Emily Rae Detrick, a health coach, wants women to be more in touch with their menstrual cycle in its entirety. This, she said on an October episode of Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, a podcast popular among “Make America Healthy Again” (Maha) adherents, is “a way that you honor God and the way we were created”. It also serves her self-assigned mission to help “make America fertile again”.
In the episode and on social media, Detrick speaks at length about the luteal phase, the 14-ish days between ovulation and menstruation when women are more likely to experience irritability, bloating and food cravings. If a woman does not get pregnant after ovulating, or so Detrick’s line of thinking goes, her body becomes upset. “During the luteal phase, the reason why your stress threshold is so much lower is because this is the time your body would be incubating a potential baby,” she said. No baby, and you might turn into a frazzled, nagging shrew.
This interpretation might seem retrograde, conjuring ancient medical theories of female hysteria or wandering wombs. (Plato wrote that a childless woman ultimately goes mad because of her angry, empty uterus.) But for some women, the luteal phase – a real scientific term – has become a kind of catchall used to explain feminine malaise.
Thousands of posts on TikTok are tagged “#lutealphase”, with women sharing memes or humorous videos about their temperament changes during this period. “I won’t tell anyone I’m in my luteal phase but there will be signs,” one woman captioned a closeup of her blistering acne. In another video skit, a woman washes dishes at home. Her husband comes up to give her a light, affectionate butt slap. She shouts, recoils and sprays him with soap. Blame it on her luteal.
The clip has almost 100,000 likes. “I don’t even want to be PERCEIVED during my luteal phase,” reads one comment. A man chimed in: “I don’t think my wife ever gets out of her luteal phase.”
Google searches for “luteal phase” have risen 300% in the past five years, likely due to these kinds of videos. Other popular searches include “luteal phase workout” (low impact cardio, pilates and yoga are good for stress management, according to infographics); “luteal phase meal” (sweet potato nachos satisfy cravings, according to one influencer); and “luteal phase mood” (rancid, according to everyone).
This content traffics in hyperbole – and even pronatalism in the hands of influencers such as Detrick and Clark. But growing interest in the luteal phase does gnaw at an ugly truth. Americans have long received inadequate sexual health education, especially when it comes to women’s health, and it’s getting worse. Abortion misinformation flooded TikTok after the supreme court’s reversal of Roe v Wade, and “don’t say gay” laws in states such as Florida and Texas ban discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. It makes sense that women might find empowerment in talking about their luteal phases.
“It’s about wanting to take control and learn more about their bodies,” said Dr Karen Tang, a Pennsylvania gynaecologist. “People are saying: ‘I had no idea that other people had these similar patterns.’”
“Women’s bodies are understudied, underfunded, under-researched,” added Mariah Wellman, an assistant professor at Michigan State who studies influencers and wellness culture. “By no fault of their own, women are lacking information and not getting it from their healthcare providers.”
A better understanding of cycles
According to Tang, the luteal phase describes what happens on a physiological, biological level: progesterone rises and estrogen lowers, and these hormonal swings result in physical and emotional symptoms until menstruation happens. Premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, refers to the symptoms that flare up – moodiness, bloating, breast tenderness, hunger and sluggishness, for example – during someone’s luteal phase.
“Explaining what happens in the luteal phase provides a way for people to understand why they feel the way they do, so it’s not as confusing or mysterious why their physical and mental health seems to change so drastically,” Tang said.
Tang says she has noticed an uptick in women coming into her practice who are potentially experiencing premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), which they first heard about on social media – sometimes through luteal phase posts. An intense hormonal sensitivity, PMDD affects about 6% of people who menstruate, according to the American Psychological Association. It wreaks havoc – one study found that 72% of individuals with PMDD reported “lifetime active suicidal ideation” – and often goes undiagnosed.
“It’s wonderful to see those patients go from being absolutely miserable almost a quarter of their life, where [PMDD] is affecting their relationships,” she said. “When they’re able to get treatment, they’re themselves again.”
Haley Martinez, 29, is an energy-healing and breath-work coach living in Clinton, New Jersey. She used to bodybuild but quit the sport because it was too hard on her body. “I had missing cycles on and off for years,” she said. “I just felt disconnected from that part of me as a woman.” Martinez says her doctor “dismissed” her concerns, so she began studying holistic health. When she started to get her periods back after quitting bodybuilding, she felt heightened emotions, which she later learned occurred during her luteal phase. She wondered why her doctors or health teachers had never mentioned it.
“There was a relief having an explanation, but there’s also an anger at not being taught this at all,” Martinez said.
Luteal phase is a genuine medical term. This gives credence to influencers to talk about it, even if they are not licensed medical professionals. “They seem more credible and educated,” Wellman said.
But Tang warns against their tendency to make generalizations. “There’s a lot of verbiage and absolutes, as if it were astrology, where a Taurus or a Virgo is prone to this sort of behavior,” she said. For instance, TikTok users joke about their sense of self totally derailing once the luteal phase sets in; every month, without fail, they believe they have turned into “the ugliest person alive” or a “forest shrew”. Detrick, the guest on Clark’s podcast, claimed that working out is inevitably harder: “You’re like, ‘Am I weak? What is wrong with me?’” Clark agreed: “I always feel that way.”
“They have latched on to these little kernels of truth about the phases of the cycle and turned it into almost a prescription,” Tang said. “None of this is so absolutely universal that you have to live your life based on these principles.”
Selling Maha ideology
Most women who post online are not politicizing their luteal phases. Talk of women’s cycles among Maha evangelists, however, easily lends itself to conservative viewpoints about pronatalism, traditional gender roles and restricting access to reproductive healthcare such as birth control.
Hormonal birth control methods such as the pill prevent ovulation from taking place, which means that there is no luteal phase. This might sound like a positive change for people who deal with intense discomfort in this part of their cycle, and many take birth control at least partly for this exact reason. (Along with preventing pregnancy, hormonal birth control can ease cramps and symptoms of PMDD, and help treat hormonal acne.)
That does not sit well with Clark, a self-described “cuteservative”, who has said she wants to get women off of birth control and experience their “natural” hormonal cycle – even if that means they suffer a couple weeks every month. In an episode of Clark’s podcast earlier this month, Kylah Smook, a content creator who runs retreats for women getting off birth control, said that ovulation is a “vital sign” that indicates whether a woman is in good health: “If you’re not ovulating [due to birth control], it’s your body telling you: ‘Hey, we’re not feeling good. Like, I don’t feel safe to make a baby.’”
It is true that ovulation can be an indicator of general health, and irregular cycles might indicate an issue, but millions of people do not ovulate while safely using birth control. Smook and Clark’s skepticism evokes a common thread of pronatalism: getting people to question and quit birth control would probably lead to more babies being born and women becoming mothers, signaling a return to conservatives’ beloved nuclear family structure. “Me and the man who loves me through my luteal phase,” Clark captioned an Instagram photo of her fiance, Maha blogger Vance Voetberg, implying that the perfect couple won’t let a mood swing scare them if it’s in service of procreation.
In this way, telling women to embrace the luteal phase helps sell Maha ideology. It’s also being used by the adjacent wellness industry to market products such as “PMS bars”, aromatherapy oils and many, many teas. “The wellness industry has a big incentive to commercialize the luteal phase as something you can purchase your way out of,” said Wellman.
And while familiarity with the luteal phase has been helpful to women, it also can be easily caricatured.
Sharon Cancio is a full-time YouTuber who lives in Florida and makes what she calls “big sister content” – the sometimes awkward conversations you might have with a sibling about bodies, health and sex. Before learning about the luteal phase around five years ago, Cancio assumed she was depressed. “Why did I feel so crappy and depleted most of the time?” she said. “Is it my boyfriend who’s ruining my life?’” (It wasn’t; they’re still together.)
Knowing about the luteal phase has not magically fixed Cancino’s mood issues, but it has helped her deal with them. “I hate to admit that I do get very mean,” she said. “Now knowing that it’s a thing my body actually goes through, and it’s not just me suddenly hating everyone, I can prepare for it when it comes around.”
Women’s partners often gird themselves, too. Boyfriends and husbands frequently make appearances in luteal phase TikToks, often painting themselves as longsuffering and subject to the wild whims of a woman. In one video, a husband reads off a list of things his wife said to him during her luteal phase. Samples: “Shut up,” “Can you not breathe on me,” “Don’t even, that’s just gonna piss me off.” (“Sounds like clear communication to me,” one presumably female user quipped.)
In another skit, a group of men muse on ways they could annoy their wives during the luteal phase, including loudly playing video games while they’re trying to read, watching football all day and then complaining about being tired, and leaving dirty utensils in the sink.
“Women are the butt of the joke,” Wellman said. “It’s another way women can be torn down by men for something that is natural and that they have no control over. And then they are being told by other women – wellness influencers – that they can be ‘fixed’ if they buy this product.”
Women who pathologize their luteal phase struggles may find comfort in social media sisterhood. That does not belie the fact that women’s health can easily be co-opted to poke fun, sell products or advance political agendas. Ultimately, it is up to individuals to come to terms with how they want to engage with this content.
Martinez, the former bodybuilder, finds humor in the unpredictability that comes with hormonal shifts. “I’ll joke with my boyfriend if I’m feeling especially sensitive about something and I can recognize it’s because of my luteal phase,” she said. “But I always want to say: be careful not to dismiss yourself, because our feelings are always valid to some degree.”
