Read: What happens to a woman’s brain when she becomes a mother

Days after the special was released, the supermodel Chrissy Teigen, just a week postpartum after the birth of her second child, tweeted, “I can confirm postpartum life is 90% better when you don’t rip to your butthole. Baby boy: 1 point. Luna: 0,” and posted a picture of herself to Instagram wearing the mesh underwear. In the Instagram caption, she quoted Wong’s Netflix special. And earlier this summer, the comedian Amy Schumer Instagrammed a photo of herself, standing outside on a sunny day with her newborn, wearing just a bra and the mesh underpants. “Five weeks. Hospital underwear for life!” the caption read. The post has been one of Schumer’s most popular of the summer.

For generations, the grisly bodily details of new motherhood—the messy postpartum bleeding, the frustrating and sometimes painful process of figuring out breastfeeding, the wound care necessary for the vagina and cervix or the C-section incision, not to mention the waddling around the house wearing whatever undergarment can contain both an absorbent maxi pad and an ice pack—have been something of a secret kept among women. Like menstruation and menopause, the topic is often considered impolite fodder for mixed company, and many women, as a result, find themselves underinformed or misinformed about it (or only informed by a mother or another trusted older woman when the occasion arrives). But today, the realities of the human body immediately after giving birth are less mysterious than ever, a development some attribute to a changing climate around motherhood. Consequently, the care available to women has improved in some ways, too.

Jennifer Mayer, a doula and the founder of the New York–based birth- and postpartum-care team Baby Caravan, believes that some of the mystery can be traced to the fact that many U.S. doctors gloss over or fail to address what exactly women should expect from their own bodies and how to manage it.

“When you’re pregnant, you go for checkups once a month, and then twice a month, and then in the last four weeks you go weekly. And then you have your baby, they send you home, and then you don’t come back until six weeks later,” Mayer says. “Which is a huge chunk of time, and such an intense period.” Indeed, many parenting books and blogs reference the “six-week checkup” as the first visit a mother and newborn will have with a doctor after birth. That gap in medical care during the time when mothers’ bodies undergo major hormone fluctuations and injury healing, Mayer adds, can create the sense that whatever the mother’s body is doing in those six weeks is her problem to deal with.

Harvey Karp, a pediatrician and the author of 2003’s newborn-parenting manual The Happiest Baby on the Block, believes part of why so many new parents seem caught off guard by the messy and painful aspects of the postpartum stage is the degree to which modern society isolates nuclear families. In the past, when multiple generations of family members lived together and community members were more likely to help raise kids, Karp notes, “it used to be that young women would be with other young women, helping take care of their babies, and there was this automatic transfer of knowledge.” Today, he says, what gets shared between new mothers and mothers-to-be is more like an automatic transfer of fantasy.