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How period trackers have changed girl culture

well.blogs.nytimes.com

71–80 of 109 posts

Re: How period trackers have changed girl culture

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Absolutely, 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_h...

"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.

Re: How period trackers have changed girl culture

#72

A 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

That is explicitly mentioned in the article.

true, 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"

Re: How period trackers have changed girl culture

#73
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about operational speaking, but epedemiologically speaking, the two are very different. One of them is associated with e. coli, a lethal bacterium that even in modern times and developed nations kills people on a regular basis, e.g. Walkerton, Ontario, where seven people were killed by improperly treated drinking water in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak It’s easy to see why…

I'm not a native speaker, so forgive me for not expressing myself clearly enough, but isn't urination also considered to be defecation, or does defecation in English refers only to the "number two"? I'm asking, because urine is mostly sterile. However, my point was that while there are a lot of obvious differences, defecation is similar enough to menstruation, such that it's not surprising that stigma is also similar…

At least medically speaking, yes, the term "defecation" is used exclusively to refer to "number two":

> Defecation is the final act of digestion, by which organisms eliminate solid, semisolid, and/or liquid waste material from the digestive tract via the anus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defecation

Re: How period trackers have changed girl culture

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not very unlike. They are mostly alike. They have differences, which is why we only say they are alike, not equivalent.

They are only “mostly alike” if you carefully cherry-pick the ways in which you count similarity, while handwaving over the number and importance of the ways in which they are different. Humans care about deciding which things are actually alike and which things are only superficially alike, because such choices have important consequences. For example, if we decided they are “mostly alike,’ we might decide that all…

>They are only “mostly alike” if you carefully cherry-pick the ways in which you count similarity, while handwaving over the number and importance of the ways in which they are different.

They are very alike if you look at all the other bodily activities and then rank them based on how different they are.

Is 1mm a short distance or a huge distance? Without knowing the scale, you can't say if a 1mm difference is important or rounding error. 10000mm and 10001mm is not a big difference. .001mm and 1.001mm is a big difference. But both are only the difference of 1mm.

In the same way, these bodily functions are different, but their differences are not great compared to the differences between these and other bodily functions. Urination is one of the only things I can think is closer... and it also has a lot of stigma around it.

Re: How period trackers have changed girl culture

#75
post #3

I never understood the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary process that half of all people have.

It has all the unreasonable stigmas of bodily functions and some of the unreasonable stigmas around sex and the much of the unreasonable stigma around puberty.

Re: How period trackers have changed girl culture

#76
I 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.

Re: How period trackers have changed girl culture

#78
post #77

[deleted]

"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.

Re: How period trackers have changed girl culture

#79
post #3

I never understood the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary process that half of all people have.

It's at least partially due to the process being "unnatural" in a historical context. Women were historically pregnant much of their lives, so having a period would have been relatively uncommon. It's also been explicitly stigmatized in many different religious contexts, from the Old Testament to Native American cultures.

Is any of this right? Probably not. But for better or worse, we're driven as much by our history as our intellect.

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