Oh, come on, everyone knows about premenstrual syndrome, or PMS. It’s that time of the month when a woman’s cycle turns her into an irrational scream machine. It’s why we can never have a woman president: We’d have a war every 28 days! (Because presidents are totally allowed to decide whether or not we go to war.) It’s also the reason women need to stay in the kitchen and make us sandwiches, because sexism sexism sexism.
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“We just nuked Canada because it said we look fat in these shoes.”
But at One Time …
While scientists have always found reasons to discount women’s opinions as irrational, their excuses are pretty inconsistent. Back in ancient Greece, Hippocrates blamed female bad moods on the uterus getting knocked out of place and blocking the heart, which meant she should engage in as much sex as possible to push it back where it belongs.
When sex came to be considered more of a sin with the rise of Christianity, these “irrational” bursts of anger started to get blamed on having too much sex. Then, by the late 18th century, it was considered a side effect of going too long without getting pregnant.
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If by “too long” you mean “a month.”
So what does the science say? Well, if the researchers don’t tell their subjects what they’re looking for, they find no correlation between mood alteration and the menstrual cycle. Even among studies that do find a correlation between PMS and mood, many of them place PMS in completely different places in the woman’s cycle.
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“I’m not PMSing — I’m pissed off.”
We’re not saying that hormones don’t change behavior — they do, in both women and men — but there’s little evidence to suggest that women become emotionally compromised or irrational during the supposed “PMS” phase.
The biggest problem here is separating culture from biology. Or, more specifically, the way we write off cultural effects as biological. We are told from an early age that a woman’s period will make her act like a bitch. Regardless of the truth, that makes it easy for a female to see it as a blank check to be in a bad mood and for a man to dismiss every female emotional reaction as a series of noises made by her lady parts.
Read more: 5 Gender Stereotypes That Used To Be the Exact Opposite | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19780_5-gender-stereotypes-that-used-to-be-exact-opposite.html#ixzz1ujFGUpFv
