Your most hated body perk

@shazzbaa Shazzbaa
Sat, 06 Aug 2016 18:30:31 +0000

@shazzbaa wrote:

JessJackdaw:

I mean... why do we even have them? Most mammals just reabsorb the lining just fine... Humans are just weird and gross I guess.

Because in humans (and the few animals that menstruate), parent and baby have an antagonistic relationship! Baby wants all the nutrients; Parent wants to keep some nutrients for themselves. Human foetuses are aggressive and try to dig all the way through the womb lining to steal nutrients and blood from the mother directly, which most animal foetuses don't do, so we have a lot of extra lining as a defence. There's also the idea that, since our young can show up at any time and take a lot of resources, the extra lining is in part designed to kill a bad embryo before we waste a bunch of resources on offspring that won't be worth it. Either way, we have extra, and it's too much to absorb efficiently so it's """easier""" to bleed it out. [I don't remember where I first learned this so here's the first source I could find]

Basically most animals build a nice little metaphorical nest which is easy to take down, while we build freakin' castle ramparts every month to prevent babies from stealing our blood and to kill them if they are unworthy.
Idk why we treat periods as awkward shame instead of the most metal coming of age ritual possible?

.............But yeah I agree they're definitely the worst one.