"Never again shall you thirst, for I am come to wet your mouth with wine and water, to quench your thirst with kisses. Words of Love from my own lips will serve as your oasis, and you shall never want for drink again."

prokopetz:

lizziegoneastray:

prokopetz:

nonesane:

iamaslumberbatch:

a-lot-like-diana:

so basically when you have your period and your lower back hurts it is because your hips are contracting and spreading apart, only slightly, to make room for the release of the blood and linings of your uterus. so basically your body is going through a small and mild labor to push out the dead insides of your uterus. so basically I have gone through labor and basically I don’t want children. 

why aren’t we taught this shit

Also, another reason menstruation hurts? Your uterus is contracting so hard it’s cutting off its own blood supply!

However, while this can hurt (and any non-uterus-havers who say you shouldn’t complain, ask them to cut off the blood supply to their hand or other limb and see how they feel) it shouldn’t hurt so much that it impairs your everyday life.

If you’re in so much pain that you can’t stand up, feel faint or have to vomit, you might have endometriosis or some other complication that you need to seek medical attention for.

The whole “menstruations hurt” is so unhelpful to learn since you never get taught how much it should hurt. Endometriosis is a fairly common illness among people with uteri and yet I went 13 frikkin’ years without treatment because I thought I was just experiencing menstrual cramps.

Anatomy education really needs to step up its game! A lot of uterus-havers are suffering under the false assumption that ‘this is just the way the world is’ when there’s a lot of things that could be done about said pain.

/end rant.

Note that a big part of that is that, until relatively recently, nobody really knew what “average” or “typical” was in terms of menstrual discomfort because the male-dominated medical establishment has historically been uninterested in addressing “women’s problems”. Indeed, a great deal of what we think of as common knowledge regarding female anatomy and physiology is really unsupported supposition, because nobody’s ever bothered to check in any systematic way.

(I mean, heck, up until just a few years ago, we still thought that the thickening of the uterine lining that precedes menstruation was actually meant to render the uterus more hospitable for a hypothetical embryo, and look accurate that turned out to be.)

^wait, you mean that’s not true?

Nope. The menstrual cycle creates a hostile environment for newly fertilised embryos, in order to weed out the weak and unfit ones before any resources are wasted allowing them to grow. We spent centuries blithely assuming it was precisely the opposite because, well, having babies is what women are for, right?

(Source)