Every study I've seen, and simple observation, tells me that girls hit puberty earlier now merely because of increased adiposity. They're fatter. And you don't need to be actually "fat" but even normal sized kids these days are generally much softer than they used to be. Before roughly the 80s and 90s, teenagers were almost universally r…
Every study I've seen, and simple observation, tells me that girls hit puberty earlier now merely because of increased adiposity. They're fatter. And you don't need to be actually "fat" but even normal sized kids these days are generally much softer than they used to be. Before roughly the 80s and 90s, teenagers were almost universally rail thin. Like, REALLY skinny by today's standards.
The women in my family are all tall and slim with basically the same body type. My older sister looked like a literal skeleton when she was 13, in the 80s. I looked skinny but not like a skeleton, in the 90s. Our mom looked like a concentration camp victim at 13, in the 60s. My sister's daughter, born in the 2000s, looked slim but not at all skinny, and she definitely had softness. I know lots of teenagers who are more plump than their parents, which basically didn't exist in the past.
I also think pre adolescent and adolescent girls have been getting hit on by adult men for all of history and that's nothing new. I was a super late bloomer and got my period and developed way after my friends, around 14. Regardless of that fact and being totally flat chested, I STILL had friends dads and strange men on the street leering and saying disgusting things to me, and was trapped in a corner and molested by two older boys at a public pool. My mom has similar tales from the 50s and 60s, and like I said, she resembled a blonde concentration camp victim with zero boobs, and it still happened. I don't think these things are new, they just weren't talked about previously. And yes of course a teenage girl with big gravity defying boobs is going to get it all the worse.
Btw, women absolutely DO consider that their own fathers are disgusting pigs just like their friend's dad and their math teacher and their uncle and their neighbor...but the thought is so horrifying and profoundly upsetting and depressing to think about that it's best to put it out of your mind, because what else can you do? I mean how exactly do you think it would have made you feel if you found out in junior high that your mom was likely furiously masturbating to 13 year old boys? And so was everyone else's mom? Like wtf do you do with that information??
Anyway, I appreciate your concern with and interest in the issue. I do disagree that it's environmental beyond just increased levels of adiposity. And I disagree that it's the stating and harassment from men (virtually all adult men, not much of an issue with boys your own age). Ask literally any woman alive, even 75 year olds, and they will tell you they were cat called and harassed more from age 13 to 17 than any other age.
Personally I think it's bc of porn and women now having to know exactly what guys are watching and getting off to...every guy, all the time. It's another thing you really can't deal with other than just choosing to not think of it. Before the 90s, this was something most women were ignorant of or could easily avoid. Before the 70s, it didn't even exist. Now, you can't help but know about it and know exactly how absolutely fucking depraved it is, and it's every guy everywhere all the time. That is an enormous difference in a few decades, and profoundly psychologically unsettling for women/girls. I'm surprised they're not ALL asexual/lesbians whatever.
There are studies that control for adiposity and it only explains a small part of the decrease in age of menarche. It’s actually quite likely that increased obesity in young women is the result of precocious puberty and not its cause. Hormones affect adiposity much more than adiposity affects hormones.
About getting attention from men despite having no boobs, there are quite a lot of things that signal sexual maturity more than boobs do. Boobs are just a stand-in to use in an argument, but realistically, your facial characteristics, shape of your hips, length of eyelashes, body hair, redness and clarity of skin and various body odors are much more salient in sexual signaling than boobs- especially because boobs can be artificially enhanced or hidden away in baggy clothes.
Ha. Yeah I got tons of attention from adult men at 14 but it wasn't til I started artificially enhancing with a major padded bra in high school that the boys my age paid attention. ;) I do get that the cause and effect of body fat isn't clear, but there's definitely a strong association in international studies done everywhere. To the point where they can almost predict how many months earlier you're likely to get your period for every one point increase in BMI.
Plus it's well known that a lot of extreme athletes who keep very low body fat, like gymnasts and ballerinas, often don't get their period til they're like 16.
I certainly remember being rail thin and flat chested in junior high while all my friends looked like full grown women. And all those girls with D cups in 7th grade seemed to like the attention...they got boyfriends early, they got married early, they're all normal now. So I still say the increasing numbers of asexual, nonbinary, trans etc young women who are rejecting sex with men entirely is mostly about porn and the internet revealing too much to everyone about what other people are really like. But I do grant that separate from that, early puberty is not a good thing. I have a mentally challenged niece who went through puberty at age 10 and she's mentally about 6...it has been very bad.
Strong predictive value of a correlation doesn’t always mean a strong correlation. Adiposity is predictably associated with early puberty, where you can predict the number of months of precocity based on BMI, but it doesn’t explain the entirety of the phenomenon-not even close. That’s why you get a weak but highly consistent correlation between the two variables.
What do you think about all the de-transitioners coming forward that say that they either developed too early and felt dysmorphia because of it or the ones that felt insecure in their perfectly normal bodies because all the other girls their age were hyper feminine and much more sexually mature? This seems to me very much like a drastic population level shift causing issues on both ends of the spectrum.
I think any time you're on the extreme on either end and don't "fit in" or are different from your peers and what's portrayed in the media, it's very difficult for teenagers, especially girls.
At puberty you become exquisitely attuned to social status and the opinion of your peers and it's mortifying to be out of step (unless it's for something admired...the boys who got tall and matured earlier than others certainly seemed to socially benefit from it). I was absolutely OBSESSED and perpetually mortified by being flat chested and not getting my period til two years after most of my friends. Though honestly I was much more tortured and upset about not living up to the standards of models and actresses than I was about my own peer group. But it preoccupied 90% of my thoughts at the time, and I wouldve murdered my own family to get myself a nice pair of boobs. My recollection is that the well developed girls in 7th and 8th grade mostly flaunted it, but they were in the realm of normal. There were probably girls who had developed in more like 4th or 5th grade who were embarrassed and hiding it so perhaps I didn't notice. Of course this was the 90s so no one had ever heard of such a thing as trans or NB...I can easily imagine that if one is an outlier on any measure that's generally considered socially undesirable, that a tween girl would look for any possible avenue to escape her circumstances. It's easy for me to imagine thinking to myself at 13 "hey I'm tall and thin and flat, I'd make a really good looking guy, maybe I should try that". I did listen to Jordan Peterson's interview with a detrans girl and she mentions that a lot of her motivation was being flat chested and not curvy and feeling like she didn't live up to feminine ideals. It would be interesting if someone did a study looking at how many female teenaged transitioners fall within the average/median range for things like height, weight, and development level, and how many fall more towards the tail on both sides of the curve.
Your comment made me text my mom and sister to ask, because we were all very skinny kids. My mom got hers at 10 or 11, still in elementary school in the 60s or early 70s. I was surprised to hear that. I got mine at 12 in the mid-90s. My younger sister hasn't responded, but my hazy memory says she got hers around 11 or 12, too. After reading Sai's comment after yours, I'm really curious about this fat/hormone link, either way. None of us started gaining weight until my mom during menopause (aside from some normal fluctuation). My mom and sister were those kinds of women who walked out of the hospital in their normal pants after having babies.
Yeah, same in my family. I have pics of my mom on the beach in the 70s post babies and she was thin as a model. Though we all got ours later around 13/14. I was one of the kids embarrassed about not having it and having all my supplies ready years before I needed them.
I like watching music documentaries from the 60s and 70s, which generally feature a lot of concert footage of young people, and that's where the weight/fat difference is hugely striking. Huge crowds of people in their teens and 20s and everyone is skinny. It's actually much more noticeable wrt the men than it is the women, because they have no fat OR muscles...they're all just skinny birds compared to nowadays.
I mean...couldn't possibly be because there is massively more food, everywhere, all the time now?? People used to eat meals, and that was it. Moms didn't carry snacks and drinks everywhere. Gas stations didn't sell food and snacks. Literally only grocery stores, farm stands, and restaurants sold food...other than popcorn (which was way smaller) at the movies or hot dogs at a sporting event. I remember those days and I'm not that old! There is food and candy and snacks and drinks filled with sugar sold and available literally everywhere all the time now. Every mom I know literally carries snacks on her everywhere she goes. That was not a thing pre 1990s. People were just expected to be hungry sometimes and it wasn't considered the end of the world.
I'm just saying...Occam's razor. This trend is not limited to the US. It has occurred all over the world including very remote and not very westernized places. The biggest difference is people all over the world have far more food available to them than ever in history. Most places were subject to ocassional famine most of history and there were still some through the 1990s...in the 80s children in the millions still literally starved to death. There hasn't been a real famine in the entire world in over a decade (warnings and fund raisers about famine risk notwithstanding, you don't see skeletal 7 year olds with distended bellies like was a common sight on TV in the 80s). People are fatter everywhere because they're well fed.
People underestimate how much better tasting food is these days too.
Even compared to the aughts, food today is MUCH tastier thanks to massive advances in industrial gastronomy. Compared to the 80s it's like a completely different country. Makes compulsive snacking a lot easier. Even in like 1998 your option to get fat was like Lunchables or Kid Cuisine. Or for adults, compare a Hungry Man to a Devour bowl. Night and day.
Thankfully there have recently been a lot of advances specifically in making low calorie food not taste like shit and that is taking a lot of the edge off the problem. These days the healthiest protein bars / shakes taste delicious, whereas even 15 years ago they were disgusting. But I think like 2005-2015 in particular was kind of a danger zone when it comes to culinary tech.
And lol I was the weirdo drinking protein drinks in the 90s, and I remember gagging them down and sometimes almost puking, they tasted so bad. Now they're great.
Oh totally. Food is completely different. Other than your basics, it was awful in the past. And there were no options outside of big cities. The level of diversity and quality and options now is off the charts compared to 1980s and prior, there's no comparison. Before the 1990s, you couldn't even get a salad anywhere but big cities that wasn't just iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing. Grocery stores had bananas, oranges, and apples and maybe some plums and berries in the summer, but that was it. No one had ever heard of a kiwi. No one ate sushi. Most towns had a low quality pizza and Italian place and a crappy Chinese place and like a Long John Silver's and Ponderosa and that was it. Food used to be one of the big distinctions between a major metro and everywhere else, same with access to cool clothes. Now you can get great quality food and fashion and lots of others things no matter where you live.
It’s occurred all over the world in places where the diet changes to American processed food.
The widespread obesity happening in America and its vassal states is not simply due to an abundance of food. Food scarcity hasn’t been an issue in the US since the Great Depression, almost 100 years ago.
I'm not talking about obesity...yes that's an issue in most western nations now. But I'm talking about just more food and nourishment in general, worldwide. In places like Peru and Afghanistan, everywhere. It isn't about being "fat" it's about not being rail skinny with no extra calories, as women need a certain level of body fat to get their period. Don't think I'm talking about obesity, but actual lack on malnourishment. 20 year olds in many nations are now far taller than their parents and grandparents were too, because they have enough food. And age of first menses is dropping worldwide. Globally, we have produced about 1% more food every year PER CAPITA since the 1990s, meaning even with population growth food production goes up even more and there is simply far more food. So plenty of girls that 40 years ago didn't have enough body fat til they were older, because they were actually semi malnourished, now reach that point earlier. And in the US or other places where obesity is an issue, a plump elementary age girl might get there even earlier. But don't mistake me saying this is just because of being overweight or obese, that's not at all the case.
But people really seem to forget just how thin people were in the past...they didn't much muscle mass either. Look at old photos of the public and men are all skinny with very little muscle OR fat. And kids that people think are normal weight today still have more body fat than they used to. I have photos of my friends and I at age 11 in bathing suits circa 1990 and out of ten girls every one is rail thin...not a single bit of soft arm flesh or belly pudge among them, which today you'd see on at least some kids in a group of ten. And btw, we were freaking hungry all the time too.
Would make an awful lot of sense from the evolutionary point of view, no? Body reaches a certain weight and figures it's mature enough to start reproducing. If that comes way earlier than it did in the environment of evolutionary adaptation due to much higher calorie loads...well, you can guess.
I think they've shown you're not attracted to people you grow up with (Westermarck effect), which is probably why incest isn't much more common.
I was actually underweight when I experienced menarche at age 11. As in, I was somewhere around 70-80 lbs. I was still underweight for a few years after that. So no, it's not just a weight thing when that happens. For me, this happened in the late 1990s-- not far off from the 20th century time period you're talking about.
Where did you grow up and you have reason to believe there was a particular environmental exposure there? I.e. was it just you or something happening to other girls in that area? Did your mom get hers around the same age? I think 11 is within the realm of normal...that's 6th grade definitely some girls had theirs then but 12 seemed more common. You are suddenly triggering for me a memory I had completely forgotten about...there was one girl I was in school with who was very short and skinny and childlike in all ways (personality and appearance), who got hers very early like 10 or 11. She didn't have a father in her home. I'd forgotten about her.
I grew up in Rochester, NY. It's entirely possible that there were weird chemicals in the environment-- Kodak and Xerox were based there. It was also the "murder capitol of New York" even in the 1980s/1990s when NYC was at its peak level of violence. My mom didn't grow up there (she grew up in Rome NY) and got hers closer to age 13. It was really hard to compare this to what other girls were going to because the school I went to was REALLY small-- there were only 4 of us in the 6th grade class, and I was the only 6th grade girl. We shared a classroom and teacher with the 4th and 5th grade, kind of like a one room school house type arrangement. The reason for going to private school was that the public schools within city limits (as opposed to the suburbs) had an appalling reputation with everything from test scores to stuff like kids getting into fights, etc. I grew up with the impression that public school was terrifying LOL (this is hilarious because I work in the Sioux Falls public schools now). So before 7th grade, I had no one to compare notes with. In 7th grade, a lot of my peers were getting their first periods and talking about it a fair bit.
I've actually heard the "absent father" explanation before, but that doesn't quite check out for me. My parents are still married to this day. My dad had a well-paying job so my mom could stay home. On weekends, my dad would take me and my brothers to places like Mendon Ponds, Discovery Zone, the Science Museum and Planetarium, etc. Basically every weekend when I was a kid was a fun outing of some sort, so he was more involved than most fathers probably.
However, I remember my home life being really stressful from the mid-'90s onwards. My parents fought with each other constantly. My dad was stressed out because the company he worked for changed management and the new boss was absolutely horrible, but he didn't want to change jobs. My mom started going through "the change" when my younger brother was still a toddler. In the early '90s, we all used to sit together and eat dinner as a family, and by the end of the decade I would be eating in the living room with my younger brother watching "The Simpsons" during dinner every single night and my older brother would watch the bigger TV in the basement. None of us wanted to start sitting together again. I'm unscrambling exactly what happened to this day.
That's funny, I grew up in upstate NY too. Not Rochester, but a similar post industrialist town with shut down factories and major corporations that probably used to dump chemicals in the rivers, very similar. Though in other ways, we're the opposite. My parents were divorced, I went to public school, I was WAY mentally and emotionally ahead of my physical development and always wanting to be an emancipated adult, not a kid.
One thing is similar...home and parents were a nightmare and claustrophobic awkward emotionally borderline unbearable situation from age 13 to 17. But honestly I kind of thought that's just how it was with everyone, especially girls. Puberty and adults are not a good mix, and a daughter going through puberty and mom going through menopause is an explosive mix.
Me and all my friends were all at absolute WAR with our moms at that age. I think it was more normal for people not to get along with their parents back then. Parents didn't try to be their kids' friends and they weren't. When I see how close and open and nice to each other and indulgent parents are with their teenagers these days, it's astonishing to me (even my own dad with my half brother who was born when I was in high school...he's was a totally different type of parent). At least at my school, we 100% viewed our parents as our enemies and prison wardens, and we were all nightmares for them. My mom always talks about how one day around age 17 I finally emerged from my room and had a conversation with her, and she was so shocked she didn't even know what to do. We all get along great now but those years were rough.
Every study I've seen, and simple observation, tells me that girls hit puberty earlier now merely because of increased adiposity. They're fatter. And you don't need to be actually "fat" but even normal sized kids these days are generally much softer than they used to be. Before roughly the 80s and 90s, teenagers were almost universally rail thin. Like, REALLY skinny by today's standards.
The women in my family are all tall and slim with basically the same body type. My older sister looked like a literal skeleton when she was 13, in the 80s. I looked skinny but not like a skeleton, in the 90s. Our mom looked like a concentration camp victim at 13, in the 60s. My sister's daughter, born in the 2000s, looked slim but not at all skinny, and she definitely had softness. I know lots of teenagers who are more plump than their parents, which basically didn't exist in the past.
I also think pre adolescent and adolescent girls have been getting hit on by adult men for all of history and that's nothing new. I was a super late bloomer and got my period and developed way after my friends, around 14. Regardless of that fact and being totally flat chested, I STILL had friends dads and strange men on the street leering and saying disgusting things to me, and was trapped in a corner and molested by two older boys at a public pool. My mom has similar tales from the 50s and 60s, and like I said, she resembled a blonde concentration camp victim with zero boobs, and it still happened. I don't think these things are new, they just weren't talked about previously. And yes of course a teenage girl with big gravity defying boobs is going to get it all the worse.
Btw, women absolutely DO consider that their own fathers are disgusting pigs just like their friend's dad and their math teacher and their uncle and their neighbor...but the thought is so horrifying and profoundly upsetting and depressing to think about that it's best to put it out of your mind, because what else can you do? I mean how exactly do you think it would have made you feel if you found out in junior high that your mom was likely furiously masturbating to 13 year old boys? And so was everyone else's mom? Like wtf do you do with that information??
Anyway, I appreciate your concern with and interest in the issue. I do disagree that it's environmental beyond just increased levels of adiposity. And I disagree that it's the stating and harassment from men (virtually all adult men, not much of an issue with boys your own age). Ask literally any woman alive, even 75 year olds, and they will tell you they were cat called and harassed more from age 13 to 17 than any other age.
Personally I think it's bc of porn and women now having to know exactly what guys are watching and getting off to...every guy, all the time. It's another thing you really can't deal with other than just choosing to not think of it. Before the 90s, this was something most women were ignorant of or could easily avoid. Before the 70s, it didn't even exist. Now, you can't help but know about it and know exactly how absolutely fucking depraved it is, and it's every guy everywhere all the time. That is an enormous difference in a few decades, and profoundly psychologically unsettling for women/girls. I'm surprised they're not ALL asexual/lesbians whatever.
There are studies that control for adiposity and it only explains a small part of the decrease in age of menarche. It’s actually quite likely that increased obesity in young women is the result of precocious puberty and not its cause. Hormones affect adiposity much more than adiposity affects hormones.
About getting attention from men despite having no boobs, there are quite a lot of things that signal sexual maturity more than boobs do. Boobs are just a stand-in to use in an argument, but realistically, your facial characteristics, shape of your hips, length of eyelashes, body hair, redness and clarity of skin and various body odors are much more salient in sexual signaling than boobs- especially because boobs can be artificially enhanced or hidden away in baggy clothes.
Ha. Yeah I got tons of attention from adult men at 14 but it wasn't til I started artificially enhancing with a major padded bra in high school that the boys my age paid attention. ;) I do get that the cause and effect of body fat isn't clear, but there's definitely a strong association in international studies done everywhere. To the point where they can almost predict how many months earlier you're likely to get your period for every one point increase in BMI.
Plus it's well known that a lot of extreme athletes who keep very low body fat, like gymnasts and ballerinas, often don't get their period til they're like 16.
I certainly remember being rail thin and flat chested in junior high while all my friends looked like full grown women. And all those girls with D cups in 7th grade seemed to like the attention...they got boyfriends early, they got married early, they're all normal now. So I still say the increasing numbers of asexual, nonbinary, trans etc young women who are rejecting sex with men entirely is mostly about porn and the internet revealing too much to everyone about what other people are really like. But I do grant that separate from that, early puberty is not a good thing. I have a mentally challenged niece who went through puberty at age 10 and she's mentally about 6...it has been very bad.
Strong predictive value of a correlation doesn’t always mean a strong correlation. Adiposity is predictably associated with early puberty, where you can predict the number of months of precocity based on BMI, but it doesn’t explain the entirety of the phenomenon-not even close. That’s why you get a weak but highly consistent correlation between the two variables.
What do you think about all the de-transitioners coming forward that say that they either developed too early and felt dysmorphia because of it or the ones that felt insecure in their perfectly normal bodies because all the other girls their age were hyper feminine and much more sexually mature? This seems to me very much like a drastic population level shift causing issues on both ends of the spectrum.
I think any time you're on the extreme on either end and don't "fit in" or are different from your peers and what's portrayed in the media, it's very difficult for teenagers, especially girls.
At puberty you become exquisitely attuned to social status and the opinion of your peers and it's mortifying to be out of step (unless it's for something admired...the boys who got tall and matured earlier than others certainly seemed to socially benefit from it). I was absolutely OBSESSED and perpetually mortified by being flat chested and not getting my period til two years after most of my friends. Though honestly I was much more tortured and upset about not living up to the standards of models and actresses than I was about my own peer group. But it preoccupied 90% of my thoughts at the time, and I wouldve murdered my own family to get myself a nice pair of boobs. My recollection is that the well developed girls in 7th and 8th grade mostly flaunted it, but they were in the realm of normal. There were probably girls who had developed in more like 4th or 5th grade who were embarrassed and hiding it so perhaps I didn't notice. Of course this was the 90s so no one had ever heard of such a thing as trans or NB...I can easily imagine that if one is an outlier on any measure that's generally considered socially undesirable, that a tween girl would look for any possible avenue to escape her circumstances. It's easy for me to imagine thinking to myself at 13 "hey I'm tall and thin and flat, I'd make a really good looking guy, maybe I should try that". I did listen to Jordan Peterson's interview with a detrans girl and she mentions that a lot of her motivation was being flat chested and not curvy and feeling like she didn't live up to feminine ideals. It would be interesting if someone did a study looking at how many female teenaged transitioners fall within the average/median range for things like height, weight, and development level, and how many fall more towards the tail on both sides of the curve.
Your comment made me text my mom and sister to ask, because we were all very skinny kids. My mom got hers at 10 or 11, still in elementary school in the 60s or early 70s. I was surprised to hear that. I got mine at 12 in the mid-90s. My younger sister hasn't responded, but my hazy memory says she got hers around 11 or 12, too. After reading Sai's comment after yours, I'm really curious about this fat/hormone link, either way. None of us started gaining weight until my mom during menopause (aside from some normal fluctuation). My mom and sister were those kinds of women who walked out of the hospital in their normal pants after having babies.
Yeah, same in my family. I have pics of my mom on the beach in the 70s post babies and she was thin as a model. Though we all got ours later around 13/14. I was one of the kids embarrassed about not having it and having all my supplies ready years before I needed them.
I like watching music documentaries from the 60s and 70s, which generally feature a lot of concert footage of young people, and that's where the weight/fat difference is hugely striking. Huge crowds of people in their teens and 20s and everyone is skinny. It's actually much more noticeable wrt the men than it is the women, because they have no fat OR muscles...they're all just skinny birds compared to nowadays.
The increased adiposity itself is due to endocrine disruptors…
I mean...couldn't possibly be because there is massively more food, everywhere, all the time now?? People used to eat meals, and that was it. Moms didn't carry snacks and drinks everywhere. Gas stations didn't sell food and snacks. Literally only grocery stores, farm stands, and restaurants sold food...other than popcorn (which was way smaller) at the movies or hot dogs at a sporting event. I remember those days and I'm not that old! There is food and candy and snacks and drinks filled with sugar sold and available literally everywhere all the time now. Every mom I know literally carries snacks on her everywhere she goes. That was not a thing pre 1990s. People were just expected to be hungry sometimes and it wasn't considered the end of the world.
I'm just saying...Occam's razor. This trend is not limited to the US. It has occurred all over the world including very remote and not very westernized places. The biggest difference is people all over the world have far more food available to them than ever in history. Most places were subject to ocassional famine most of history and there were still some through the 1990s...in the 80s children in the millions still literally starved to death. There hasn't been a real famine in the entire world in over a decade (warnings and fund raisers about famine risk notwithstanding, you don't see skeletal 7 year olds with distended bellies like was a common sight on TV in the 80s). People are fatter everywhere because they're well fed.
People underestimate how much better tasting food is these days too.
Even compared to the aughts, food today is MUCH tastier thanks to massive advances in industrial gastronomy. Compared to the 80s it's like a completely different country. Makes compulsive snacking a lot easier. Even in like 1998 your option to get fat was like Lunchables or Kid Cuisine. Or for adults, compare a Hungry Man to a Devour bowl. Night and day.
Thankfully there have recently been a lot of advances specifically in making low calorie food not taste like shit and that is taking a lot of the edge off the problem. These days the healthiest protein bars / shakes taste delicious, whereas even 15 years ago they were disgusting. But I think like 2005-2015 in particular was kind of a danger zone when it comes to culinary tech.
And lol I was the weirdo drinking protein drinks in the 90s, and I remember gagging them down and sometimes almost puking, they tasted so bad. Now they're great.
Oh totally. Food is completely different. Other than your basics, it was awful in the past. And there were no options outside of big cities. The level of diversity and quality and options now is off the charts compared to 1980s and prior, there's no comparison. Before the 1990s, you couldn't even get a salad anywhere but big cities that wasn't just iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing. Grocery stores had bananas, oranges, and apples and maybe some plums and berries in the summer, but that was it. No one had ever heard of a kiwi. No one ate sushi. Most towns had a low quality pizza and Italian place and a crappy Chinese place and like a Long John Silver's and Ponderosa and that was it. Food used to be one of the big distinctions between a major metro and everywhere else, same with access to cool clothes. Now you can get great quality food and fashion and lots of others things no matter where you live.
It’s occurred all over the world in places where the diet changes to American processed food.
The widespread obesity happening in America and its vassal states is not simply due to an abundance of food. Food scarcity hasn’t been an issue in the US since the Great Depression, almost 100 years ago.
I'm not talking about obesity...yes that's an issue in most western nations now. But I'm talking about just more food and nourishment in general, worldwide. In places like Peru and Afghanistan, everywhere. It isn't about being "fat" it's about not being rail skinny with no extra calories, as women need a certain level of body fat to get their period. Don't think I'm talking about obesity, but actual lack on malnourishment. 20 year olds in many nations are now far taller than their parents and grandparents were too, because they have enough food. And age of first menses is dropping worldwide. Globally, we have produced about 1% more food every year PER CAPITA since the 1990s, meaning even with population growth food production goes up even more and there is simply far more food. So plenty of girls that 40 years ago didn't have enough body fat til they were older, because they were actually semi malnourished, now reach that point earlier. And in the US or other places where obesity is an issue, a plump elementary age girl might get there even earlier. But don't mistake me saying this is just because of being overweight or obese, that's not at all the case.
But people really seem to forget just how thin people were in the past...they didn't much muscle mass either. Look at old photos of the public and men are all skinny with very little muscle OR fat. And kids that people think are normal weight today still have more body fat than they used to. I have photos of my friends and I at age 11 in bathing suits circa 1990 and out of ten girls every one is rail thin...not a single bit of soft arm flesh or belly pudge among them, which today you'd see on at least some kids in a group of ten. And btw, we were freaking hungry all the time too.
Would make an awful lot of sense from the evolutionary point of view, no? Body reaches a certain weight and figures it's mature enough to start reproducing. If that comes way earlier than it did in the environment of evolutionary adaptation due to much higher calorie loads...well, you can guess.
I think they've shown you're not attracted to people you grow up with (Westermarck effect), which is probably why incest isn't much more common.
I was actually underweight when I experienced menarche at age 11. As in, I was somewhere around 70-80 lbs. I was still underweight for a few years after that. So no, it's not just a weight thing when that happens. For me, this happened in the late 1990s-- not far off from the 20th century time period you're talking about.
Where did you grow up and you have reason to believe there was a particular environmental exposure there? I.e. was it just you or something happening to other girls in that area? Did your mom get hers around the same age? I think 11 is within the realm of normal...that's 6th grade definitely some girls had theirs then but 12 seemed more common. You are suddenly triggering for me a memory I had completely forgotten about...there was one girl I was in school with who was very short and skinny and childlike in all ways (personality and appearance), who got hers very early like 10 or 11. She didn't have a father in her home. I'd forgotten about her.
I grew up in Rochester, NY. It's entirely possible that there were weird chemicals in the environment-- Kodak and Xerox were based there. It was also the "murder capitol of New York" even in the 1980s/1990s when NYC was at its peak level of violence. My mom didn't grow up there (she grew up in Rome NY) and got hers closer to age 13. It was really hard to compare this to what other girls were going to because the school I went to was REALLY small-- there were only 4 of us in the 6th grade class, and I was the only 6th grade girl. We shared a classroom and teacher with the 4th and 5th grade, kind of like a one room school house type arrangement. The reason for going to private school was that the public schools within city limits (as opposed to the suburbs) had an appalling reputation with everything from test scores to stuff like kids getting into fights, etc. I grew up with the impression that public school was terrifying LOL (this is hilarious because I work in the Sioux Falls public schools now). So before 7th grade, I had no one to compare notes with. In 7th grade, a lot of my peers were getting their first periods and talking about it a fair bit.
I've actually heard the "absent father" explanation before, but that doesn't quite check out for me. My parents are still married to this day. My dad had a well-paying job so my mom could stay home. On weekends, my dad would take me and my brothers to places like Mendon Ponds, Discovery Zone, the Science Museum and Planetarium, etc. Basically every weekend when I was a kid was a fun outing of some sort, so he was more involved than most fathers probably.
However, I remember my home life being really stressful from the mid-'90s onwards. My parents fought with each other constantly. My dad was stressed out because the company he worked for changed management and the new boss was absolutely horrible, but he didn't want to change jobs. My mom started going through "the change" when my younger brother was still a toddler. In the early '90s, we all used to sit together and eat dinner as a family, and by the end of the decade I would be eating in the living room with my younger brother watching "The Simpsons" during dinner every single night and my older brother would watch the bigger TV in the basement. None of us wanted to start sitting together again. I'm unscrambling exactly what happened to this day.
That's funny, I grew up in upstate NY too. Not Rochester, but a similar post industrialist town with shut down factories and major corporations that probably used to dump chemicals in the rivers, very similar. Though in other ways, we're the opposite. My parents were divorced, I went to public school, I was WAY mentally and emotionally ahead of my physical development and always wanting to be an emancipated adult, not a kid.
One thing is similar...home and parents were a nightmare and claustrophobic awkward emotionally borderline unbearable situation from age 13 to 17. But honestly I kind of thought that's just how it was with everyone, especially girls. Puberty and adults are not a good mix, and a daughter going through puberty and mom going through menopause is an explosive mix.
Me and all my friends were all at absolute WAR with our moms at that age. I think it was more normal for people not to get along with their parents back then. Parents didn't try to be their kids' friends and they weren't. When I see how close and open and nice to each other and indulgent parents are with their teenagers these days, it's astonishing to me (even my own dad with my half brother who was born when I was in high school...he's was a totally different type of parent). At least at my school, we 100% viewed our parents as our enemies and prison wardens, and we were all nightmares for them. My mom always talks about how one day around age 17 I finally emerged from my room and had a conversation with her, and she was so shocked she didn't even know what to do. We all get along great now but those years were rough.