Woman quality

Egg Quality and a Woman’s Age

A number of couples dealing with the issue of infertility sometimes fail to recognise one particular fact that may be the root cause behind their unsuccessful conception - the age factor. Maternal age in particular, is an important consideration in order to determine the egg quantity and quality and, later, the embryo quality after fertilisation.

Women’s Age and Eggs

Fertility decreases with a woman’s age. This is because every woman has millions of eggs or, more specifically, follicles that mature into eggs inside her body when she is born. By the time she reaches puberty, though, the number of these follicles drops down to about 300,000 to 400,000. During the monthly menstrual cycles, approximately 20 eggs start the journey to maturity but only one or two are finally able to complete this journey and are fit enough to be fertilised. These are the ‘good’ eggs.

Therefore, as you start aging, the number of eggs inside your body (egg quantity) and the number of good eggs that could have been fertilised (egg quality) keep depleting. Consequently, over time the chance of fertilisation also drops.

Egg quality and quantity are together known as the ovarian reserve and at any particular time, two women of the same age may have very different statistics in terms of this ovarian reserve. But, in general, it has been found that the pregnancy rate begins to decline when people reach their the early 30s while the percentage of infertile couples starts increasing as follows:

By age 30, 7%

By age 35, 11%

By age 40, 33%

And at age 45, 87% of couples are infertile

Egg Quality

An egg is said to be of good quality if it has good normal chromosomes and it can easily combine with sperm to develop into an embryo. In order to fertilise the egg, sperm need to be healthy enough to travel and reach the fallopian tube (and yes, the quality of sperm also goes down as a man ages, the change is just more subtle and gradual). However, an egg needs to be both healthy enough to fertilise and have the essential qualities necessary to divide and grow into a healthy embryo.

Eggs with abnormal chromosomes or those that just have the cytoplasm (the jelly-like material that comprises the cell) cannot ensure successful pregnancy. Also, after fertilisation occurs, eggs need to have ample energy to grow and mature, which is supplied by the mitochondria present in the egg cells. If this energy is not sufficient then the embryo will eventually disintegrate, leading to miscarriage .

There are good and bad eggs from the very start in any female’s body, but usually the number of eggs of superior quality are present at a higher volume at a younger age than after 30. While analysing the egg quality, although age is an important factor, no two women can have the same number of good eggs. Egg quality is also affected by external sources like radiation therapy, smoking, chemotherapy and health conditions like endometriosis .

Egg Quality and Fertility

Egg does not implant into the uterine wall after fertilisation

Egg implants but cannot grow due to insufficient energy

With increased age of the mother, the age of the eggs also increases and leads to abnormal chromosomes. Children born may have genetic abnormalities, like Down’s syndrome.

This may also be a reason why certain fertility treatments, such as IVF and IUI. are repeatedly unsuccessful in older woman.

Quality Women

Reader Coy expressed a need for illumination on the myth of the Quality woman:

Rollo,

I would really appreciate your thoughts on “the quality woman”. You have touched on the phenomena in many of your previous posts but i really feel my self subconsciously slipping into that binary circle jerk of madonna/whore. A dedicated post would be nice.

I briefly touched on this in AFC Social Conventions :

The Myth of the “Quality” Woman

It seems like all I read about on SoSuave these days is a never ending quest for a “Quality Woman.” There’s threads asking for clear definitions of what constitutes a “Quality” woman and others that conveniently set women up into 2 camps - Quality women and Hors, as if there were no middle ground. How easy it becomes to qualify a woman based on her indiscrretions (as heinous as they’re perceived to be) for either of these catagories. This is binary thinking at its best – on or off, black or white, Quality woman or Hor.

I think the term ‘Quality’ woman is a misnomer. Guys tend to apply this term at their leisure not so much to define what they’d like in a woman (which is actually an idealization), but rather to exclude women with whom they’d really had no chance with in the first place as an ego-preservation method, or mistakenly applied too much effort and too much focus to only to be rebuffed. This isn’t to say that there aren’t women who will behvae maliciously or indiscriminately, nor am I implying that they ought to be excused out of hand for such. What I am saying is that it’s very AFC to hold women up to preconceived idealizations and conveniently discount them as being less than “Quality” when you’re unable to predict, much less control their behaviors.

The dangers inherent in this convention is that the AFC (or the DJ subscribing to the convention) then limits himself to only what he perceives as a Quality woman, based on a sour-grapes conditioning. Ergo, they’ll end up with a “Quality” woman by default because she’s the only candidate who would accept him for her intimacy. It becomes a self-fulfiling prophecy by process of elmination. Taken to its logical conclusion, they shoot the arrow, paint the target around it and call it a bullseye, and after which they’ll feel good for having held to a (misguided) conviction.

So why is this a social convention then? Because it is socially unassailable. Since this convention is rooted to a binary premise, no one would likely challenge it. It would be foolish for me to say “Yes Mr. DJ I think you ought to avoid what you think of as Quality women.” Not only this, but we all get a certain satisfaction from the affirmation that comes from other men confirming our own assessment of what catagory a woman should fit into. Thus it becomes socially reinforced.

Be careful of making a Quality woman your substitute for a ONEitis idealization.

Back when he had a terrestrial radio show Tom Leykis did a topic about this: He had everyday women call in and tell their stories of how they used to be sexually (i. e. slutty) and how they are now. He came up with this after driving past a grade school on his way to the studio and seeing all of the women there waiting for their kids to come out and wondered about what their lives used to be like in their childless 20s. This was a wildly popular topic and the confessions just poured in like all of these women had been waiting for years to come clean anonymously about the sexual past that their husbands would never dream they were capable of. Each of these women sounded proud of themselves, almost nostalgic, as if they were some kind of past accomplishments.

This is why I laugh at the concept of the Quality woman. Don’t misinterpret that as a “women = shit” binary opinion. I mean it in the sense that most guy’s concept of a quality woman is an unrealistic idealization. There’s not a guy in the world who committed to monogamy with a woman who didn’t think she was ‘quality’ when he was with her. Even if she was a clinical neurotic before he hooked up with her, she’s still got “other redeeming qualities” that make her worth the effort. It’s only afterwards when the world he built up around her idealization comes crashing down in flames that she “really wasn’t a Quality Woman.”

The Quality Woman is defined by how well she fits a man’s conditioned ideal. Good Luck Chuck lamented in last week’s Hyenas that after a certain age all women are Alpha Widows, or, progressively lose the idealization of embodying the Quality Woman. While I understand the frustration, there’s an eerily similar tone that men use when they bemoan the lack of Quality Women in the world that echoes women’s when they ask “what happened to all the real men?” The only difference being that in girl-world a woman is entitled to a real man irrespective of her own quality, while a man is less of a Man for his complaints of her lacking those qualities.

I don’t envy the situation monogamy minded men in this era find themselves in. As we become a more and more connected society the indiscretions of a woman’s past will become increasingly more difficult to hide, much less temper. Whereas before, unless a woman had worked in porn, documenting her sexual and/or intimate past may have been an effort best reserved for private investigators. Now it’s as easy as reading her social media footprint archived for all to read.

This is tough on a guy sold on idealistic notions that his virgin bride is awaiting him somewhere in the world. That may be a bit binary for all but the most white knight of guys, but by order of degree, and with a measured prudence, I think it’s important for men to disabuse themselves of finding the virgin slut, who’ll only be his virgin slut.

And while I would never advocate a guy to hurry up and marry those sluts. the problem with this idealization is that men want to force fit the woman who most closely resembles his Quality Woman into that fantasy role. It becomes a psychological feedback loop – connect with a “Quality Woman”, discover her flaws, personal conditions and the decisions she made that resulted in them, then (after attempts at rationalizing them himself) disqualify her from the Quality Woman designation. The cycle comes full circle when her disqualification as a Quality Woman sets the environment for finding his next ‘jewel in the rough’.

The bad news and the good news of this is that, as connectivity and communication among men increases, so too do they realize that the Quality Woman is an impossibility even for the most gracious of women. Thanks to the rise of the manosphere we have a global consortium of men exchanging their individual experiences with women to compare and contrast with their own. The good part is it’s easy to generate a list of red flags to watch out for or read about the consequences men have suffered as a result of their blue pill existences. The bad part is that with that greater understanding comes the realization that even the best of women are still subject to hypergamy, the feminine imperative and the fem-centric environment they find themselves in.

A little bit of knowledge is sometimes dangerous – after a lot of this realization and the discernement that comes from it men are likely to have a very long list of prerequisites and red flags develop. I’m not saying men should surrender to the inevitability of marrying some raging former slut, but I am saying that an important part of unplugging oneself from the Matrix is letting go of the idealization of the Quality Woman. There are a lot of caring and nurturing former sluts, and there are pristine and chaste women only lacking the proper motivation to move them in a direction no one would ever expect of them.