Maternal Dominance Hypothesis and Priviledged Daughter Hypothesis

[Mabel_79]

Hi Atomic,
Just wondering about the exercise thing. I was about 8st7, pretty fit and slim, when I started swaying and I used to run twice a week. During my LE sway I lost weight- only about 4 or 5lbs, but for me that was quite a lot and I looked very skinny. I also upped my running.
Do you think all this running which kept my body muscley, upped my testosterone levels and that's why my sway failed?

I'm also worried about the part of the study where she suggests that a woman's womb is more favourable to a certain gender. I miscarried last year after a sway and due to the completely different way I felt during those 12 weeks, was sure it was a girl. Could my body have rejected it due to the gender and does that make my chances of PDG working lower? So confused right now.
Despite my husbands insistance that this is our last I feel I can't give up on the dream just yet- I just feel I need to know where we went wrong.

[atomic sagebrush]

Interesting! I think if you have some weight to lose, even if it's only 5lbs but your cycles all stay normal then that's a huge benefit. I always wondered if I were to have just stuck to 1800 calories of really bland LE food and not lost weight to keep cycles normal if it would even make my body sense any sort of health decline since I'm already at a very low BMI. I definitely remember wishing I had more weight and room to play with as far as the diet and extreme exercise goes, but I really felt limited because losing anything made O mess up.

I definitely must be more 'martha' lol!

Well, we have studies in other animals that show calories of carbs and higher intake of Omega 6 fats (versus cals of protein and higher intake of Omega 3/saturated fats) even when calories were kept equal, swayed pink.

Calorie intake is only ONE way we can send a signal to our body that times aren't as good as they were. I think by changing the makeup of our diets from more balanced to disproportionally "poor folks" food, we can send that signal even if a person eats identical to the amount of cals they were eating before.

Now, I also happen to think that if you eat "poor folks" foods AND lose a bit of weight, that's even better as long as you keep ovulating when you do it. And if you do that AND try to unplug that mental hamster wheel, better still.

[atomic sagebrush]

Hi Atomic,
Just wondering about the exercise thing. I was about 8st7, pretty fit and slim, when I started swaying and I used to run twice a week. During my LE sway I lost weight- only about 4 or 5lbs, but for me that was quite a lot and I looked very skinny. I also upped my running.
Do you think all this running which kept my body muscley, upped my testosterone levels and that's why my sway failed?

I'm also worried about the part of the study where she suggests that a woman's womb is more favourable to a certain gender. I miscarried last year after a sway and due to the completely different way I felt during those 12 weeks, was sure it was a girl. Could my body have rejected it due to the gender and does that make my chances of PDG working lower? So confused right now.
Despite my husbands insistance that this is our last I feel I can't give up on the dream just yet- I just feel I need to know where we went wrong.

I really don't like analyzing swyas that produced opposites. I think the exercise stats have been pretty good and I do not believe that anyone who is losing weight on a lower protein diet physically CAN be building muscle with intense exercise. If you lose weight, you lose muscle, that's how it goes. Now can you make your T levels go up from other things, absolutely you can and your body will make testosterone out of the last little dribble of fat you have on your body if it thinks you need it. But we don't even KNOW that testosterone is swaying. It's just one theory and it may be something else entirely or a lot of something elses. You may have gotten to 90-10 girl to boy ratio and then just pulled the short straw. I understand that you want to know what went "wrong" (regardless of how bad it feels right now, a healthy baby is NEVER wrong) but not I nor anyone else will ever be able to tell you that.

There is NO evidence that a woman's womb is more favorable to one gender over another. She is just guessing about stuff and I don't think you should let one person's guessing bring you any heartache. We have seen TONS of women some of whom with 6 boys go onto have HT daughters. There are women on this site who had 8 boys and had daughters naturally. There is no way that if swaying really works, that it would allow you to conceive a particular gender and then miscarry it. If swaying works, it makes you more likely to conceive the baby with the best shot of survival, period, from conception on. Eggs are too "biologically expensive" to waste and as risky as pregnancy used to be (even miscarriages), genes that caused anyone to conceive a baby only to lose it months later for no good reason, would have been culled from the gene pool a long time ago. Those genes would be at such a huge disadvantage that there is no way that they'd have been able to compete with anyone who did not have such genes.

You simply can't tell the gender of your baby from pregnancy symptoms. i know you probably aren't going to believe me but it's true. We have done dozens of polls and there are people both with all boys and all girls with dramatically different pg symptoms for same gender pg, and then there are people with diff. gender babies and identical pregnancies - there is NO rhyme or reason to it at all.

I KNOW it's so so so so hard to get thru. Please believe me when i say that. I am thinking of you and I promise you it does get easier with time.

[Precious3]

WOW! This is extremely interesting! Thank you for doing all this research and analyzing!

This is more of a hindsight analysis for me, as I am already pregnant with my last after 2 sons and it was an oops so I didn't get a chance to sway at all. Which I'm learning might be a good thing after all!

I'm hard to categorize as either Mary or Martha as for things that I don't care (like housekeeping and routines) I'm extremely laid back to the point of negligence. I actually had to hire a weekly housekeeper as I just can't get myself to do things I'm not interested in.

BUT when I'm passionate about something, whether a project or a certain topic I tend to obsess over it and research to the point of compulsiveness and obsess over every little detail, thinking non stop about it, planning and strategizing. As a result, I have periods when I'm really laid back and periods where I'm euphoric over something.

And YES, both times when I conceived I was in an obsessive period. With my first I was obsessing over conceiving, which I did the second month, but not before extensive research and a trip to the OB who confirmed through an ultrasound I had just ovulated and I did my BD homework like crazy. With my second I wasn't planning on it, but I was in the middle of launching a project (I'm a work at home Internet entrepreneur) and I was euphoric about it, I could feel the testosterone!

With this one I do have a sliver of hope it is a girl. Although I was in the middle of a "project" it wasn't so adrenaline filled, I was doing a cleanse - vegan diet. Not sure if the diet helped for swaying, although I did lose like 12 pounds in 5 weeks (about 10% of my weight) it was a nutrient dense diet (lots of veggies and fruits).

Anyway, after what I've read here I think I accidentally had my best shot, if had planned on it I wouldn't have been able to stop myself from obsessing over it.

And if I do have a third son I'm happy thinking that it is my personality which makes me more apt to raising them well!

Thank you!


Me (29) and DH (30)
DS1 - 2010
DS2 - 2012
Expecting #3 (and last!) by March-April 2014

[atomic sagebrush]

Mary/Martha cannot be strictly categorized the way you're thinking of it. Some people are not into housework (me too) but spend lots of effort and energy controlling other arenas of life. It's not that we are all 'cookie cutter' personality types, it's at the most fundamental level, a feeling that we MUST control every aspect of what we believe matters. Personally, I don't think a clean house matters to my level of happiness or personal well-being, so I don't get real worked up over that, but I do feel like owning a huge collection of children's books IS important, so I have a hell of a lot of stacks of dusty books sitting around LOL.

Additionally some of us are so much "martha" that we bite off more than we can chew and end up seeming like chaotic disasters because we want to do and control SO much that we can't do anything at all ever. Perfectionism can be paralyzing and make it appear like a person is lazy or unorganized, when really they're not, it's just that they're trying to do so much that they can't do anything well.

Nutshell version - Marthaism can take many forms and it's gonna be different for everyone because we are unique individuals. It's the need to control that I think is what matters, not the subject matter of one's desire to control.

[SweetLily]

Oh dear heavens, THAT'S why I have 3 sons!!! ROFL!

I'm a martha!!!! I need to have more fun!

Thanks atomic!

[prettyflamingo]

I have a question please atomic. I have three boys, the first conceived naturally, no swaying, pregnant first month of ttc, followed by a failed pgd at HRC, followed by a miscarriage (conceived naturally following the In Gender girl diet) followed by twin boys conceived via normal ivf in London as I couldn't fall pregnant for a year after the miscarriage. My question is that I agree with the hypothesis you've put forward, and can see why I got my first boy. What I don't understand is how I got another two boys via ivf when they were conceived outside my body so were not really influenced by my character. We only had two fertilise out of five, and put them both back and both stuck. I am now pregnant again via ivf and scared to death it's another boy. Do you think I have any hope of a girl? Please help. Thank you.

[atomic sagebrush]

You always have hope of a girl!!

Even if gender ratio were simply a flip of a coin, there would be some people who would get all boys and others who got all girls just from sheer dumb luck. It's statistically possible to get 10 heads or 10 tails in a row and quite easy to get three. So Lady Luck always has her role to play here.

Additionally, there may be something to the idea that either sperm or egg is somehow primed to be more favorable to one gender or the other or that for reasons we can't even guess at, one gender just doesn't want to develop after fertilization. I don't feel like I have the quality of evidence to support this factually (I think I mentioned this in the essay but Grant did a study that seemed to possibly support this, but then some other researchers couldn't repeat her findings) BUT I do know quite a few RE's believe in the idea. That doesn't mean you can't get a girl, because there are people even with pretty "blue" gender splits who do get XX as well, just not as many.

[prettyflamingo]

Thank you for taking the time to reply Atomic. I think what you say makes good sense, even though it hurts. I will always wonder if I lost the perfect XX at HRC because my body can't support girls, and if the baby I lost at 11 weeks was a girl. I seem to have no trouble growing boys so will just assume this is another boy until proven otherwise.

[atomic sagebrush]

It is totally understandable to wonder, but there is NO evidence whatsoever that anyone's body can't carry a particular gender and especially where girls are concerned. 140-160 boys are conceived for every 100 girls and so many more boys than girls are miscarried that the number drops to 105-100 by birth.

There are rare genetic conditions that do make it more difficult for people to have SONS, not daughters. full explanation here: http://genderdreaming.com/forum/sway...by-gender.html