day.
Thankfully there have recently been a lot of advances specifically in making low calorie food not taste like shit and that is taking a lot of the edge off the problem. These days the healthiest protein bars / shakes taste delicious, whereas even 15 years ago they were disgusting. But I think like 2005-2015 in particular was kind of a danger zone when it comes to culinary tech.
And lol I was the weirdo drinking protein drinks in the 90s, and I remember gagging them down and sometimes almost puking, they tasted so bad. Now they're great.
Oh totally. Food is completely different. Other than your basics, it was awful in the past. And there were no options outside of big cities. The level of diversity and quality and options now is off the charts compared to 1980s and prior, there's no comparison. Before the 1990s, you couldn't even get a salad anywhere but big cities that wasn't just iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing. Grocery stores had bananas, oranges, and apples and maybe some plums and berries in the summer, but that was it. No one had ever heard of a kiwi. No one ate sushi. Most towns had a low quality pizza and Italian place and a crappy Chinese place and like a Long John Silver's and Ponderosa and that was it. Food used to be one of the big distinctions between a major metro and everywhere else, same with access to cool clothes. Now you can get great quality food and fashion and lots of others things no matter where you live.
It’s occurred all over the world in places where the diet changes to American processed food.
The widespread obesity happening in America and its vassal states is not simply due to an abundance of food. Food scarcity hasn’t been an issue in the US since the Great Depression, almost 100 years ago.
I'm not talking about obesity...yes that's an issue in most western nations now. But I'm talking about just more food and nourishment in general, worldwide. In places like Peru and Afghanistan, everywhere. It isn't about being "fat" it's about not being rail skinny with no extra calories, as women need a certain level of body fat to get their period. Don't think I'm talking about obesity, but actual lack on malnourishment. 20 year olds in many nations are now far taller than their parents and grandparents were too, because they have enough food. And age of first menses is dropping worldwide. Globally, we have produced about 1% more food every year PER CAPITA since the 1990s, meaning even with population growth food production goes up even more and there is simply far more food. So plenty of girls that 40 years ago didn't have enough body fat til they were older, because they were actually semi malnourished, now reach that point earlier. And in the US or other places where obesity is an issue, a plump elementary age girl might get there even earlier. But don't mistake me saying this is just because of being overweight or obese, that's not at all the case.
But people really seem to forget just how thin people were in the past...they didn't much muscle mass either. Look at old photos of the public and men are all skinny with very little muscle OR fat. And kids that people think are normal weight today still have more body fat than they used to. I have photos of my friends and I at age 11 in bathing suits circa 1990 and out of ten girls every one is rail thin...not a single bit of soft arm flesh or belly pudge among them, which today you'd see on at least some kids in a group of ten. And btw, we were freaking hungry all the time too.
Your comment made me text my mom and sister to ask, because we were all very skinny kids. My mom got hers at 10 or 11, still in elementary school in the 60s or early 70s. I was surprised to hear that. I got mine at 12 in the mid-90s. My younger sister hasn't responded, but my hazy memory says she got hers around 11 or 12, too. After reading Sai's comment after yours, I'm really curious about this fat/hormone link, either way. None of us started gaining weight until my mom during menopause (aside from some normal fluctuation). My mom and sister were those kinds of women who walked out of the hospital in their normal pants after having babies.
Yeah, same in my family. I have pics of my mom on the beach in the 70s post babies and she was thin as a model. Though we all got ours later around 13/14. I was one of the kids embarrassed about not having it and having all my supplies ready years before I needed them.
I like watching music documentaries from the 60s and 70s, which generally feature a lot of concert footage of young people, and that's where the weight/fat difference is hugely striking. Huge crowds of people in their teens and 20s and everyone is skinny. It's actually much more noticeable wrt the men than it is the women, because they have no fat OR muscles...they're all just skinny birds compared to nowadays.
Would make an awful lot of sense from the evolutionary point of view, no? Body reaches a certain weight and figures it's mature enough to start reproducing. If that comes way earlier than it did in the environment of evolutionary adaptation due to much higher calorie loads...well, you can guess.
I think they've shown you're not attracted to people you grow up with (Westermarck effect), which is probably why incest isn't much more common.
I was actually underweight when I experienced menarche at age 11. As in, I was somewhere around 70-80 lbs. I was still underweight for a few years after that. So no, it's not just a weight thing when that happens. For me, this happened in the late 1990s-- not far off from the 20th century time period you're talking about.
Where did you grow up and you have reason to believe there was a particular environmental exposure there? I.e. was it just you or something happening to other girls in that area? Did your mom get hers around the same age? I think 11 is within the realm of normal...that's 6th grade definitely some girls had theirs then but 12 seemed more common. You are suddenly triggering for me a memory I had completely forgotten about...there was one girl I was in school with who was very short and skinny and childlike in all ways (personality and appearance), who got hers very early like 10 or 11. She didn't have a father in her home. I'd forgotten about her.
I grew up in Rochester, NY. It's entirely possible that there were weird chemicals in the environment-- Kodak and Xerox were based there. It was also the "murder capitol of New York" even in the 1980s/1990s when NYC was at its peak level of violence. My mom didn't grow up there (she grew up in Rome NY) and got hers closer to age 13. It was really hard to compare this to what other girls were going to because the school I went to was REALLY small-- there were only 4 of us in the 6th grade class, and I was the only 6th grade girl. We shared a classroom and teacher with the 4th and 5th grade, kind of like a one room school house type arrangement. The reason for going to private school was that the public schools within city limits (as opposed to the suburbs) had an appalling reputation with everything from test scores to stuff like kids getting into fights, etc. I grew up with the impression that public school was terrifying LOL (this is hilarious because I work in the Sioux Falls public schools now). So before 7th grade, I had no one to compare notes with. In 7th grade, a lot of my peers were getting their first periods and talking about it a fair bit.
I've actually heard the "absent father" explanation before, but that doesn't quite check out for me. My parents are still married to this day. My dad had a well-paying job so my mom could stay home. On weekends, my dad would take me and my brothers to places like Mendon Ponds, Discovery Zone, the Science Museum and Planetarium, etc. Basically every weekend when I was a kid was a fun outing of some sort, so he was more involved than most fathers probably.
However, I remember my home life being really stressful from the mid-'90s onwards. My parents fought with each other constantly. My dad was stressed out because the company he worked for changed management and the new boss was absolutely horrible, but he didn't want to change jobs. My mom started going through "the change" when my younger brother was still a toddler. In the early '90s, we all used to sit together and eat dinner as a family, and by the end of the decade I would be eating in the living room with my younger brother watching "The Simpsons" during dinner every single night and my older brother would watch the bigger TV in the basement. None of us wanted to start sitting together again. I'm unscrambling exactly what happened to this day.
That's funny, I grew up in upstate NY too. Not Rochester, but a similar post industrialist town with shut down factories and major corporations that probably used to dump chemicals in the rivers, very similar. Though in other ways, we're the opposite. My parents were divorced, I went to public school, I was WAY mentally and emotionally ahead of my physical development and always wanting to be an emancipated adult, not a kid.
One thing is similar...home and parents were a nightmare and claustrophobic awkward emotionally borderline unbearable situation from age 13 to 17. But honestly I kind of thought that's just how it was with everyone, especially girls. Puberty and adults are not a good mix, and a daughter going through puberty and mom going through menopause is an explosive mix.
Me and all my friends were all at absolute WAR with our moms at that age. I think it was more normal for people not to get along with their parents back then. Parents didn't try to be their kids' friends and they weren't. When I see how close and open and nice to each other and indulgent parents are with their teenagers these days, it's astonishing to me (even my own dad with my half brother who was born when I was in high school...he's was a totally different type of parent). At least at my school, we 100% viewed our parents as our enemies and prison wardens, and we were all nightmares for them. My mom always talks about how one day around age 17 I finally emerged from my room and had a conversation with her, and she was so shocked she didn't even know what to do. We all get along great now but those years were rough.
Good post, but I'm not sure why you frame this as a 'feminist issue', when it would be more appropriate just to call it a 'women's issue'. As we can see from the rather unhinged comments of a Mzz Grundy elsewhere in this thread, all we can expect feminists to do is to mine this biological problem for political ammunition, at the price of deepening every social and psychological wound caused by it.
but most women who call themselves feminists aren't gross political lesbians etc.
for 80% of self-described feminists, feminism literally just means "boys should be nice to me" or "I grew up in a blue state"--calling it feminist is a good rhetorical inroad with those broads
We don't need women speaking about this but sex realists who look at the data and do research to uncover the truth
Setting 18 as the age of majority is a fairly new thing, even in Western civilization. We need to remember that as recently as 1860, the average lifespan was <40. Children were rushed along into adulthood out of sheer necessity.
Improved sanitation, health care and nutrition has changed all that, of course and I certainly do not advocate rushing children into sexual activity, but I am not sure that supporting offspring to the age of 30 is helpful either.
Wrong again. The problem is actually men horndogging young girls, and the solution is for them to stop it.
Good hypothesis and worth investigating. But I don't think this is a feminist issue, nor should it be (feminism = ideological lens on gender issues). Instead, it should be an issue of rational, constructive discourse with people concerned about the well-being of both sexes.
it's just rhetoric; calling it feminist is a tactical choice to slip a foot in the door with more normie women who might otherwise reject it out of hand
Hear, hear. Feminism is a broad church and has achieved much but in current times I wonder if the goal of some feminists is to have a secure bubble to share low-quality arguments without fear of counter proposals.
« Normal people are too stupid and bigoted to let a man express any opinion on something as sensitive as this. The only reason I’m willing to start the discussion is that I’m incredibly autistic and disagreeable. » I wish I had your eloquence. You are truly the Cicero of our times.