The following quote is from Planned Parenthood (although I have seen similar cites in many places):
I have seen the phenomenon of lower ages for menarche discussed in terms of better nutrition, but what’s the logic? That the bodies say “Hey, there’s lots of food! Have a kid!”?
What, then, of the hubbub made about Olympic gymnasts, who are well-fed and very fit, but see a delay in the physical signs of maturity?
Is there any thought within whatever scientific community discusses these things that a lower level of overall physical activity may be responsible for this change? That perhaps the body is saying “Hey! There’s no exercise going on here! Better have a kid to continue the race while the body is young enough to keep the heart pumpimg!”
have societies where women must do a greater amount of physical labor see a later average age for menarche?
I suppose this stems from my own thought that such a drastic change in human physiology in the space of only a century is somewhat freakish, and would like people’s thoughts on this:
Is it a sign of positive or negative change in our lifestyle?
I would say the early average onset of menses would be a negative change.
I had this discussion with my ex wife and a couple of her friends a few times. Apparently from what i’ve read and understand, the amount of fat in a childs/adults diet has direct affect/bearing upon a woman’s puberty/menses. The higher the fat content of the diet and the body fat content the earlier it seems to start puberty. The reverse is also true. The lower the fat content, the more it delays or in the case of one who has already reached puberty, can halt it.
So, IMHO I would say it’s a negative change that the average age of puberty is going down, as that means we’re basically getting fatter, and eating more fatty foods etc etc.
The body can only menstrate when there is a certain amount of fat stored- the same amount of extra energy that is needed to carry a pregnancy. It makes lots of evolutionary sense. Anorexics and athletes often cease to menstrate because they lack the needed fat.
Olympic gymnasts are not well fed. They may have access to a wide variety of nutritious food, but they are often of pretty restricted diets. Chances are that their bodyfat is so low that they do not mestrate.
So our children are gaining the needed fat store earlier. There is also speculation that constant exposure to artificial light somehow messes up the bodily clock, and that exposure to artificial hormones in the environment are triggering early menstration. A signifigant amount of hormones are in our water supplies, from agricultural use and from the sewage of people taking drugs with hormones in them. And then there are the hormones in our meat, and even the hormones that are in the plastic that we wrap our food in. If anything, I’ll put my bets on that as a cause of early menarche.
Have you seen these girls? Well-fed, they’re not. Like dancers and models there is a high incidence of eating disorders due to pressure to maintain a low weight and small size.
Heavy excercise (and they train up to 6 hours a day) can delay or prevent menarche, many top female athletes have amenorrhea or oligomenorrhea.
Certainly, in the bad old days, and in especially in Eastern Europe, gymnasts were given drugs specifically designed to delay puberty. A small, light, boyish body is more aerodynamic than a taller, heavier one with hips and breasts.
The female body doesn’t get pregnant if it thinks the pregnancy would be threatened by starvation or hard work.
I have nothing to bring except an opinion but I rather thought menstruation was almost entirely related to diet, and not age. As such, it would have far more to do with the ability of the parents (father) to provide the daughter with a healthy diet than age e.g. Juliet came from an affluent, middle class family. Most of her peers would not have.
Isn’t that why art historically portrays the ‘voluptuous’ as desirable, because it can breed ?
Slimness only became popular as society itself became affluent and was able to ensure no one starved.
My wife’s not an expert in this field, but she is on the faculty of a medical school. I asked her this question as she was rushing off to work. She said
– “menarche” is pronounced like menarky (I didn’t know that)
– nobody really knows why the age has dropped so much
– if fat were the reason, we’d expect to see more individual variation than we do, since there is considerable variation in the fat content of young women.
Nobody else has said it yet, so I wanted to point out there is an inverse correlation between the amount of physical labor women (or the society in general) must perform and the amount of food available to them. The highly mechanized farms in the U.S. produce more food per man-hour than any farms in history. And this same trend – of efficiency and productiveness – runs throughout American society. We work less for richer food than just about anyone else.
By contrast, farmers in most of Africa and China (female or male) must labor from sunup to sundown to produce just enough food for their family to live on. And again, this trend holds throughout their societies. Manual labor is a very inefficent way to produce anything, but it is usually the only way they have.
What I think is interesting is how women’s bodies have changed, but social attitudes seem to have gone the other direction. It was not uncommon for women in the 1840s to get married as young as 15 and start pumping out babies. But as society became more machine-oriented (meaning less work available per person) population growth has dramatically slowed. And this seems to be the trend in every modern society. I read somewhere (sorry, no cite at the moment) the U.S. has the highest population growth rate of any industrialized nation, but we’re only at about 1%. Many European nations are experiencing population drops, as people have fewer and fewer children.
So what we have is a female population that is capable of having more children (by starting earlier) than ever before, but societies that are refusing (by regulating the age at which sexual behavior and marriage are considered permissiible, as well as through simple economic and social forces, i.e. women’s liberation) to exploit that ability in any way.
I’m not saying I think population growth should be pursued as an end in itself, I just find the inverse nature of these two seperate phenomena to be interesting.
What is the average age of menarche in developing countries? I’m thinking of subsistence farmers in Africa and Asia, remaining hunter-gatherer tribes, etc. Seems that would be pretty insightful as to what’s going on, and if the assumption referenced in the OP (medieval menarche circa age 20) would seem to have much basis in fact.
soooooo if Menarche is based on diet and higher fat absorbtion, is that why men instinctively go for the skinny bulemic type females instead of the fat chicks? So that they can “play” at sex without producing anything.
Is this Mernarche theory relating it to diet consistent with third world countries whose diet has not increased their fat content? What is the average age in Africa, Asia and the middle east does menarche occur?
there really was a time that you could boink a 20 year old and not have any worries? suh-weet! Of course this is probably of a time where showing a bare ankle was considered risque.
Is it actually a given that the age of menarche has really reduced?
It has always appeared widespread in most cultures that girls reached womenhood - and marriageability - from puberty. I find it odd, given we know that girls married at 13/14/15 in many historic societies - that they were all pre-pubescent. Especially given that a (normal) heterosexual male is designed to be sexually attracted to a post-pubescent woman - breasts and hips etc - not a pre-pubescent one.
I don’t want to dispute doubtless very solid studies into average menarche age, but how exactly do they get their data? I can fully see how in a malnourished society - eg poorer classes during the industrial age, living off crusts of bread and working in factories, lots of child labour - menarche could be delayed. I can see how with artificial hormones in our food and water that menarche could be increasingly premature today - eg 7/8/9 rather than 12/13, say. I just find it strange that girls in previous eras and primitive societies would have got married five or six years before breasts and periods began.
Look, you could only bionk a 20 year old without risk of her becoming pregnant if she were starving to death, infested with parasites, and suffering from life-threatening diseases.
And male’s sexual “instincts” would of course instruct them to go after the women with the MOST chance of becoming pregnant, not the least. I think people have a funny idea about what men “really” want women to look like. A gay fashion designer might think the anorexic androgenous look is great, but most men I know like women with big breasts and round buttocks. Or is it just me that enjoys big breasts?
It seems to me that what men really like is women who seem healthy, since healthiness is the closest proxy for fertillity that evolution can give you. And that means well fed, young, parasite and disease-free.
Before I start this, I’ll just go on record that I prefer non-waif-like women…
I think the depiction at one point in history of young, plump women as objects of desire had a lot of factors. It could be that the social pendulum had simply swung in that direction, but you also must remember that at a more or less contemporary time with that, the dowry that accompanied a young woman into marriage was her weight in gold. So the men of the time may have found them desirable for their potential to cause more than one type of bulge.
As far as marrying them off young, marriage was done more as a social binder than as an expression of love. As long as you wanted ties to such-and-such a merchant, why not offer to give to him in marriage your young daughter who (according to the quote in my OP) was engaging in all sorts of naughty exploratory sex play anyway?
I can emphatically state you are not alone in these views; place me irmly in the “most men” group.
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Skinny, attractive models are used in order to create subconscious insecurity in women. The vast majority of women will not live up to the standard of beauty these models create, and that is the point. In order to alleviate that (conscious or subconscious) insecurity, the model is therefore portrayed with a product, to create the message that “this product will make you this beautiful.” The whole idea is to sell the product. If using fat models sold more product, then they would be in ads.
[/end of hijack]
Far be it from me to argue with Planned Parenthood as quoted in the OP:
However, Juliet is probably a bad example. The AVERAGE age may have been 20. However, as has been pointed out by a previous post, Juliet was probably more well-nourished than the average. She was one of a small noble (not middle-class) group. Your late-teens pre-pubescents were more likely the servant and serf classes, which were the majority of society, and who probably were underfed. Also, Juliet’s nurse and mother chide her for still being unmarried at 14, stating that many her age are already mothers.
Skinnier models were originally used because they had the same shape as the clothes hanger. Women buy clothes off the rack, therefore, the clothes have to look appealing on the rack.
The subconscious insecurity thing was just a lucky break for the fashion/beauty industry.
As for the drop in the age of onset of menses, how do they know what happened before 1840? There are lots of girls diaries floating around from that era or something?
“Today, I became a woman. Tomorrow, I will wed the man my father chose for me. I wonder what he’ll look like?”