Listen up, y'all, because you're about to get learnt on placentas. Before I even address these weird guys who tried a placenta smoothie and lost their dude-bro minds over it, there are few things I want to make spectacularly clear to the internet: You are here today because somebody's placenta kept you alive. It is an organ that develops (like a boss) for the sole purpose of feeding and nourishing a growing baby in the womb, connected by the umbilical cord. The nutrients that come out of this placenta are basically otherworldly, and it spends the entire pregnancy preventing infection, keeping the mother's blood supply separate from the baby's, and providing vital growth hormones for development. It is basically the bossest fairy godmother any of us ever had.
And yeah, placentas are gross-looking. As a general rule, so are all of our organs. It just so happens that our vaginas spit out placentas when they're done with them (otherwise known as the "afterbirth"). And although this may come as a shock to you, a ton of animals eat their own placentas — the nutritional benefits, although no longer necessary for humans in the modern world, are hugely impacting for the animals that do. Plus, plenty of women eat their own placentas through various methods. Hell, an editor at Bustle ate her own placenta, and she was a much happier human for it.
Backing up here: I'm not saying that people have to eat their own placentas. It is a free country and you can do whatever the hell you want with your placenta sans judgment. What I take huge issue with, though, is these guys who just ~had to had to~ try a placenta smoothie, and then mocked the hell out of the whole thing.
Honestly, this video is disgusting to watch. Not because of the placenta, mind you, but because of their gross, ridiculously immature reactions to it. They cringe, they groan, they cough all over it, and basically act like god damn heroes for consuming an entirely biologically natural thing that nobody asked them to touch in the first place. Like, I could handle a woman eating her own placenta and being grossed out about it. We are allowed to judge and be grossed out about our own bodies. But it seems entirely disrespectful to not only sit around and mock placentas basically for existing, but to sit around and whine about how gross it is.
It's also just plain dumb of them. It's like a bunch of fifth graders laughing during a sex ed talk, and it mocks people who actually choose to eat their own placentas for logical reasons: they can be dehydrated into nutrient-rich pills, and people swear by the benefits of drinking it raw in a smoothie directly after birth. Would I do this? No, to be honest. But would I sit around and mock an entire group of people for doing it? NO. Because ultimately it's their body and their choice, and sitting around and whining about somebody else's placenta — which again, nobody asked them to touch — is hugely disrespectful and weirdly shaming, not just to people who eat their placenta, but to all women who ever created one in the first place.
Whoever belonged to this placenta: power to you. Hopefully any men involved in the actual childbirth portion of this placenta being brought into this world were not as ridiculously immature and whiny about it as they were in this video:
Images: YouTube(3)
