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How period trackers have changed girl culture
- zkirill 11y agoIt must be fascinating to work on an app where the target demographic is slightly less than half of the world's population. The CEO's Twitter feed is very interesting too. https://twitter.com/idatin/status/659853258496851968 https://twitter.com/idatin/status/659853258496851968 What may seem as a simple tracker app on the surface is actually a very complicated product tackling many problems all over the world.
- adamwiggins 11y agoIt is. http://www.helloclue.com/jobs.html http://www.helloclue.com/jobs.html
- Udo 11y agoTo someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s like me, this seems like a strange regression in some ways. The overwhelming majority of girls were on the pill pretty much when they became sexually active, and when I look at my age group right now, that's still the case to this day. The pill was considered normal, safe, and liberating. Many said their menstrual problems were greatly reduced, and of course there was a completely reliable schedule that came with it. Just two decades ago, period trackers would not have been all that useful to most people. That's a big culture shift.
- yumptonpa 11y agoYou think it's a good think that the majority of women were resorting to a drug to cope with a normal healthy body function? I think it's good if more women are able to cope without the drugs.
- Udo 11y agoI said it's a culture shift, I didn't mean to pass any judgement. As someone with a male body I'm not really in the position to tell. I have a strong feeling of what I would do if I had been born female, but I was not, so... Pain, suffering, and health problems in general, are indeed natural as you say. However, most people would consider them part of the "no thanks" aspect of nature. You disagree, and I suspect you already know that's an extreme and unethical position to hold, otherwise you would not have made a new HN account just for this discussion.
- yumptonpa 11y ago> I said it's a culture shift, I didn't mean to pass any judgement. You said it was a 'regression'.
- zeveb 11y ago> You think it's a good think that the majority of women were resorting to a drug to cope with a normal healthy body function? That's what I've always thought was so odd about the complaint that erectile dysfunction are typically covered by health insurance but contraception may not be: the former fixes a broken body, while the other breaks a functioning one.
- golergka 11y ago"Fixed" and "broken" are defined how the person wants to use his body, not by natural order of things. Otherwise, reaching immortality could be viewed as "breaking" perfectly functioning death meachanism.
- zeveb 11y ago> "Fixed" and "broken" are defined how the person wants to use his body, not by natural order of things. That's an interesting idea, but one which I have to disagree with. A person who wishes to be an amputee does not have a broken body because he has two arms and two legs, nor is his body fixed by severing one or more of them; rather, he has healthy limbs and a broken brain or mind, which may be fixable with particular forms of therapy, or not, but certainly not by destroying his healthy limbs. > Otherwise, reaching immortality could be viewed as "breaking" perfectly functioning death mechanism. From what I know of how people age and die it appears that death is the failure and that immortality, were it achievable, is the proper state.
- golergka 11y agoInteresting discussion. What's the definition of "fixed" and "broken" you're implicitly using in your argument?
- mreiland 11y agostop worrying about definitions, it's a question of intent and life satisfaction for people. What category someone on the internet wants to file that under is irrelevant.
- golergka 11y agoI think that the pill is supposed to "cope" with potential unwanted pregnancy, not with periods.
- yumptonpa 11y ago> Many said their menstrual problems were greatly reduced, and of course there was a completely reliable schedule that came with it.
- StavrosK 11y agoAre you saying that problems are normal and healthy?
- golergka 11y agoThanks, I can read. My point is, while this might be a desirable side-effect, this is not the reason women are on the pill.
- mkaziz 11y agoActually, a lot of women who have really bad periods sometimes specifically go on the pill to reduce their intensity. Source: friends in med school who have gone through their ob-gyn rotations.
- golergka 11y agoWow, I had no idea. Thanks.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoJust to add to mkaziz's info, my wife specifically went on the pill in her teens, and was on it through her early through mid twenties specifically to address how painful her periods were. Its not well known, but some women's periods can be debilitating (several days where you experience intense pain and cramping, where you don't even want to get out of bed).
- delecti 11y agoNormal healthy body function is getting pregnant many times throughout your life. Just because periods are what happens every month to a female body in current society doesn't mean it's normal or healthy. There's reason to think that modern women having so many periods throughout their adult lives is at least partly to blame for higher incidences of various female-specific cancers (breast in particular, but also uterine and ovarian). Reducing the number of periods a woman has in her lifetime greatly reduces the risk of those cancers. http://gladwell.com/john-rock-s-error/ http://gladwell.com/john-rock-s-error/
- sangnoir 11y agoEstrogen is carcinogenic. 1. http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/publications/in-vivo/Vol2_Iss10_may26_03/ http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/publications/in-vivo/Vol2_Iss10... 2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10688862 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10688862
- toomuchtodo 11y agoEstrogen can be administered with other compounds to reduce the chance of cancer from interaction with oxygen radicals: http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/publications/in-vivo/Vol2_Iss10_may26_03/ http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/publications/in-vivo/Vol2_Iss10... Anyways, there's always something that's going to cause cancer in your body until we determine a way of hardening the cellular death and reproduction systems.
- blub 11y agoThere's a group of women who have all sorts of ugly side-effects from taking the pill. It has its pros and cons like everything.
- Udo 11y agoJust because some people suffer from side effects doesn't mean it's a bad option for everyone. Both medically speaking and from a maintenance point of view, the pill is still a good default for most women. Cultural support may have dwindled into nothingness by now (especially in the US), but every single woman using it that I talked to said she enjoyed the amount of control it gave her and that it greatly increased her quality of life. I can't imagine those who already know this measure of comfort and control would react positively to "hey, we'll take this away from you, but here, have a period tracker app in exchange". I realize it's a controversial hypothesis, but I suspect the market for period tracker apps is so large because the majority of women don't have access to, or even factual knowledge about, the alternative due to mostly cultural reasons.
- StavrosK 11y agoI never understood the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary process that half of all people have.
- gallamine 11y agoIn American culture is pretty taboo to have a conversation about defecation - that's a process that all people have! It might not make sense, but it isn't unusual.
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- tomp 11y agoI agree completely. Personally, I don't recall ever witnessing this stigma, apart from the general disinterest in this topic. Having said that, I don't understand the current movement of glorifying and promoting menstruation (e.g. [1], [2]). Sure, it's natural, but it's also rather yucky - just like shitting and pissing. But I'd still appreciate if I don't see photos of shit, menstruation, or sperm on my Facebook. [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/menstruation-themed-photo-series-artist-censored-by-instagram-says-images-are-to-demystify-taboos-10144331.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/menstrua... [2] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rossalynwarren/a-woman-ran-a-marathon-free-bleeding-to-take-a-stand-against http://www.buzzfeed.com/rossalynwarren/a-woman-ran-a-maratho...
- speeder 11y agoI am from Brazil, I had never heard of a taboo in the open, but after I started to have long term girlfriends, all of them tried to not use the word "menses" in Portuguese, from methods that I think are stupid (writing only "m" instead) to the outright infuriating (using ambiguous and hard to understand euphemisms), it annoyed me a lot, and I argued with all of them about it, never worked, they never explained that behavior and continued it.
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- glossyscr 11y agoA bit click-baity title since the product's USP is not even mentioned: When to have unprotected intercourse with a 'lower' probability of getting pregnant EDIT: Thanks for the downvote, please elaborate
- peteretep 11y agoThat is explicitly mentioned in the article.
- glossyscr 11y agotrue, I was too fast but the mention in the article feels more like a side benefit, from what I heard it's one of the core features, here the snippet: "They also can record when you had sex (Clue’s icon for protected sex is a man wearing a tie) or remind you to pack tampons"
- peteretep 11y agoThere's a much longer snippet further down
- mkesper 11y agoApparently you didn't read the article (It was not me who downvoted you, though). It's mentioned there that most apps come with a fat warning that it's absolutely not reliable.
- sokoloff 11y agoI didn't downvote, but it seems like that's a minor selling point at best. The article mentions it, of course, but even as a male, I can imagine far more utility from the other predictive and tracking aspects than that.
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- eveningcoffee 11y agoAs the app mentioned is free, I would deduce that they try to turn the data about their users cycle into a monetary value. Is there research how certain periods of the cycle would affect women shopping behaviour (or behaviour in general)? I am asking this to understand how much value is in such information. Perhaps there are other aspects I am overlooking?
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago> Is there research how certain periods of the cycle would affect women shopping behaviour (or behaviour in general)? I am asking this to understand how much value is in such information. If someone stops having periods, that might be a sign they're pregnant. That's valuable to retailers (famously, some can spot when you're pregnant before even you know, by tracking purchases). Also, mood swings and specific cravings might happen, and that would affect consumption? (Don't have personal experience here.)
- endymi0n 11y agoAbsolutely, we're talking about a really lucrative segment here... > To marketers, the average Joe’s online data is worth around 10 cents. However, a pregnant woman’s data is worth fifteen times that: $1.50. http://www.salon.com/2014/04/28/one_womans_attempt_to_hide_her_pregnancy_from_big_data/ http://www.salon.com/2014/04/28/one_womans_attempt_to_hide_h...
- WildUtah 11y ago"pregnant woman’s data is worth fifteen times" The reason for this is obvious if you've ever budgeted for a new baby in the house.
- arjunnarayan 11y agoIt's not just the cost of buying baby stuff. It's that people's lives fall into regular patterns. Usually, there are few opportunities to change someone's pattern. Pregnancy is one of the biggest such opportunities. For example, say someone goes to QFC for their weekly groceries - it's hard to convince them to go in the opposite direction to Safeway, even if it's about the same distance. Pregnancy is one of those few times when people's shopping patterns are up for grabs. If you can slip in and get them to go to Target for a few critical baby-things, maybe you can get them going to Target for everything else for the next ten years.
- klausa 11y ago>It's not unlike the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary (...) which is defecation. Yeah! And as we all know, girls are in general, just /gross/. There is no such stigma around shitting. Have you really never heard people joking what happens after they eat Taco Bell or similar foods? People don't talk about particulars of shit they take - but it's not a complete taboo. But seriously - those two are nothing alike and comparing them in such way shows that you haven't given it any real thought.
- StavrosK 11y ago> Have you really never heard people joking what happens after they eat Taco Bell or similar foods? I've heard men joke about it. I haven't heard women do it. My girlfriend (like most girls I know) will talk about her period to me, but she will never talk about her shit. > those two are nothing alike and comparing them in such way shows that you haven't given it any real thought. Would you care to enlighten us?
- xyzzyz 11y ago> There is no such stigma around shitting. Have you really never heard people joking what happens after they eat Taco Bell or similar foods? People don't talk about particulars of shit they take - but it's not a complete taboo. I've heard girls talking about their periods much more often than talk about their dumps, so no, I don't think taboo for menstruation is bigger. > But seriously - those two are nothing alike and comparing them in such way shows that you haven't given it any real thought. Nothing alike? At the very least, both are discharges from the crotch area, and both are disposed of in or around toilet. Both require sanitary accessories, and both can signal your health. I probably haven't given menstruation as much thought as you, Janusz, however I don't understand why you're so aggresive about it.
- dang 11y ago> you haven't given it any real thought Please don't do this here. Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Snark isn't welcome, either. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10614354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10614354 and marked it off-topic.
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- facepalm 11y agoIs it really such an issue in the US? I find that hard to believe. I can imagine it is not a popular subject, just like other subjects of hygiene. But that is not the same as being stigmatized.
- jacquesm 11y agoPeriod trackers don't protect against STDs, and neither does 'the Pill'.
- WildUtah 11y agoI have an app idea now. There should be a cycle tracking app for men. It could have black leather and chrome theming to make it very, very masculine; perhaps there could be big trucks or motorcycles as metaphors in the controls somehow. And it would track periods using the same basic time series regression methods as the girly ones. Only instead of predicting when your period is coming, it will predict those three days a month when you need to tread very lightly around your wife or girlfriend to avoid emotional trauma and fighting. Maybe I'll monetize it with affiliate links to chocolate vendors or florists a couple days before the target date. There could be an automatic scheduling of a nice thoughtful present via Amazon Prime and calendering of a night out with the boys for those days when it's a little dangerous to be at home. Yup. I'm going to have the investors lining up.
- minikites 11y agoI feel sorry for the women in your life.
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- WildUtah 11y ago"that this article is getting so many down votes." You can't downvote stories. The secret ranking formula automatically downgrades stories that reach certain thresholds of views and votes depending on the distribution of comment voting. Upvotes can actually make a story fall in the rankings. The exact details are considered a state secret, but you should not expect that upvotes will always promote a story.
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