Ok I know this may sound a little goofy but I was wondering about this the other day (just after I dumped the body thanks for your help in that!) Does the gravitational pull of the Moon have anything to do with a woman’s period? The cycle time between full moons seems to be 28 or so days and so does a woman’s period. Please enlighten me.
You sound reasonable…it must be time to up my medication
All women’s cycles are not the same length. That is, one woman might have a 25-day cycle, and another might have a 30-day one. So the short answer is no, the moon’s phase is not directly related to womens’ menstruation.
In any case, if it were the moon’s gravity that were affecting things, a woman would have about two periods per day. Recall that the moon’s gravity causes the tide, which takes around 12 hours to complete a cycle.
However, I’m no anthropologist, and am hesitant to state that there’s absolutely no relation at all between the moon and menstruation. The time periods are pretty close, after all. Maybe sometime in the evolutionary past, proto-human mating rituals took place during the night, and the light of a full moon was beneficial somehow. (This bit is an utter WAG, if you couldn’t tell.)
I’m not a warlock. I’m a witch with a Y chromosome.
For whatever it’s worth, my cycle always seems to fall on the new moon or full moon for some reason. Strange…I haven’t started howling yet though.
And that would be… a bicycle.
The gravitational aspect of things couldn’t possibly be it. But our fishy ancestors might have been influenced by the tidal effects on the sea.
Still, that would be twice a month, not once a month, so I expect moonlight itself is also a factor.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
As a female who has had periods start on the full moon, I can only speak for myself. My PMS seems to be more aggravated. But I’ve learned to revel in my PMS, and use it to my advantage ;0
If that were true, a connection betwixt the moon and periods, society would change whenever the moon was full. It doesn’t.
More interesting to me, a bunch of women sharing living quarters eventually get their periods in snyc.
Here’s the theory I heard. Or maybe I’m just making it up. You be the judge:
Before mankind tamed fire to provide light at night, their only nighttime light sources were very feeble starlight, and the moon. A full moon meant a night well-lit enough to be safe from leopards and other predators that hunted in total darkness – and, thus, safe enough to make all those grunting noises and movements involved in carnal merry-making. Ovulation at or near the full moon thus ensured the greatest chances of impregnation, and thus a menstrual cycle or approximately one months’ duration that could synchronize with nighttime light-cues would result in the greatest reproductive success.
Nowadays, we light our night skies with thousand-watt sodium arclamps, chandeliers, etc., and so the light-cues of the lunar cycle are all but completely washed away. Thus, this month-long menstrual cycle has no “one special well-lit night” to synchronize itself with.
So, a night-light-swamped woman’s cycle has to fall back on the second-best cue it has at its disposal – namely, the pheremonal changes that accompany the menstrual cycle of the dominant female in her group. (At least one study has shown that it is the dominant female’s cycle to which the women in a close group will eventually synchronize.)
There are a few remnants of this old lunar dependency still lurking in our behavior, though. We still consider moonlight to be “romantic”. In poetry and art, the moon is usually considered “feminine”, the man-in-the-moon notwithstanding.
And of course, as we all know, a night light will scare away predators. 
I’m not flying fast, just orbiting low.