It 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.
In 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Yeah, in Greece they also say "I'm indisposed", and it's a generally-known euphemism for "I'm on my period", but you never really know if they're on their period or if they're ill.
> Personally, I don't recall ever witnessing this stigma
I've seen it in things like my mom asking me whether I'd be uncomfortable getting her pads from the supermarket, which was pretty puzzling to me. I guess it's to women what buying condoms is to men, maybe.
It's not unlike the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary process that almost all of people have, which is defecation. Operationally speaking, the two are very similar. So, why is there a stigma behind defecation?
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:
It’s easy to see why humans have developed behaviours and social stigma around defecation.
Menstruation is very different. Our social behaviours around it may have more to do with our social behaviours around genders, sexual availability, and other stuff. I’m not an anthropologist, so I’ll just stop here before I dig a hole for myself.
I’ll just note that the two are very unlike in very important ways.
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 you need is a pad to absorb defecation, and you need only change it when it cannot absorb any more liquid.
After many such discoveries, we change our minds and say, “Although they may appear to be alike at first glance, it turns out that they are mostly different."
>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.
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.
I'd argue urination is less stigmatized than defacation('number two') or menstruation. How many times have you seen someone urinating in (semi-)public vs. defacating in public?
I understand what you're trying to say about patriarchy, and it's a problem, but that said...
I and 100% of people have a few completely natural and necessary processes that we go through on a pretty much daily basis that are so stigmatized they have a special room in our houses dedicated to making sure we can do them in private. I'm talking about defecating and urinating.
Can you imagine if--once a month, like clockwork--you got really bad IBS and couldn't help but visibly leak diarrhea into your pants? Would you celebrate "I have monthly track marks", or would you develop coping mechanisms to try to hide it?
And before anyone complains about "you can't compare pooping and having a period", uh, poo is brown because it's mostly dead red blood cells. It is a process for expelling material my body can no longer use. About as comparable as apples and oranges, which is to say, fairly comparable, because they're both sweet, round fruits that grow on trees and contain their own seeds.
We generally don't share the details of what we do with our bodily fluids with other people. I mean, we call public toilets "restrooms" because we can't bring ourselves to admit to what is going on in there.
Should our culture be so prudish about bodily functions? I don't know, but that is certainly the case as of right now. And it's applied pretty evenly, regardless of sex. So I would say it's easily "understandable".
[0] I usually leave sweating and fatigued, so I don't know how much "rest" I'm receiving in there. Suppose I need to lay off the Chipotle. Which brings up another point, severe abdominal cramping isn't unique to menstruation, either.
> I understand what you're trying to say about patriarchy
I wasn't trying to say anything about patriarchy, just to be clear.
> Would you celebrate "I have monthly track marks", or would you develop coping mechanisms to try to hide it?
Neither, probably. If everyone got it, I'd say "I have my IBS these days" and everyone would understand.
> We generally don't share the details of what we do with our bodily fluids with other people.
Sure, but there's a difference between "holy shit this period is so goopy, it's like I have a second nose" and "this period is giving me pretty bad cramps".
> So I would say it's easily "understandable".
My issue is not about describing periods in detail, I understand why people don't want to invoke images in other people's heads. I'm just puzzled about not even being able to say "I have my period this week", which is like saying "I have diarrhoea", it's not really that descriptive unless the recipient tries hard to imagine it, in which case, it's their problem :P
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.
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.
Apparently 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.
I 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.
As 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.
> 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.)
It'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.
As the app mentioned is free, I would deduce that they try to turn the data about their users cycle into a monetary value.
There are good reasons why people might want to make this sort of app beyond selling the data. There's a huge potential for health care service providers - if women don't need prescription drugs or appointments to see their doctor, and any other medical issues are resolved more easily because there isn't the problem of the drugs interacting with the pill, then that represents a vast saving in the cost of supplying services.
if women don't need prescription drugs or appointments to see their doctor, and any other medical issues are resolved more easily because there isn't the problem of the drugs interacting with the pill, then that represents a vast saving in the cost of supplying services.
This exactly. The app. I use is called the Pink Pad and free. I have been using it since 2011. Since then, I have stop taking the pill. There are no ads just very straight forward. It tells you fertile days and other things. Since that time, it has been off on certain days as that is my fault for not getting to properly note things. But it has been very spot on.
Relying on that app may not be the best idea; from the article:
>While the apps also can be used to track ovulation, signaling the days the user is more or less likely to become pregnant, most period tracker apps explicitly warn users not to rely on them to prevent pregnancy. The ovulation tracker and fertility prediction can be helpful for a woman trying to conceive, but it can give a false sense of security to a woman who relies on the app as a form of birth control.
>That’s because even the most vigilant ovulation tracking methods have shockingly high failure rates, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, with up to one in four women becoming pregnant over the course of a year with typical use.
>“Apps are a tool; they’re not actually a birth control method,” said Hannah Ransom of San Diego, a certified fertility awareness educator.
I guess that 4 people do not work for free. I understand that There's a huge potential for health care service providers, but how could this company get money out of this? This app is free for everyone. I do not connect the dots why one health care service provider should fund it. So perhaps you could elaborate it from this point of view?
In the case of Clue it looks like they are selling data insights, although it looks more like they're interested in overall trends rather than individuals (caveat: based on their marketing). They're already quite big at 22 staff (the 4 you saw on the site are the founders), and they're still hiring. That's all paid for with VC cash at the moment. I don't imagine they can easily cover that level of burn without targeting enterprise customers once the inventment runs out, which likely will be things like white label apps sold directly to health care providers - in European countries there's often one major provider that's run by the government. Selling a white-labelled app to them that can save the provider a large sum of money wouldn't be that hard.
I looked at their (Clue's) privacy policy a while ago: basically you have the option of not creating an account, and they claim that everything is stored locally and not sent anywhere in that case.
I think it's a German/EU company, so they should have some restrictions on what they do with this data.
I can't say for the privacy policy, but I used Clue for over a year without an account. Since I forgot to do a final export of the data before resetting my phone (I know, I know...), I subsequently lost all the locally stored data for the past few months. When I contacted Clue, they said their was no way to retrieve it. So my guess is that they are telling the truth re: nothing sent to the cloud unless you explicitly choose to.
I think there's a touch of "my adversary is a super-villain" paranoia to the anti-tracking sentiments. I mean Facebook or Amazon get talked about occasionally for being able to predict pregnancies or breakups an monetizing that. But, IMO, it's much overblown. Predctive analytics are not at that point, if they ever will be. The vast majority of ad targeting is a lot simpler than that. It's either common sense understandable (advertise nanny services to people who read parenting magazines) or trial and error. Trial and error is still the more powerful of the two.
FB & Google have the option to scan your site, pick audiences and advertising strategies and run everything on autopilot. it doesn't work very well.
If your strategy is to collect toilet break statistics, user listening habits or some other bit of "data" for a large number of free users than monetize it somehow, good luck.
To 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.
I 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.
So our disagreement boils down to language "gotchas"? Yes, you got me. Although one might argue that labeling something a regression is not a value judgement when things have indeed gone back to how they were in the past - but if bias is what you were looking for you found it. I never tried to hide it either.
Let's talk about something worthwhile instead: do you really believe, as alluded to in your comments, that the natural state is an ideal humans should aspire to, especially in the face of disease and other bodily limitations?
> 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.
"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.
> "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.
> What's the definition of "fixed" and "broken" you're implicitly using in your argument?
Functionally according to its function. One's digestive organs are meant to digest; one's reproductive organs are meant to reproduce. Reproductive organs which can't reproduce are broken: fixing ones which are broken is indeed healthcare, while breaking ones which are fully-functioning is an elective procedure.
But "function" only exists for something that was created by intellectual being with a goal in mind. How can you define "function" for something that evolved naturally?
> But "function" only exists for something that was created by intellectual being with a goal in mind.
That doesn't bother me, since I think it's pretty obvious that there must be a prime mover of some sort.
> How can you define "function" for something that evolved naturally?
What it does. A kidney filters blood (and performs some other functions as well): a kidney which doesn't filter blood is obviously unhealthy. A heart pumps blood: a heart which fails to pump blood is obviously unhealthy. Gonads produce reproductive cells and introduce them to sexual partners: a set of gonads which don't produce such cells, or fail to introduce them to sexual partners, is obviously unhealthy.
At a higher level, an organism is a mechanism for propagating genes. An organism which propagates its genes fulfills its function; one which does not fails to fulfill its function (note that ensuring the propagation of one's relatives' similar genes can count as a partial fulfillment at least).
Actually, 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.
Just 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).
Normal 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.
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.
Just 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.
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
Is 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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