Women's Bodies Are Magical - 7 Things Your Body Does That Are Basically Witchcraft

We are taught so much shame around our bodies. Taught to dislike them, manage them, apologise for them, before we've even worked out what they're actually for.

I spent my entire teenage years drowning in the baggiest clothes I could find. Not to disappear for the sake of it - because my boobs were huge, and they pulled in a kind of attention I never asked for and didn't want. So I hid. Hoodies, oversized jumpers, anything that made me smaller and less seen. Years of my actual life, spent managing other people's eyes instead of just existing in the body I was in.

That's the conditioning working exactly as designed: shrink, apologise, underestimate, hide.

Meanwhile, this entire time, my body (and yours) has been quietly performing actual sorcery, without asking anyone's permission.

Here are the receipts...

Women's Bodies Are Magical

1. Your clitoris is a feat of engineering - built purely for pleasure

Roughly double the nerve endings of a penis, packed into a fraction of the surface area, with one job only. Not reproduction. Not survival. Just pleasure. This is the only organ in the human body that has no other function. How lucky are we??

I once saw a man on Twitter describe it as "the devil's doorbell." Imagine being that frightened of something whose entire purpose is joy.

That's not a glitch, and it's not "extra." It's evidence. Female pleasure was engineered in on purpose, which makes it a birthright - not a luxury you have to earn, justify, or quietly skip past on a Sunday afternoon.

2. The egg that became you was sitting inside your grandmother

Before you were even born, you were already carrying the eggs that might one day become your own children. They formed while you were still a foetus, inside your mother. Three generations, nested inside one body, all at once.

Which means the actual egg that, decades later, became you, was already there - inside your grandmother's womb, before your mother had even been born.

No wand required.

3. You carry your children long after they're born

It's called microchimerism. Cells from a pregnancy can cross into the mother's bloodstream and settle into her organs (including her brain) and stay there for decades. You don't just grow a person. You keep a piece of them, quietly, for the rest of your life.

And they don't just sit there. Researchers have found these fetal cells turning up specifically at sites of injury in the mother's body - in caesarean scars, where they help lay down new collagen as the wound heals, and in animal studies, at the site of skin wounds and even strokes, where they migrate in and get to work repairing the damage. Your child's cells, quite literally, are helping to patch you back together.

4. Women out-endure men once the distance gets ridiculous

In a standard marathon, men finish around 11% faster than women, on average. Push the distance past 195 miles, and that gap doesn't just close - it reverses. Women have repeatedly out-finished men outright at extreme ultra-distances, likely down to better fat-burning efficiency and steadier pacing once everyone else is falling apart.

Courtney Dauwalter won the Moab 240 (240 miles through the Utah desert) outright, more than ten hours ahead of the first man home. Jasmin Paris won Britain's 268-mile Spine Race outright while breastfeeding her baby at checkpoints, then went on to become the first woman ever to finish the brutal Barkley Marathons in its 33-year history. Fiona Kolbinger won the 2,500-mile Transcontinental cycling race across Europe outright, beating a field of 224 men by more than ten hours, as a total unknown nobody had heard of before the start line.

Turns out endurance was never the issue. It just took a ridiculous distance to prove it.

5. Your nose is doing more than his

Women have around 43% more cells, and close to 50% more neurons, in the olfactory bulb - the part of the brain that processes smell. It's measurable, it's replicated, and it's built in from birth.

Nobody knows for certain why. The leading theory ties it to survival and bonding: a sharper sense of smell would have helped mothers identify their own newborns, catch spoiled food before it made anyone ill, and pick up on the subtle social and hormonal cues other people give off. Whatever the original reason, the wiring stuck.

Make of that what you will, next time someone tells you you're imagining the smell.

6. Period blood can out-heal your own blood

Researchers at Hudson Institute found that plasma from menstrual fluid healed wounds in human skin cells almost completely within 24 hours, compared to around 40% healing from ordinary blood plasma over the same time. The womb rebuilds its own lining from scratch in three to five days, roughly 450 times across a reproductive life, and scientists are now trying to work out exactly what's in that fluid that makes it so good at repair.

It's early-stage lab research, not a finished treatment. But the headline holds: your body has quietly been outperforming medicine's best wound-healing efforts, on a monthly basis, for free.

And for most of history, that same fluid was treated as sacred rather than something to hide in your sleeve on the way to the loo. Turns out it was onto something.

7. Women outlive men, almost everywhere, every time

In virtually every country on earth, women live longer than men, often by several years. It holds across income levels, healthcare systems, and even other species. The leading theory: that the second X chromosome acts as a backup copy of genes the single male X doesn't have, plus oestrogen's protective effect on the heart before menopause.

Menopause itself is almost unheard of in nature. Outside humans, it's only confirmed in five species of toothed whale, including orcas and narwhals. Almost every other female mammal, elephants included, keeps reproducing until the day it dies. We evolved to live decades past our own reproductive years specifically so we could keep our children and grandchildren alive, instead of competing with them for resources. Evolution's verdict: older women were too valuable to lose.

We're not just built to create life. We're built to outlast it.

Not every woman will see herself in every single one of these - eggs, periods, birth, all of it.

Bodies differ. Some of this was never yours to begin with, some of it was taken, some you never wanted. None of that makes you any less magical. It just means your magic looks different.

We were taught to shame our bodies, to be quiet, agreeable, and small.

Women's bodies are magical.

This is what we've been built to do this whole time.

No wonder we were called witches.

Mx

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