It would be interesting to track the age of menarche against the overall fertility rate in a society. It would make a certain amount of sense if the body went into puberty earlier when the society was not reproducing itself.
That certainly would be very interesting, but I expect that you would not get a clear linear relationship there. A lowered fertility in a society works as a signal to speed up the LH only when the rest of the variables, especially the high calorie intakes and overall feelings of unpredictability, line up to facilitate it. A sort of “times are tough so we better have as many kids as possible while we still can afford it”. Otherwise, it can also work as a signal to slow down the LH- if the perceived tough times are consistent enough then that’s a cue not to waste any resources on reproduction and instead to focus solely on survival.
Part of what I am trying to argue here is that the whole academic apparatus we currently have of studying nested and cyclical phenomena is completely inadequate. When the causes and effects are all only proximate and the overall variables can both be caused by and in turn effect the rest of the variables in a system, which is the modus operandi of nearly all natural systems, we simply end up not being able to actually study such phenomena at all. We usually just assign cause and effect based on which of the variable affects the others slightly more strongly, which is what the correlation analysis tells us, and then pretend that any effects in the opposite direction are just noise.
In physics, the same problem was solved when we made the jump from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. In fluid dynamics we use dimensionless numbers to quantify the “meta-“ abstracted properties of complex systems. But there is hardly any such analogue in most of the academic disciplines, especially the social sciences. If we are supposed to solve any of the real problems, we absolutely need to be able to perceive complex phenomena as they actually are and not as we would like them to behave.
I would argue that we also tend to assign causes based upon our political/philosophical views. So even if a variable might be rather strongly correlated, we will tend to ignore it if it doesn’t fit our view of what we want to be the truth in this area.
Look up Dick Diven’s photoperiod research, it’s another piece of the puzzle.
As an aside, earlier pubescence has been accompanied by a significant rise in cognitive capacity in the past several decades, which should at least be of some help in dealing with this going forward.
An early puberty does come with a burst of cognitive abilities but the effect is nullified and even reversed by full adulthood. We are actually in the middle of a century or more of cognitive decline- look up Edward Dutton and Richard Lynn’s work on this.
I’ve seen their research. Immigration of stupid people is a major cause of the reverse Flynn effect, but that’s outside the scope of this and in any case dwarfed by the cognitive boost conferred by nutritional improvements in the past hundred years, the potential of which has yet to be exhausted, especially on a global level.
Nutrition and other factors do have a positive effect on cognitive ability but the decline is due to a negative selection against intelligence- smart people have been self selecting out of the gene pool for more than a century. This cannot be countered by any environmental factors, however effective. Intelligence is something like 60-90% genetic based on which population you are looking at.
Can you share a study or article about this? I circle a similar thesis in this essay, but I wasn't sure whether the cognitive advantages seen in children with early puberty necessarily translated to cognitive advantages in adulthood ... https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-drama-of-the-gifted-children
Iodisation and better protein nutrition have raised IQ and height. Look on PubMed. It’s not necessarily the early puberty that caused the cognitive boost, but some calculate that IQ has risen up to 15 points on the low end. There are studies on populations in the US, Korea, etc.
I'm sorry but what country are you in? Nutrition has definitely not improved in the West in the last forty years, it's been steadily declining with the rise in consumption of processed foods, refined sugars, seed oils, and whole-food prices, and with poorer soils and increased used of pesticides such as glyphosate ... plus Vitamin D (from sunlight) is fairly critical to nutrition and affects other vitamin and mineral levels and hormone production and a significant percentage of the population is scared to go outside without sunscreen to absorb it.
"Along with the declined age of puberty for girls we are also seeing a catastrophic decline in men’s levels of testosterone, along with all the negative health outcomes it implies, a dramatic increase in every kind of illness that is caused by endocrine disruption, like hypothyroidism, metabolic syndrome, higher adiposity, respiratory problems, PCOS, endometriosis, various fertility issues, low sperm counts, increased rates of certain cancers etc. It is impossible not to see all these negative trends as a cluster of changes that are caused by the same or similar events."
*** So where did the idea come from that soy increases breast cancer risk? Isoflavones, which are found in soy, are plant estrogens. High levels of estrogen have been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer. However, food sources of soy don't contain high enough levels of isoflavones to increase the risk of breast cancer.
Soy or isoflavone supplements, on the other hand, generally contain higher levels of isoflavones. Some studies have suggested a link between soy or isoflavone supplements and an increased risk of breast cancer in women who have a family or personal history of breast cancer or thyroid problems. ***
Soy is used in many foods as a filler. Soy oil is used in damn near everything. The idea that it's not effecting people is unreasonable to assume.
There are many things that are minimally dangerous, but in the aggregate most people are exposed to much higher levels of these substances than one might imagine -- because of their use in so many products.
GMO corn is another example. Sure they don't spray all corn with Roundup, and maybe you don't eat corn on the regular -- but many foods use corn as a filler.
Whether or not this is a malevolent act or not is debatable. Just keep in mind. Monsanto, the company that made the GMO corn that can survive Roundup -- didn't serve it in their own company cafeteria.
We consume multiple poisonous substances from multiple directions on the regular.
This was excellent, thank you for doing all of this research!! Another commenter (Jonathon) said something about the decline in age of puberty corresponding with a rise in cognitive capacity ... I *sort* of discuss something similar in this essay, which, in part, talks about how some children might score as "gifted" on childhood IQ tests because they're developing faster than average, noting an anecdotal relationship between childhood "giftedness" and early puberty ... and I argue that attachment trauma is one of the underlying causes.
Okay, so you obviously have delved into this research far more than I have or will. I'm very interested in evolutionary theory in general so I'm well versed in concepts like life history and R versus K selection, but I've never looked TOO far into this issue, so I'm not trying to question the expert, so to speak.
But let me just point out a few questions/issues:
1. How exactly would we know when girls started menstruating 200 or 2000 years ago, and how reliable is that information? It's not like most people went to doctors for yearly checkups, prior to about 60 years ago. And it strikes me that families and girls had VERY strong motivations for hiding menarche in their daughters, for most of history. Because I. Most cultures, women were expected to be married off as soon as they had their period. The older men would be sniffing around wanting to snap them up as soon as they were fertile, and it's always been in a family's best interest (and certainly the girl's) to stave that off as long as possible. You can read cross culturally and girls have NEVER liked being married off to old men, yet it as always happened, so one should expect they would lie and hide it as long as possible, if that was the one way to prevent it from happening. It's not like it's hard to hide, or that there were underwear police checking for blood every day. Heck, my dad had no idea when I got my period and I was raised my modern progressive parents who gave me sex ed books. So I'm just not sure you can trust those historical accounts when the incentive to hide and delay admitting puberty was so strong.
2. Also, most people experienced periodic famine (especially those in northern latitudes) and were on the edge of starving for much of history.
3. If girls really got their periods at 16, why were so many married off younger than that?
4. Fatherlessness I take as a point, though this seems like a pretty easy study to do. Is there a simple set of replicated studies on median age of menarche in the US comparing homes with a father in it versus not?
5. Fatherlessness is tricky to measure because living circumstances have been so widely different and single home nuclear families are basically a modern invention. I live in Utah, so if I think about what things were like in the 1800s, it's one father with 7 wives and 80 kids. Literally. I doubt they saw their dada much in that circumstance. And polygamists all married girls off the second they were bleeding, usually around 14, hence the incentive to lie about it as mentioned above. I have the weird experience of having heard from people who left the remaining polygamist communities, and trust me, no 14 year old girl wants to marry the 45 year old man who's already married to half her cousins, she has a crush on the cute boy her age and dreads with all her might having to marry the old man, but is forced on pain of God's eternal disfavor, so all she can really do is not tell anyone when she gets her period and pretend to still be a child.
6. Might the simple sexual cues of an extraordinarily sexual media itself be the cue triggering fast life history? Since the Advent of TV, we've been saturated in sexual imagery and portrayals of sexiness like nothing before in history, and with the internet that's on steroids. Perhaps the cues trigger a "need to compete in the competition seemingly around me" response? Pre 1960s there was essentially zero filmed or photographic portrayals of sexuality, at all. And sex happened behind closed doors. So the general environment was infused with about 1% the sexuality that we see today, and people who didn't want to be exposed to it could easily live an entire life without ever having to be confronted with an overt display of sexuality.
I do think this is all very interesting and I'd love to see more data analysis and studies. But I disagree with Walt's hypothesis that this is the cause of young women becoming turned off to male sexuality. Getting your period 11 months early isn't going to do that. It's just that women know too much now. The internet has revealed exactly the level of depravity out there. And here's the thing...it isn't just young girls. Go on any forum for millennial or Gen X women...they all fucking hate men right now, ESPECIALLY if they're in the dating market and actually exposed to and thinking about men. Every major metro in the country has an "are we dating the same guy" group with more than 50k members where they all compare notes about all the bad behavior of the guys they come across on dating apps. And they all can't stand men because they just know too much. 150 years ago, men hid that shit from women and just went with their friends to the local brothel, and women could only guess at what went on there and never really confirm any of it. Now they all know exactly what guys are looking at and saying to each other, and women are comparing notes with each other online, and it's more reality than they want to know about or can handle.
I appreciate you raising these questions. If you had them then others might too so let me address them here:
1. You seem to have a very bleak and low opinion of the entire human history. The situations you are describing were actually quite rare and they are, in fact, the extremely fast LH strategy that is usually employed in wartime or in frontier cultures that need the extra manpower.
The historical data on age of menarche comes from quite a wide range of sources, including many medical texts describing the perfect physiology of it. It is very likely that many of these anonymous “manual” type texts were written by women. Despite your own situation, it is in general not very hard to spot it when menarche happens, especially in small communities where behavior and habit changes are immediately apparent. If you know what to look for, which the elder, hawkishly protective women in traditional cultures certainly seem to, you can definitely tell the exact age of menarche even if the girl is trying to lie about it. We can even gauge different stages of puberty from skeletal remains, even. There are many cultures across history and even today that celebrate menarche with special rituals. I will admit that some of the historical data may have a margin of error, there are very few actual demographic data sets, but there is no clear trend where all women across all of history would have reasons for keeping the real age of menarche a secret or even to exaggerate it.
But even if you choose to believe that this data is false, and that the historical ages of menarche were exaggerated, reducing them by a whole 2 years would still put them in just a comparable window to today. So I wonder if you are advocating for keeping the terrible conditions and extremely fast LH, that you think was just ubiquitous across history, unchanged. Shouldn’t our modern progressive cultures in which half the women are unmarried at 30 have pushed that age higher?
2. I have addressed this- famine conditions don’t uniformly produce the same effect in LH. If the famine conditions are unpredictable then they cause a faster LH but if they are predictable year after year, then they cause a slower LH. In our age of extreme abundance, we seem to have the same LH as in conditions where there were unpredictable famines. That should give anyone reading this pause.
3. There is a difference between the average/expected age of menarche in any culture, and the whole variation within the population. To the extent that age of puberty dictated age of marriage, you would get plenty of outliers in any large enough population. In the kind of cultures that you seem to believe were historically the most abundant, however, early marriage is not just a way to increase fertility, it is a way to secure ties between families and clans and often it is a business transaction. Coming from Utah you should know this- such marriages happen as early as is culturally acceptable, regardless of age of puberty. But it is not the historical norm across cultures or across history, outside of royalty ironically enough, and the practice doesn’t have a lot to do with the exact age of menarche.
4./5. There are studies that compare the ages of menarche across the population for homes with or without a father. The issue is that there are many genetic, financial and other environmental factors that pollute this data and give very inconclusive results. The studies I have chosen to include are instead comparing the outcomes for twins, to avoid genetic and to some extent financial variation, and find a very clear trend where the various different family situations that are recorded clearly lower the age of menarche. The difference can be as much as a whole year, on average. Out of all the family conditions studied, having both parents present and involved creates the best outcomes, while the absence of the biological father has a much bigger impact on age of menarche than the absence of biological mother. That is why I have chosen to highlight the role of fathers specifically.
6. The overtly sexual media and availability of porn are certainly not helping the matters. But like I have said elsewhere, it is not by far the driving force behind the worldwide changes we are seeing, simply because the first recorded drop in ages of menarche in modern times comes from the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It was not an overtly sexualized culture by any means.
When the average age of menarche drops by 11 months, which is quite a substantial period of time for a 12yo, and the age of thelarche drops even more than that, you are actually looking at quite a substantial portion of the population for which both those milestones have, in fact, dropped down to completely inappropriate ages. You can scoff at the cultural impact of the change in the average, but the average people are usually not the ones leading the sweeping cultural shifts. It is the 5-10% of the population that bears the brunt of any such drastic change that end up leading the social movements and setting the new norms.
You seem to believe that most men are predatory and have exploitative intentions toward most women. With the current broken relations between men and women, I don’t blame you for getting that impression, but I and Walt are trying to tackle the underlying problems here and hopefully to mend these broken relations. Men and women have historically been allies of each other and not competitors. That is ultimately the goal, if we want to escape this caustic and oversensitive culture we seem to be lost in.
Hm, I'm not sure where you're getting anything about predatory males. I think it's a concern if girls are hitting puberty before they can mentally handle it, but NOT because of predatory males, that's my point. If women have a problem with men it's a cultural and media issue, I just think early puberty is a separate issue that isn't related to why Gen Z are seemingly unnecessarily afraid of men. That's bc they've been explicitly taught that, for one thing, and to have ridiculous and silly ideas about what even constitutes "rape" and how likely it is to happen. And secondly because everyone...not just women...has in fact gotten too much of a dark view into what humans do and think when they're anonymous and not subject to social norms and pressures, bc of the internet. But that's a general problem, not specific to gender relations, and clearly many people do very much have a dark view of others nowadays, on every measure.
Anyway, I don't think I implied that men are predatory, at least I didn't mean to...I do think everyone has been exposed to the degenerate and depraved and various bad sides of others in every way, bc that's just what happens when people can see what's in others minds without social penalties. But that's off topic.
I don't think males historically marrying teenagers was bc they were predators. It's just that for most of history, every other woman was already married and constantly pregnant or breastfeeding for the entirety of the rest of her fertile period, so snapping up the new adolescents was literally the only option. It used to be the norm for women to have 10 to 12 pregnancies throughout her life with only half surviving. It's not like there were pools of single non-pregnant ladies in their 20s to choose from...you found a pubescent girl or a widow and those were your options. And anyway, it wasn't just up to the future spouses anyway, most of the time it was their parents who decided. But it still would have been in the interests of males to secure a wife early and for females to try to delay that as long as possible, when we're talking about teenagers getting married.
According to Wikipedia, marriages around 14 or 15 were absolutely standard for most of history in most places. Things differ by the specific time and place of course, but you've got consent laws and marriageable age on the books at age 12 in Medieval Europe and Rome, etc. which only got raised to 13 around the 1800s. In fact, it is only some south Asian countries that even today have the highest ages of legal marriage, several years higher than anywhere else in the world including the US. I believe you are Indian, so perhaps that colors the perspective you're coming from, but the later marriage ages in some South Asian countries seem to be an outlier globally, with the rest being 3 to 6 years younger. I can't get substack to let me paste a link from my phone, but that's what the Wikipedia article on "marriagable age" says.
Your point on age of puberty not becoming LATER, given we now have such a slow life history and people aren't even considered full adults til they're practically 25 and don't marry til about 30, is a good one. That would make sense. That's why I suggested that perhaps it's about the perception of sex being around one culturally, rather than in actual reality. People are now exposed to more sexy imagery just driving down the street seeing billboards than anyone would've been their entire lives in the 1800s. But I missed the part about menarche ages originally dropping around the industrial revolution. I had thought you said the steep drop started in the 50s, which is when mass media via film and TV started ramping up, that's why I thought maybe there was a connection there.
A lot of really great information in there. Curious, did any of the studies make mention of any affects from GMO's or any other tinkering that we've done with our food?
I can see the day to day living and stress being a larger impact than what I'm asking, but that is one that I can handle within my family on a personal front to the best of my abilities.
I haven’t seen any studies that particularly test for GMOs and their effect on age of menarche. My guess is that a lot of the GMOs end up being highly imbalanced in their nutrient ratios, you probably get too many calories and not nearly enough minerals, vitamins, enzymes or microbiota from them compared to non-GMOs. Other than that, the actual genetic tinkering hasn’t been proven to cause direct illnesses but with complex systems there is always cascading issues. As a rule, GMOs do require higher amounts of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, which do end up getting into our systems. I do wonder if some of the genetic modifications make the foods more of an irritant to the system, that would definitely add to the background stresses. Remember, stress is much more a physiological response than a psychological one.
It really is very difficult to avoid processed or modified foods or even chemicals nowadays, especially in America. What I personally find very useful, is that I periodically do 1-2 days long fasts to let my system clear out. I have hypersensitivity(kind of like allergies) so I get inflammation quite often and it makes me very lethargic. The fast always calms it down though, so I wonder if it will be useful to periodically bring down general background stresses from certain foods or other irritants in the environment. Only if you are trying it, remember to drink plenty of water and lick a pinch of salt every few hours, so that you don’t get low on sodium.
I can see that it is the policy in many places, but why is that?
As I have tried to point out, our ecological environment is not actually harsh enough to justify any of the severe lifestyles that are surprisingly common nowadays. We have simply come unhinged from the natural forces and are making our own ecology, and clearly doing it badly enough to flirt with extinction, in the form of collapsed birth rates and the global migrations induced by it. In a certain kind of ecosystem perhaps it would make sense for women to learn hostility and resentment toward men by default and then to slowly unlearn it throughout their life, but it certainly makes no sense to do that in our current conditions.
Why were there penal laws in Ireland to the same effect?
Power.
Why were the Anglo-Indians banned from the East India company Civil Service after the victories of 1804-1807 by the other Wellesley Brother ? Because of what had just happened in the Americas… India was not to slip the leash. This had a great deal to do with the modern dysfunctional conception of race - Indirectly.
It would be interesting to track the age of menarche against the overall fertility rate in a society. It would make a certain amount of sense if the body went into puberty earlier when the society was not reproducing itself.
That certainly would be very interesting, but I expect that you would not get a clear linear relationship there. A lowered fertility in a society works as a signal to speed up the LH only when the rest of the variables, especially the high calorie intakes and overall feelings of unpredictability, line up to facilitate it. A sort of “times are tough so we better have as many kids as possible while we still can afford it”. Otherwise, it can also work as a signal to slow down the LH- if the perceived tough times are consistent enough then that’s a cue not to waste any resources on reproduction and instead to focus solely on survival.
Part of what I am trying to argue here is that the whole academic apparatus we currently have of studying nested and cyclical phenomena is completely inadequate. When the causes and effects are all only proximate and the overall variables can both be caused by and in turn effect the rest of the variables in a system, which is the modus operandi of nearly all natural systems, we simply end up not being able to actually study such phenomena at all. We usually just assign cause and effect based on which of the variable affects the others slightly more strongly, which is what the correlation analysis tells us, and then pretend that any effects in the opposite direction are just noise.
In physics, the same problem was solved when we made the jump from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. In fluid dynamics we use dimensionless numbers to quantify the “meta-“ abstracted properties of complex systems. But there is hardly any such analogue in most of the academic disciplines, especially the social sciences. If we are supposed to solve any of the real problems, we absolutely need to be able to perceive complex phenomena as they actually are and not as we would like them to behave.
I would argue that we also tend to assign causes based upon our political/philosophical views. So even if a variable might be rather strongly correlated, we will tend to ignore it if it doesn’t fit our view of what we want to be the truth in this area.
Look up Dick Diven’s photoperiod research, it’s another piece of the puzzle.
As an aside, earlier pubescence has been accompanied by a significant rise in cognitive capacity in the past several decades, which should at least be of some help in dealing with this going forward.
An early puberty does come with a burst of cognitive abilities but the effect is nullified and even reversed by full adulthood. We are actually in the middle of a century or more of cognitive decline- look up Edward Dutton and Richard Lynn’s work on this.
I’ve seen their research. Immigration of stupid people is a major cause of the reverse Flynn effect, but that’s outside the scope of this and in any case dwarfed by the cognitive boost conferred by nutritional improvements in the past hundred years, the potential of which has yet to be exhausted, especially on a global level.
Nutrition and other factors do have a positive effect on cognitive ability but the decline is due to a negative selection against intelligence- smart people have been self selecting out of the gene pool for more than a century. This cannot be countered by any environmental factors, however effective. Intelligence is something like 60-90% genetic based on which population you are looking at.
Okay, THIS makes way more sense.
Can you share a study or article about this? I circle a similar thesis in this essay, but I wasn't sure whether the cognitive advantages seen in children with early puberty necessarily translated to cognitive advantages in adulthood ... https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-drama-of-the-gifted-children
Iodisation and better protein nutrition have raised IQ and height. Look on PubMed. It’s not necessarily the early puberty that caused the cognitive boost, but some calculate that IQ has risen up to 15 points on the low end. There are studies on populations in the US, Korea, etc.
I'm sorry but what country are you in? Nutrition has definitely not improved in the West in the last forty years, it's been steadily declining with the rise in consumption of processed foods, refined sugars, seed oils, and whole-food prices, and with poorer soils and increased used of pesticides such as glyphosate ... plus Vitamin D (from sunlight) is fairly critical to nutrition and affects other vitamin and mineral levels and hormone production and a significant percentage of the population is scared to go outside without sunscreen to absorb it.
From the article:
"Along with the declined age of puberty for girls we are also seeing a catastrophic decline in men’s levels of testosterone, along with all the negative health outcomes it implies, a dramatic increase in every kind of illness that is caused by endocrine disruption, like hypothyroidism, metabolic syndrome, higher adiposity, respiratory problems, PCOS, endometriosis, various fertility issues, low sperm counts, increased rates of certain cancers etc. It is impossible not to see all these negative trends as a cluster of changes that are caused by the same or similar events."
From Mayo Clinic:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/soy-breast-cancer-risk/faq-20120377
*** So where did the idea come from that soy increases breast cancer risk? Isoflavones, which are found in soy, are plant estrogens. High levels of estrogen have been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer. However, food sources of soy don't contain high enough levels of isoflavones to increase the risk of breast cancer.
Soy or isoflavone supplements, on the other hand, generally contain higher levels of isoflavones. Some studies have suggested a link between soy or isoflavone supplements and an increased risk of breast cancer in women who have a family or personal history of breast cancer or thyroid problems. ***
Soy is used in many foods as a filler. Soy oil is used in damn near everything. The idea that it's not effecting people is unreasonable to assume.
There are many things that are minimally dangerous, but in the aggregate most people are exposed to much higher levels of these substances than one might imagine -- because of their use in so many products.
GMO corn is another example. Sure they don't spray all corn with Roundup, and maybe you don't eat corn on the regular -- but many foods use corn as a filler.
Whether or not this is a malevolent act or not is debatable. Just keep in mind. Monsanto, the company that made the GMO corn that can survive Roundup -- didn't serve it in their own company cafeteria.
We consume multiple poisonous substances from multiple directions on the regular.
This was excellent, thank you for doing all of this research!! Another commenter (Jonathon) said something about the decline in age of puberty corresponding with a rise in cognitive capacity ... I *sort* of discuss something similar in this essay, which, in part, talks about how some children might score as "gifted" on childhood IQ tests because they're developing faster than average, noting an anecdotal relationship between childhood "giftedness" and early puberty ... and I argue that attachment trauma is one of the underlying causes.
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-drama-of-the-gifted-children
A very interesting read. I think that you have collected a very important piece of the puzzle. Now we need to figure out what we do with it!
Okay, so you obviously have delved into this research far more than I have or will. I'm very interested in evolutionary theory in general so I'm well versed in concepts like life history and R versus K selection, but I've never looked TOO far into this issue, so I'm not trying to question the expert, so to speak.
But let me just point out a few questions/issues:
1. How exactly would we know when girls started menstruating 200 or 2000 years ago, and how reliable is that information? It's not like most people went to doctors for yearly checkups, prior to about 60 years ago. And it strikes me that families and girls had VERY strong motivations for hiding menarche in their daughters, for most of history. Because I. Most cultures, women were expected to be married off as soon as they had their period. The older men would be sniffing around wanting to snap them up as soon as they were fertile, and it's always been in a family's best interest (and certainly the girl's) to stave that off as long as possible. You can read cross culturally and girls have NEVER liked being married off to old men, yet it as always happened, so one should expect they would lie and hide it as long as possible, if that was the one way to prevent it from happening. It's not like it's hard to hide, or that there were underwear police checking for blood every day. Heck, my dad had no idea when I got my period and I was raised my modern progressive parents who gave me sex ed books. So I'm just not sure you can trust those historical accounts when the incentive to hide and delay admitting puberty was so strong.
2. Also, most people experienced periodic famine (especially those in northern latitudes) and were on the edge of starving for much of history.
3. If girls really got their periods at 16, why were so many married off younger than that?
4. Fatherlessness I take as a point, though this seems like a pretty easy study to do. Is there a simple set of replicated studies on median age of menarche in the US comparing homes with a father in it versus not?
5. Fatherlessness is tricky to measure because living circumstances have been so widely different and single home nuclear families are basically a modern invention. I live in Utah, so if I think about what things were like in the 1800s, it's one father with 7 wives and 80 kids. Literally. I doubt they saw their dada much in that circumstance. And polygamists all married girls off the second they were bleeding, usually around 14, hence the incentive to lie about it as mentioned above. I have the weird experience of having heard from people who left the remaining polygamist communities, and trust me, no 14 year old girl wants to marry the 45 year old man who's already married to half her cousins, she has a crush on the cute boy her age and dreads with all her might having to marry the old man, but is forced on pain of God's eternal disfavor, so all she can really do is not tell anyone when she gets her period and pretend to still be a child.
6. Might the simple sexual cues of an extraordinarily sexual media itself be the cue triggering fast life history? Since the Advent of TV, we've been saturated in sexual imagery and portrayals of sexiness like nothing before in history, and with the internet that's on steroids. Perhaps the cues trigger a "need to compete in the competition seemingly around me" response? Pre 1960s there was essentially zero filmed or photographic portrayals of sexuality, at all. And sex happened behind closed doors. So the general environment was infused with about 1% the sexuality that we see today, and people who didn't want to be exposed to it could easily live an entire life without ever having to be confronted with an overt display of sexuality.
I do think this is all very interesting and I'd love to see more data analysis and studies. But I disagree with Walt's hypothesis that this is the cause of young women becoming turned off to male sexuality. Getting your period 11 months early isn't going to do that. It's just that women know too much now. The internet has revealed exactly the level of depravity out there. And here's the thing...it isn't just young girls. Go on any forum for millennial or Gen X women...they all fucking hate men right now, ESPECIALLY if they're in the dating market and actually exposed to and thinking about men. Every major metro in the country has an "are we dating the same guy" group with more than 50k members where they all compare notes about all the bad behavior of the guys they come across on dating apps. And they all can't stand men because they just know too much. 150 years ago, men hid that shit from women and just went with their friends to the local brothel, and women could only guess at what went on there and never really confirm any of it. Now they all know exactly what guys are looking at and saying to each other, and women are comparing notes with each other online, and it's more reality than they want to know about or can handle.
I appreciate you raising these questions. If you had them then others might too so let me address them here:
1. You seem to have a very bleak and low opinion of the entire human history. The situations you are describing were actually quite rare and they are, in fact, the extremely fast LH strategy that is usually employed in wartime or in frontier cultures that need the extra manpower.
The historical data on age of menarche comes from quite a wide range of sources, including many medical texts describing the perfect physiology of it. It is very likely that many of these anonymous “manual” type texts were written by women. Despite your own situation, it is in general not very hard to spot it when menarche happens, especially in small communities where behavior and habit changes are immediately apparent. If you know what to look for, which the elder, hawkishly protective women in traditional cultures certainly seem to, you can definitely tell the exact age of menarche even if the girl is trying to lie about it. We can even gauge different stages of puberty from skeletal remains, even. There are many cultures across history and even today that celebrate menarche with special rituals. I will admit that some of the historical data may have a margin of error, there are very few actual demographic data sets, but there is no clear trend where all women across all of history would have reasons for keeping the real age of menarche a secret or even to exaggerate it.
But even if you choose to believe that this data is false, and that the historical ages of menarche were exaggerated, reducing them by a whole 2 years would still put them in just a comparable window to today. So I wonder if you are advocating for keeping the terrible conditions and extremely fast LH, that you think was just ubiquitous across history, unchanged. Shouldn’t our modern progressive cultures in which half the women are unmarried at 30 have pushed that age higher?
2. I have addressed this- famine conditions don’t uniformly produce the same effect in LH. If the famine conditions are unpredictable then they cause a faster LH but if they are predictable year after year, then they cause a slower LH. In our age of extreme abundance, we seem to have the same LH as in conditions where there were unpredictable famines. That should give anyone reading this pause.
3. There is a difference between the average/expected age of menarche in any culture, and the whole variation within the population. To the extent that age of puberty dictated age of marriage, you would get plenty of outliers in any large enough population. In the kind of cultures that you seem to believe were historically the most abundant, however, early marriage is not just a way to increase fertility, it is a way to secure ties between families and clans and often it is a business transaction. Coming from Utah you should know this- such marriages happen as early as is culturally acceptable, regardless of age of puberty. But it is not the historical norm across cultures or across history, outside of royalty ironically enough, and the practice doesn’t have a lot to do with the exact age of menarche.
4./5. There are studies that compare the ages of menarche across the population for homes with or without a father. The issue is that there are many genetic, financial and other environmental factors that pollute this data and give very inconclusive results. The studies I have chosen to include are instead comparing the outcomes for twins, to avoid genetic and to some extent financial variation, and find a very clear trend where the various different family situations that are recorded clearly lower the age of menarche. The difference can be as much as a whole year, on average. Out of all the family conditions studied, having both parents present and involved creates the best outcomes, while the absence of the biological father has a much bigger impact on age of menarche than the absence of biological mother. That is why I have chosen to highlight the role of fathers specifically.
6. The overtly sexual media and availability of porn are certainly not helping the matters. But like I have said elsewhere, it is not by far the driving force behind the worldwide changes we are seeing, simply because the first recorded drop in ages of menarche in modern times comes from the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It was not an overtly sexualized culture by any means.
When the average age of menarche drops by 11 months, which is quite a substantial period of time for a 12yo, and the age of thelarche drops even more than that, you are actually looking at quite a substantial portion of the population for which both those milestones have, in fact, dropped down to completely inappropriate ages. You can scoff at the cultural impact of the change in the average, but the average people are usually not the ones leading the sweeping cultural shifts. It is the 5-10% of the population that bears the brunt of any such drastic change that end up leading the social movements and setting the new norms.
You seem to believe that most men are predatory and have exploitative intentions toward most women. With the current broken relations between men and women, I don’t blame you for getting that impression, but I and Walt are trying to tackle the underlying problems here and hopefully to mend these broken relations. Men and women have historically been allies of each other and not competitors. That is ultimately the goal, if we want to escape this caustic and oversensitive culture we seem to be lost in.
Hm, I'm not sure where you're getting anything about predatory males. I think it's a concern if girls are hitting puberty before they can mentally handle it, but NOT because of predatory males, that's my point. If women have a problem with men it's a cultural and media issue, I just think early puberty is a separate issue that isn't related to why Gen Z are seemingly unnecessarily afraid of men. That's bc they've been explicitly taught that, for one thing, and to have ridiculous and silly ideas about what even constitutes "rape" and how likely it is to happen. And secondly because everyone...not just women...has in fact gotten too much of a dark view into what humans do and think when they're anonymous and not subject to social norms and pressures, bc of the internet. But that's a general problem, not specific to gender relations, and clearly many people do very much have a dark view of others nowadays, on every measure.
Anyway, I don't think I implied that men are predatory, at least I didn't mean to...I do think everyone has been exposed to the degenerate and depraved and various bad sides of others in every way, bc that's just what happens when people can see what's in others minds without social penalties. But that's off topic.
I don't think males historically marrying teenagers was bc they were predators. It's just that for most of history, every other woman was already married and constantly pregnant or breastfeeding for the entirety of the rest of her fertile period, so snapping up the new adolescents was literally the only option. It used to be the norm for women to have 10 to 12 pregnancies throughout her life with only half surviving. It's not like there were pools of single non-pregnant ladies in their 20s to choose from...you found a pubescent girl or a widow and those were your options. And anyway, it wasn't just up to the future spouses anyway, most of the time it was their parents who decided. But it still would have been in the interests of males to secure a wife early and for females to try to delay that as long as possible, when we're talking about teenagers getting married.
According to Wikipedia, marriages around 14 or 15 were absolutely standard for most of history in most places. Things differ by the specific time and place of course, but you've got consent laws and marriageable age on the books at age 12 in Medieval Europe and Rome, etc. which only got raised to 13 around the 1800s. In fact, it is only some south Asian countries that even today have the highest ages of legal marriage, several years higher than anywhere else in the world including the US. I believe you are Indian, so perhaps that colors the perspective you're coming from, but the later marriage ages in some South Asian countries seem to be an outlier globally, with the rest being 3 to 6 years younger. I can't get substack to let me paste a link from my phone, but that's what the Wikipedia article on "marriagable age" says.
Your point on age of puberty not becoming LATER, given we now have such a slow life history and people aren't even considered full adults til they're practically 25 and don't marry til about 30, is a good one. That would make sense. That's why I suggested that perhaps it's about the perception of sex being around one culturally, rather than in actual reality. People are now exposed to more sexy imagery just driving down the street seeing billboards than anyone would've been their entire lives in the 1800s. But I missed the part about menarche ages originally dropping around the industrial revolution. I had thought you said the steep drop started in the 50s, which is when mass media via film and TV started ramping up, that's why I thought maybe there was a connection there.
Very interesting read, thank you.
A lot of really great information in there. Curious, did any of the studies make mention of any affects from GMO's or any other tinkering that we've done with our food?
I can see the day to day living and stress being a larger impact than what I'm asking, but that is one that I can handle within my family on a personal front to the best of my abilities.
I haven’t seen any studies that particularly test for GMOs and their effect on age of menarche. My guess is that a lot of the GMOs end up being highly imbalanced in their nutrient ratios, you probably get too many calories and not nearly enough minerals, vitamins, enzymes or microbiota from them compared to non-GMOs. Other than that, the actual genetic tinkering hasn’t been proven to cause direct illnesses but with complex systems there is always cascading issues. As a rule, GMOs do require higher amounts of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, which do end up getting into our systems. I do wonder if some of the genetic modifications make the foods more of an irritant to the system, that would definitely add to the background stresses. Remember, stress is much more a physiological response than a psychological one.
It really is very difficult to avoid processed or modified foods or even chemicals nowadays, especially in America. What I personally find very useful, is that I periodically do 1-2 days long fasts to let my system clear out. I have hypersensitivity(kind of like allergies) so I get inflammation quite often and it makes me very lethargic. The fast always calms it down though, so I wonder if it will be useful to periodically bring down general background stresses from certain foods or other irritants in the environment. Only if you are trying it, remember to drink plenty of water and lick a pinch of salt every few hours, so that you don’t get low on sodium.
To address what I can speak to;
It’s not illness , it’s policy. You are not treating an illness, you are describing policies.
Girls are being educated in the war on men from childhood, of course they have animus for a designated enemy. At least in the West. See - Policy.
Our education system is based on the Prussian system, which means Sparta. We’re all just mobilized in a different cause.
I can see that it is the policy in many places, but why is that?
As I have tried to point out, our ecological environment is not actually harsh enough to justify any of the severe lifestyles that are surprisingly common nowadays. We have simply come unhinged from the natural forces and are making our own ecology, and clearly doing it badly enough to flirt with extinction, in the form of collapsed birth rates and the global migrations induced by it. In a certain kind of ecosystem perhaps it would make sense for women to learn hostility and resentment toward men by default and then to slowly unlearn it throughout their life, but it certainly makes no sense to do that in our current conditions.
Why? Because politics is power.
Why were there penal laws in Ireland to the same effect?
Power.
Why were the Anglo-Indians banned from the East India company Civil Service after the victories of 1804-1807 by the other Wellesley Brother ? Because of what had just happened in the Americas… India was not to slip the leash. This had a great deal to do with the modern dysfunctional conception of race - Indirectly.
Because politics is Power, that’s why.
The effect in Ireland was the utter destruction of the Father-