I’m not asking why they’re painful, I know it’s due to nerve endings being affected during uterine cramps, but I want to know what purpose the pain serves.
If I understand what I was taught in various biology and anatomy classes, we feel pain so that the brain can alert us that there’s something wrong with our bodies. The something wrong is almost always injury or sickness/infection; in the first case the pain tells us to stop doing whatever it is that is aggravating the injury, in the second it lets us know that there’s a problem.
So why then are many women’s menstrual cramps painful? The body is doing it’s job correctly, and we’re neither sick nor injured when cramps occur. And are there any other normal bodily functions, besides childbirth, that are painful?
I think you’re confusing the logic a bit. Pain may serve a purpose in most cases but this is as a coincience. Evolution is a passive design process. Beneficial traits tend to stay in a species and poor traits tend to dissapear. To say that pain can alert us to problems or stop behavior is correct but IMHO it’s wrong to say all pain must exist for those reasons. Menstural pain may serve no purpose and if it has a neutral impact on evelution there is no reason for it to dissapear from humans.
I would think the pain is an overt signal for the female to forcibly reject any sexual advances a male might make during that time. Humans do not have an oestrus period. They can be sexual anytime of the year. I think this pain is a “stop for maintenance” signal and bilogically speaking if it wasnt painful, females may just ignore it and have sex anyways. Prolly why they get real bitchy at this time to emphasize the fact that no sex really means no sex.
I agree with Padeye, the logic is a bit skewed. Pain evolved as a signal it’s ture. Particularly with internal organs the pain tends to be designed to stop the victim moving around and rupturing or tearing bloated or damaged organs. A good survival trait that.
As a result the uterus got the same nerve endings as the other organs. It might even serve a purpose if during pregnancy a woman curls up in a fetal ball with hot water bottle when there is inflammation.
The problem is that humans aren’t really meant to ever get periods much. For the vast majority of our history a woman existed as either pregnant or breastfeeding. The actual number of periods hse had was probably only a couple of dozen ove rher entire lifespan. The risk of injury to the mother or the child from disabling the nerves in the uterus is higher than the risk of being eaten because a woman is disabled with cramps.
As a result of this no mechanism has ever evolved to reduce period pain. There was no great need and the easy solutions evolutionarily caused more harm than good.
But sex is the only thing that makes the cramps go away. Well, sex or 800mg of ibuprofen. A good solid orgasm and they’re down to a minor twinge, but failing that I’m in bed for the day with my heating pad.
See, this is what happens when nature is not allowed to take its course. Most women do not suffer from menstral cramps in such severity as to render her “curled up in a ball”. If this happened 50,000 years ago, most of the tribe would consider her possessed and toss her out, and as you say nature (and the passing sabertooth) will do its thing.
African Masai women dont go looking for the midol every month. They regard it as a discomfort, not an overbearing pain. Some women just do not have the uterial fortitude to survive in the wild.
In defense of all women however, IMHO if men had the monthly visitor, I think overpopulation would never become a problem.
What HennaDancer say’s has been told to me by a couple of women. Not all, though. You kinda got that male mantis thing going if you approach without permission.
But, that being said, generosity can have its rewards.
As far as the OP, I agree with Blake.
Peace,
mangeorge
The pain is designed to discourage women from having periods. ie. spend as much of their life as possible pregnant thus increasing the population of the species :).
Is that true? It sound slike an old husband’s tale to me.
In many of these societies women don’ stop because they aren’ allowed to or ca’t afford to. It’s not a case of them feeling less pain, just a case of not being able to give into it without getting fired/beaten/starving/having children taken.
In all fairness the same is true of men when they get injured. I’ve just never heard anyone suggest that a Masai man with his leg chewed orf bya tiger who herds his cattle the next day because he will starve otherwise is doing it because ‘he regards it as a discomfort, not an overbearing pain’. It hurts him just as much as it hurts me, but he doesn’t have the option of sick leave.
I suspect exactly the same is true of the women. They work despite the period pain, not because they don’t feel it just as severely.
IANABiologist, but here’s my lay theory. Since evolution directs organisms to reproduce, and since sexual behaviour requires time and energy, it would make sense that some animals have evolved traits which restrict sexual behaviour to times when conception is most likely to be successful. IIRC, conception in humans is less likely to occur during menstruation than at other times of the cycle. Menstrual pain, or any sort of pain at all, is likely to discourage women from engaging in physical activity, such as sex. Ergo, menstrual pain is nature’s way of minimizing fruitless sex and maximizing the chances of conception.
I’m convinced that both painful cramps at a period and painful childbirth are a product of Victorian civilization. WOmen in “primitive” countries don’t go through all this.
My first few periods were pretty benign- until I realized that my Southern Mom would let me stay home from school and eat chocolate ice cream all day if I told her I was starting my period. It got to be a habit.
I also have evidence through my dancing that birth is INTENSE but not necessarily painful, unless you’ve never moved those muscles and you freak because everyone tells you it’s agony.
That’s a bit of a cockeyed way of doint it isn’t it psychonaut? Other animals just have signals that tell the males quit blatently when the females are fertile. This serves the purpose of minimizing fruitless sex and maximizing the chances of conception far better than menstrual pain and doesn’t reduce the female’s ability to find food, care for existing young or avoid predators the way that menstrual pain does.
In fact the chimpanzee branch of the ape family seems to have purposely evolved away from such signals and timing for intercourse in favour of its benefits as a social tool. Why would humans go back and re-evolve a mechanism for timing intercourse? And why wold they do it in such a dangerous and inefficient maner? It doesn’t in any way prevent intercourse from occuring during infertle periods, only reduces it during the few days of the pain. Unproductive intercourse still occurs during the othr 2 1/2-3 weeks of the cycle.
Then how exactly do you explain the numerous references to painful, prolonged and even fatal hildbirth dating back further than 150 yers ago? Clearly painful childbirth has alway been the norm if you believe the writing that survive.
Since when has nature made a point of avoiding cockeyed solutions to biological problems? Why didn’t evolution instantly dispense with human appendices the moment they became vestigial?
There may well be a reason why menstrual pain is not entirely incapacitating. It may be that it’s intended to be light enough not to interfere with essential behaviour such as predator-evading and child-rearing, but still severe enough to discourage unnecessary recreational activity. Part of your argument also presupposes that physically-intensive food-gathering was a primary activity of prehistoric women, whereas our dimorphic anatomy suggests otherwise.
You are committing the common fallacy of assuming that humans are descended from chimpanzees, when in fact they are descended from a common ancestor which may well have employed this sort of timing mechanism. What makes you think that humans and chimps could not have taken divergent evolutionary paths with respect to this trait?
No one said that nature’s mechanisms were perfect, or that our sophisticated brains are incapable of overriding them. The warning colours exhibited by many insects do not prevent them from getting occasionally eaten by predators anyway. Humans’ natural fear of heights does not prevent hundreds of people from jumping out of airplanes every day. If a mechanism serves a useful purpose even only some of the time, then it’s a good bet it’s going to get passed on to subsequent generations.
In order for such a theory to pan out, you would have to show that women who do not experience painful cramps are somehow selected against (thereby preserving the “painful cramps” pool). Such is not likely to happen since both the “burdened by cramps” and the “none-to-mild cramping” women would have equal results if sex were to occur during their periods: no fertilization, therefore no offspring.
Alternatively, you could attempt to show that those who do have cramps are somehow reproductively favored. But, during menstruation, cramps or no, fertilization is unlikely. So there isn’t any likely to be any significant reproductive difference between those who have them and those who don’t.
If anything, I am inclined to believe that painful menstruation is more prevalent because of modern medical advances, which make such things less detrimental than they might otherwise be. If the cause is genetic (e.g., a gene responsible for excessive prostaglandin production is involved), then those women who are affected but do not succumb will pass it on. And those who succumb will likely be somewhat rare in areas where such medical treatments are available.
