Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation (26 page)

And speaking of menstrual symptoms … what’s up with that, anyway? Why do those of us not on the Pill have to put up with all the bloating, backache, constipation? Why do women with normally perfect skin suddenly sprout giant zits, and why do ladies with impeccable manners overnight develop uncontrollable flatulence? What’s with the headaches, the cramps? In fact, menstruation is unique in that it’s pretty much the only bodily process in which mild to rather severe discomfort is considered part of normal functioning.

To be fair, menstruation is also routinely linked to mood swings, anger, euphoria, horniness, energy, and creativity. Few, however, choose to dwell on any positive aspects. So how much of our monthly ordeal is made worse by our own expectations? How much of it is real? And if it is real, why isn’t it the same for all women? And what causes it, anyway?

It’s important to remember that menstruation isn’t simply a matter of a little blood four days a month, end of story. In fact, virtually every part of one’s body is affected during every stage of a normal menstrual cycle, i.e., 365 days a year: pulse rate, blood pressure, body temperature, even the frequency of urination. That being said, there are definitely menstrual symptoms that are common to many if not most women: weight gain, food cravings, cramps, bloating. Unfortunately, there are very few hard answers as to exactly what causes many of these symptoms. All we seem to know is that they most likely arise somehow from normal hormonal fluctuations and cyclical changes in our brain chemistry.

For example, many women report they have an especially intense craving for carbohydrates, sugar, and desserts in the later part of their cycles, during the premenstrual time. Exactly why this is hasn’t yet been proven (although does anyone really need a reason to crave a brownie?). Some theorize that the body responds more strongly to insulin right before one’s period due to high hormone levels, which results in lowered blood sugar. Still, no one knows for certain.

The week before a period is also when many women get sore, tender breasts. This may be because the same hormones—progesterone and estrogen—busily pumping out of that ruptured follicle of yours aren’t just stimulating your uterus and making its lining grow; they’re also stimulating your poor, hapless breasts, leaving them achey and swollen.

Others say that breast pain is caused by bloating. Bloating is an incredibly common and vaguely unpleasant symptom in which one’s stomach, hands, breasts, and feet blow up to often comical proportions, making one feel not unlike a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Bloating occurs when fluids that normally flow merrily along with one’s blood get trapped in and around tissue cells. The pressure within a cell is controlled by electrolytes like sodium; the more sodium in one’s body, the more fluid from one’s blood makes its way into the cells and is trapped there, like teeny-weeny balloons filled with too much water. And in fact, the higher levels of estrogen and progesterone in the preperiod stage may cause the body to retain sodium—which would definitely lead to that unattractive scenario.

Another theory about bloating is that in many women, the normal premenstrual surge of estrogen triggers the production of another hormone, aldosterone. Among other things, aldosterone is known to cause the kidneys to retain fluids. Whatever the reason, bloating means that many premenstrual women can pack on up to six pounds of water gain each month—about the same as dragging around a medium-size dumbbell or a smallish cat. You can help things out by avoiding sugar, starch, salt, booze, and, ironically enough, by drinking more water. Potassium also seems to help get rid of water retention, so try grabbing a banana or some raisins instead of that pecan pie you may well be eyeing by now. Exercise and calcium supplements also seem to help ease the bloat factor for many.

We’re sad to report that those fluctuating hormones also appear to wreak havoc on one’s gastrointestinal tract, causing everything from constipation and uncomfortable gas to diarrhea. Again, the exact how and why of all this is still not clear. It may have something to do with the hormones that cause the uterus to contract; it’s possible that they make the smooth muscle in the intestines contract, as well.

If you’re unfortunate enough to be one of the eighteen million women who suffer from migraines, there’s a good chance that you also suffer from menstrual migraines, migraines that come during your period. Menstrual migraines are especially severe and don’t respond to medication. They’re mostly caused by the sudden drop in estrogen right before the start of flow. Many sufferers report that their attacks disappeared during pregnancy. The Pill also seems to affect migraine sufferers adversely, so keep that in mind when considering birth control options.

As for acne? During a normal (i.e., non-Pill-related) menstrual cycle, the ovaries start producing progesterone at ovulation, which revs up the sebaceous glands. This results in more oil, oilier skin, and, you guessed it, pimples.

During the premenstrual time, women tend to have more nightmares, as well as the type of sex dreams that make you blush the next morning.

The need to urinate frequently during one’s period can be caused by fibroids, interstitial cystitis, or a urinary tract infection brought on by (we hate to say it) not changing one’s pad often enough. After all, that pad is efficiently absorbing not only one’s blood, but one’s anal cooties, as well. One’s period can also bring on marked fatigue, brought on by not only blood loss and the subsequent dip in iron levels, but by disturbed sleep. More than 70 percent of all women complain of sleep problems during their period, when hormone levels are at their lowest.

Believe it or not, one’s menstrual cycle also seems to affect the kind of dreams one has. During the premenstrual time, women tend to have more nightmares, the kind that reflect fear of death and mutilation, as well as the type of sex dreams that make you blush the next morning.

Alcohol tolerance also varies depending on where one is in one’s cycle. Unlike men, who seem capable of absorbing the same amount of beer no matter what time of the month it is, women clearly fluctuate: they seem to hold their liquor the best during their flow, the worst in the week before.

It’s also been reported that all of a woman’s senses are more acute during ovulation—for example, women tend to be more sensitive to smells, faint light, nuances in taste, even touch. One can mull over the possible biological advantages of this: might this possibly be related to an unconscious drive to find the right mate or initiate sex?

It’s also been reported that during ovulation, women feel pretty damn good about themselves. This is the time when they generally feel the greatest sense of confidence and self-esteem, and are the most competitive, as well. Compare this to the premenstrual time, when women overwhelmingly feel not only pessimistic and self-hating, but even downright hostile to others.

For years, popular myth held that a woman’s cycle was influenced by the moon and the tides.

We feel it should come as a relief to most women that symptoms, quirks, and moods as diverse as an insatiable craving for chocolate cupcakes, a sunny outlook, a raging migraine, or even a disturbingly erotic dream about that guy who works at the deli can all be linked somehow to the menstrual cycle. After all, menstruation is not just a 365-day-a-year process for all females between the onset of menarche and the end of menopause; it clearly wields a wide if mysterious influence over manyfar-flung aspects of our lives in ways we’ve only just begun to grasp.

Even though we all operate under the same basic physiological rules of menstruation, every woman’s experience of her cycle is unique. A woman’s period—the pain she suffers, her perception of that pain, the flow she has, the regularity of her cycle—is affected by numerous factors: her genes, her biochemical makeup, her weight (either losing or gaining too much weight can temporarily halt one’s flow), even her personality and culture. For years, popular myth held that a woman’s cycle was also influenced by the moon and the tides. More recently, however, that notion has been displaced by a more scientific theory—that a profound influence on a woman’s menstrual cycle may in fact be no farther away than the people around her.

In 1971, a Harvard graduate student named Martha McClintock wrote an article in Nature magazine about something she had been pondering since her days at the women’s college Wellesley: a notion she termed “menstrual synchrony.” Her theory was that the menstrual cycles of women who live together in all-female environments, such as in prison, a convent, or a single-sex dorm, tend to synchronize over time. After studying 135 women who lived in the same college dorm and comparing them with women who didn’t cohabit, she came up with a revolutionary proposal. Her theory was that not only did women’s periods in fact line up with each other over time, but that it was all somehow triggered by pheromones—those potent yet odorless chemicals that are somehow thought to trigger responses in others unconsciously, through the sense of smell.

McClintock’s theory instantly garnered a wild amount of attention, among both scientists and laypeople. Could it be true? Women began trading anecdotes about their own experiences and observations and how, sure enough, they could swear that all the toilets in their dorms clogged up at the same time due to the sudden overload of flushable tampons.

Yet subsequent studies of menstrual synchrony conducted by other researchers were, to put it mildly, consistently inconsistent. While sixteen studies confirmed McClintock’s findings, another ten found no statistically significant pattern of synchrony whatsoever among cohabiting groups of women. Some studies even found that women became less synchronized the longer they lived together.

Some researchers argued that women couldn’t possibly synchronize, since women’s cycles are such different lengths—after two or three months, they’d immediately fall out of line with one another. Others, using basic math and probability, argued that since an average cycle is twenty-eight days, the maximum time between any two women getting their periods would be fourteen days, the minimum zero. This means the average difference would be a mere seven days. Anything less than seven days could then be argued to resemble synchrony, especially among such a relatively small group of women … even though it might be, of course, totally random.

Yet McClintock not only stuck to her guns, she continued to refine her argument. In 1998, she coauthored another article in Nature in which she reported on experiments that focused specifically on the possible effect of pheromones on menstruation. Cotton swabs were dabbed with armpit sweat taken from women during different points in their cycles. The swabs, by now liberally laced with the donors’ pheromones, were then wiped on the sterilized upper lips of other women.

Before the whole idea makes you keel over in a dead faint, keep in mind that the women who were swabbed said that they honestly didn’t smell anything … which would make sense, considering that that’s how those sneaky pheromones work. And interestingly enough, the swabs did seem to have an effect on the length of the wipee’s cycles, but not in a definite or consistent way. Instead, women’s cycles were either shortened or lengthened, depending on how early in the donor’s cycle the swab was taken.

So what is one to make of this research? If this is true, it seems to indicate that unconscious signals about the menstrual cycle are in fact constantly transmitted from woman to woman via pheromones, but in a shifting and cyclical way. If so, McClintock suggests that perhaps menstrual synchrony, or at least menstrual influence, can be seen in a social instead of an isolated context—that by influencing patterns of fertility, conception, and birth, it can serve to maximize, say, the chances of survival of the young in a given community. And furthermore, Natalie Angier points out that it’s not just other women who seem to affect our cycles via those odorless messengers, the pheromones—it’s men, as well.

Since it’s documented that a woman who cohabits with a man tends to cycle more regularly than one who lives alone, wouldn’t it make sense that she’s in fact being influenced by his pheromones—the ones constantly wafting invisibly from his neck, his groin, his armpits? Is it just because of the typical height difference that so many of us straight women tend to enjoy nuzzling our guys in the neck, or are we simply trying in an unconscious way to get a good dose of his chemical messages? Certainly, it can be argued that a regular menstrual cycle favors conception. Are we in fact blindly in search of chemical triggers that will shore up our chances at propagation?

Normal, healthy menstruation is clearly still a mysterious terrain, rarely studied in any significant, well-funded way by any scientific institution or research lab … but why? Because it’s so common as to be perceived as boring and inconsequential, at least to male researchers? It’s only in its pathological state that doctors and scientists tend to sit up and take notice … in other words, when routinely good periods go bad.