Here's an unsurprising and completely not-fun fact: For most of history, the people who researched and made big declarations about periods were men who weren't having periods themselves.
If you're familiar with the concept of "sexism," you can probably guess how bad and dumb this was. The result was women hearing a lot of information that we know recognize as bogus and idiotic.
How bogus and idiotic, you ask? Extremely. But you can judge for yourself. Here are 10 bullsh*t myths women were told (mostly by men) throughout history.
1. Periods are an "abnormal occurrence" that only happen because women are meant to be pregnant.
As Sharra L. Vostral writes in her book, Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology, in 1875 a male obstetrician named Dr. A. F. A. King thought periods were "a departure from nature," because the only reasonable, natural state for a woman was pregnancy. Or in other words, people really used to think that if you weren't pregnant, you were doing something wrong. King wrote that "menstruation is the result of an interference with nature" and could be prevented if women simply followed the rules of nature and stayed constantly pregnant. LMAO. Sure.
Periods are when women are fertile.
In the mid-1800s, Vostral writes, a bunch of scientists thought periods were the same as when a female animal is "in heat," and therefore thought a period signified the time a woman was most fertile. We now obviously know this is completely untrue, and a period is when you're probably the least likely to be able to get pregnant.