Menstrual synchronization and cryptic ovulation

The PUA interpretation of cryptic ovulation is that it is an evolutionary adaption to make it easier for women to cuckold their husbands.  Doubtless there is some truth in this, but some untruth also, since when females get their way the result is not polyandry, which is cryptic, but serial monogamy, which female behavior is far from cryptic, whereas when males get their way, the result is polygyny.   Further, females have control of which males can get them pregnant, since their cervix will open for one man’s sperm and not for another man’s sperm, so cryptic ovulation for this purpose is overkill.

Another effect of cryptic ovulation is to promote more sex, for the telos not of reproduction, but for the telos of the unitive bond between man and woman, that the two should be one flesh.

Since ovulation is cryptic in humans it is odd that human females tend to synchronize their menstrual cycles.  It is apparent that a female’s subconscious mind can see what a male’s subconscious mind cannot see.

This implies an evolutionary arms race, in which it is valuable to males to know a female’s fertile period, but valuable to females that a male not know her fertile period.  And it is also valuable for females to know the menstrual cycle of competing females, and valuable for them to let her know their fertile period.

If a females fertile period is transparent to a male’s subconscious mind, this facilitates pump and dump.  By enabling more reproductively efficient sex by the male, undermines the unitive bond and male investment, to the females disadvantage, and facilitates mate guarding, to the female’s disadvantage.  It is easy to see why it should be important to females that their fertile period be cryptic to males, but why should it be transparent to females?

It is well known that females living together tend to synchronize menstruation but this serves no useful evolutionary purpose, so is presumably a side effect of something that does serve useful evolutionary purpose.

Personal observation, not necessarily statistically significant:  Women sleeping with the same man all tend to menstruate simultaneously, or very close together, even if they never meet. It looks to me that when no one is using any form of contraception, one menstruating triggers the other to menstruate.

This, assuming the observation to be valid, serves the evolutionary purpose, useful for women, of making polygyny harder, and making it less likely that a polygynist who may well consciously or subconsciously perceive a woman’s fertile state will get two women pregnant in rapid succession, thus making it more likely he will stick with whoever first gets pregnant.

22 Responses to “Menstrual synchronization and cryptic ovulation”

  1. JRM says:

    Quite the thicket around this topic. Now, I don’t particularly have a dog in this race, but this caught my eye:

    “…serves the evolutionary purpose, useful for women, of making polygyny harder….”

    There seems to be an assumption that women are against polygynous arrangements. But is it true? Powerful men in the past and present have no difficulty attracting willing females who know they are not engaging in a monogamous match. Moreover, these scenarios involve males about whom the females should have few illusions of being promoted to a monogamous pairing.

    In the past, it could be easy to understand why a Genghis Khan had access to hundreds, if not thousands of willing mates, as he would have been capable of food distribution and protection in uncertain times.

    Even now we hear (anecdotally) of sports stars who have bedded women by the hundreds. Movie stars and rock stars also proverbially have high digit sexual histories. Even politicians like a Bill Clinton have had who knows how many sexual partners.

    So I guess I would question the assumption that women are instinctively interested in foiling the best laid plans of would-be polygyny practitioners. Perhaps polygyny is an acceptable outcome for women who insist upon alpha partners but are realistic about their inability to eclipse all other available females.

  2. […] for something completely different… or maybe not… Jim turns his attention to Menstrual synchronization and cryptic ovulation. And here Jim takes a stab at Keeping up with PC—Pedophilia (approximately) […]

  3. Anonymous says:

    I like your blog, Jim, but this here is some staggering idiocy.

    Women’s menstrual cycles don’t synchronise at all. They converge and diverge at random in cycles of varying duration. Any appearance to the contrary is the result of dumb bimbos failing to accurately self-report data – how is it a notable coincidence that two women in a group are bleeding at the same time, when full menstrual cycles last, on average, 5 days for every 28 days? It’s statistical pareidolia on a level worse than horoscopes.

    • jim says:

      What can I say: I observe girls synchronizing, so do other people.

    • peppermint says:

      » pareidolia

      You sound smart. I’ll listen to you and reject this hypothesis to explain why women would sync their cycles if they do in favor of your hypothesis that they don’t.

  4. Anon says:

    Detecting estrus for a man may be hard, but definitely not impossible. I have discovered that at a certain time of the month, my colleague is much more chatty and just seems more appealing.

    And I can definitely tell when my girlfriend is in ovulation.

    Start keep track of how “sexy” women around you feel. If there’s a variation with a monthly drumbeat, you’re on to something.

  5. Aleksander says:

    “females have control of which males can get them pregnant, since their cervix will open for one man’s sperm and not for another man’s sperm”

    I have heard this claim several times before (both on this blog and elsewhere), and seen many people deny it as ridiculous, but I have never seen any actual evidence either way. Do you have any convincing evidence that your claim is obviously true? Or is it more based on experience/hearsay?

    • jim says:

      Experience. Feeling the cervix closed, then open in response to sexual stimuli during fertile period.

      If a girl gets pregnant to a rapist, that does not necessarily prove she had an orgasm, but it does prove she rather liked the rape and the rapist, and very likely had an orgasm.

      The cervix is normally closed. If closed, those sperm are not going anywhere.

  6. pbird says:

    You guys are nuts. Women synchronize From sheer nearness. That’s all it is.

    • jim says:

      But nearby women do not necessarily synchronize, while women sleeping with the same man are kept as far apart as possible, and do synchronize.

      And if women syncrhonized by nearness, why?

  7. Gilberto Dorneles da Rocha says:

    It’s also easier for a band of males to protect their investment on a band of females.
    If all of them are menstruating at some time of the month, this is the time most of the males can go out without risking being cuckolded.

  8. viking says:

    I would think synchronization made life easier for nomadic hunter gatherers. You may not know when the bitches are in heat Jim but the rest of us can tell in an instant. If they were running around dressed like Daryl Hannah in clan of the cave bear with the camp dogs and flies licking the blood off their calf’s while a dozen bitches picked fights with each other and the rest of the clan,even youde figure it was time to make camp for a bit. synchronized and short period fertility makes defending the womens mecegenating tendencies a bit easier, the impregnating more accurate and the calving process more organized as well.

  9. Laguna Beach Fogey says:

    When I was single recently and spinning several ‘plates,’ I noticed that my FWBs would reach out to me for sex all at the same time at a certain time of the month. At first I thought it was just a coincidence, but then it dawned on me. I wrote a blog post about this a couple of years ago.

  10. Caprizchka says:

    The evolutionary advantage of female menstrual synchronization is generally incomprehensible to those who believe that quantity rather than quality of offspring is an evolutionary advantage.

    When women synchronize with the cycle of the dominant (healthiest) reproductive female, who in turn synchronizes with the dominant (healthiest) male this serves to limit reproduction of “the tribe” to the optimum conditions of the environment in terms of nutrition availability. Prior to widespread organized agriculture, human females, like every other animal, would probably have reduced their body fat such as to inhibit ovulation altogether in lean times. Women whose genomes have adapted to a tighter migratory circle tend to have more regular menstrual cycles such as to be able to choose when and whether to reproduce rather than having it be entirely by accident.

    “Fertility” is only celebrated by agricultural rather than nomadic peoples who produced pornography for its own sake rather than for mere reproductive or “fertility” worship. There exists of course more than one way to have sex and apparently primitive peoples were capable of more creative sexual expressions than the Christian missionaries who studied them and thereby set the tone of anthropological interpretation of their artwork.

    Furthermore, the healthy groups of people who Weston A. Price DDS studied deliberately spaced reproduction by at least four years, allowing the mother’s nutritional status to recover sufficiently in order to impart the best health and survivability onto subsequent children. In the long run, health of the genome and gene expression matters in terms of the outcomes of future generations even more so than mere quantity.

    In short, synchronization is about reproductive leadership of the most fit.

    • jim says:

      This is incomprehensible because it makes no sense, not because ingeniously clever.

      • Mycroft Jones says:

        His reasoning may be no more accurate than yours, but it made sense to me, and he also made good points.

        I myself have not observed mother/daughter synchronization. Synchronization may be a myth.

        • jim says:

          The question is, under what circumstances do women synchronize.

          I predict they synchronize when having unprotected sex with the same man, or when in a situation that accidentally produces analogous signals, the latter case being hard to identify, since the signals are subtle and we do not know what they are.

    • jim says:

      Natural selection acts on the individual. Your comment is meaningless word salad, not an explanation in terms of natural selection, not an explanation of why one behavior will result in one individual leaving more descendents, and another individual fewer.

    • peppermint says:

      — and apparently [noble savages] were capable of more creative sexual expressions than the [sexually repressed] Christian missionaries who studied them

      Oh look, it’s the mandingo porn hypothesis

      Gas the cucks, sex war now

    • peppermint says:

      — Weston A. Price

      /!\ Warning: WASP name, possible cuck, nigger, or crypto-Jew

      — DDS

      What in the name of Trump is a DDS?

  11. Alf says:

    Nice synched menstruation hypothesis. I guess girls don’t backstab each other all the time after all.

    So a man wants multiple girls, whereas a girl only needs one man. So monogamous cultures lean more towards the female imperative than the male imperative. Which is interesting because monogamy gets good rep yet the feminine imperative gets bad rep.

    My impression is that as a high status male you can get away with having a mistress – is this a sort of consolation prize for males?

    • peppermint says:

      Monogamy is good because it leads to Whiteness. Female imperative is just the way things are, and women shouldn’t really be making sexual decisions, except for maybe syncing their cycles and trying to get in the same bed and the winner gets the ring, competition which also leads to Whiteness, since the female who gets in that bed is likely to be the Whitest of them.

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