I think (can’t say for sure; I’m not elbows) that she meant anyone who is saying things like, “Oh, I would never ever let a bad mood show. That’s so wrong!”, not factual “Doesn’t happen to me” answers.
But those aren’t young women: the ones I’ve noticed are guys.
On a more serious note, I just wanted to mention that hormone issues can happen to men as well. Probably not as sever as they occur to women, but I’ve experienced them. A year (give or take) ago I was exercising like a maniac and on a calorie restricted diet. This, in itself, made me a bit crabbier. After I’d lost a bunch of weight, I went to eating sensibly and not working out like a madman (I still workout, but I don’t do hour long cardio every day - or two times a day as I sometimes did before).
It took a while for my body to bounce back - I had low testosterone as a matter of fact. It still hasn’t gotten quite back to normal (and it might not ever get back to it’s regular level), but it was weird during those unstable (hormone) times. I’d get irritable for no reason and I think I did have mood swings (not just bad moods due to something), now that I think about it. I tried my best not to take it out on anyone and for the most part I was successful (I’m not perfect though).
While my experience is probably a far cry from anything women experience, what it does make me realize is that your hormones have a much more pronounced effect on your mood than I would have otherwise realized.
I don’t get irritable during PMS (I get depressed), but when I was on hormonal birth control for a year, it made me into a different person. I felt like a perpetual ball of rage. Things that I normally wouldn’t react to were now making me see red, like someone cutting in front of me in a line. It was only my years of living in a dysfunctional family that prohibited any expression of anger that kept me from exploding at these strangers (thanks, parents…no, seriously, that deeply ingrained inhibition saved my ass).
The worst part of it was the existential crisis that came from this change. I had always been (and now am again) a generally good-natured, easy-going person with a long fuse. It shook me to the core to think that my personality, who I was, might simply be a result of a combination of chemicals in my body. And since I was on birth control in the first place not as contraception but as a means of correcting a hormonal imbalance, did this mean that this rage monster was my real self? Oh dear GOD.
Chemical fluctuations in your brain alter who you are, how you think, how you perceive your surroundings, how you interpret your surroundings, etc. The changes in your brain chemistry during PMS affect you in the same way that regular old depression affects you – it’s like seeing everything through a veil, and the veil is part of you and can’t be recognized or removed. With me, PMS makes me depressed – little mistakes I make that I normally would laugh off now seem to be indications that I’m a horrible, worthless person who will never do anything right. I can even think to myself, “Hey, why is this bothering me so much? That’s unusual. Is this just PMS?” but that doesn’t undo my thinking that making a mistake at work equals I Am A Bad Person. At the time, that seems to be an obvious fact that I’ve just now noticed. It’s not until a day or two later that I can look back at how drastically those hormones affect my thinking, and shiver.
And what elbows said about PMS changing over time is true for me, at least. When I was in my teens and early 20s, I never had PMS symptoms besides cramping. I thought the depression and irritability associated with PMS were just a result of the pain and inconvenience of having your period. Now I don’t have cramps anymore, but I do get depressed, and I can testify that the depression is separate from the annoyance of the period.
Also, I just want to point out that most women do not have cycles that function like clockwork, with every month it’s 28 days down to the hour. So you can’t necessarily look at a calendar and say to your loved ones, “I’m going to isolate myself from you on October 6 and 7; you’re welcome in advance.”
Men experience a surge of testosterone that lasts for 20-30 years, and far exceeds the hormonal levels experienced by women with PMS. But we go to jail when our hormones cause us to act out, so the vast majority of men learn to control themselves by adulthood. So while men address women’s minor hormonal issues with humor, women call us pigs and continue their childish behavior and expect others to have sympathy for them.
Jesus, men get jailed for becoming over-emotional and complaining too much about the dishes not being done? You guys have it really bad. I had no idea.
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The vast majority of women can control themselves too. The vast majority of women are not going to jail because they lost control while experiencing PMS. The vast majority of women can handle their fluctuations with minor irritability (some with major irritability).
Further, it’s the fluctuation of the hormone that I’m referring to - not the specific amount. You can be quite fine with a T level of 500, but if it fluctuates to 200 you might feel like crap and you might be crabby and irritable. By the same token, you could be fine with a T level of 1,000, but a drop to 500 would have an impact on your mood.
Over the course of a year men’s levels are generally stable - and by that I mean, it doesn’t fluctuate to the same volume as a woman’s levels might over the course of a month.
As has been pointed out in this thread, there is a difference between being in a bad mood and actively taking that bad mood out on other people. The former is acceptable, the latter is not. I say that knowing that occasionally people have bad days and they do take their bad mood out on other people - while this is inappropriate it does happen.
I didn’t say five hours, either. I said forever. Meet with the CEO every non-working moment for the rest of your life and tell me you act the same in hour five and year 30.
I never defended lashing out. I defended not being on CEO behavior. Not quite the same.
I actually think this is more relationship-specific than being someone’s “god given right.” In my relationship, sometimes I’m in a shitty mood and being kind of pissy. Sometimes my husband is, too. Neither of us is horrible, but we’re not always our normal sunny selves, either. The important part is that both of us are okay with that. If either of us thought it was a big deal, it would be. But we don’t, because it’s not devolving into screaming matches or throwing things or anything like that.
I also think there’s a middle ground here where we’re talking past each other. I see women in my family from previous generations putting up with a lot of bullshit no matter how shitty they feel. You see women treating the people in their lives like dirt for a week every month. Most people are going to fall somewhere in between.
I’m not sure this is very clear - I’m not an expert, so feel free to research/correct me here. Here’s some general information on hypogonadism (low testosterone):
(Under Symptoms)
Some more info from the Mayo clinic:
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Does any of this excuse treating someone like crap?
No and I don’t think anyone is advocating that it does. We should all be able to control ourselves and not lash out at people because of our own emotional states. That said, it’s not always easy to do so and when it does happen, the person doing it needs to make amends for it.
In other words, hormonal issues are not a free pass to treat people like crap.
My husband has been complaining about my pregnancy hormones affecting him for weeks now. It would be funnier if I didn’t feel bad for him.
Actually that was my point. You seemed to be criticizing yourself for behavior that you forgave in others.
We all have our problems to deal with. Taking them out on others is never the right way to deal.
I’m sorry but this is not what I got from your comment. From your comment, I got the sense that men are able to control their hormones, while women are not.
I got this because you said:
I do not agree with this. I think most women are able to handle their hormones. I think occasionally women, as well as men, let X (X being hormones or a bad mood) are not able to handle the circumstances and inappropriate lash out. Obviously there are outliers to this - women/men who rage out inappropriately more often than not.
If this is not what you meant, my apologies.
Why is it ‘forever’? PMS is only two to three days per month, it’s not affecting you every single day of your life. So, you have to control your mood swings for a couple of days every 30 days, not every waking moment.
If you are upset at your husband during every day of the month, not just PMS days, then there are other issues going on.
And finally, you are missing the point: The CEO example was not meant to show that we should behave like that towards our loved ones, or behave like that all the time. It simply was meant to prove that the moody/bitchy behavior is controllable. It may take effort, but it is controllable. And the fact that many women are bitchy towards their husbands during PMS simply shows that they don’t want to put in the effort 2-3 days a month to make sure they don’t treat their husband/boyfriend like dirt.
Doesn’t this also prove that PMS rage is controllable? If previous generations of women were afraid to show rage for shitty behavior, can you imagine how unlikely it would have been for them to show rage for minor behavior when they were having PMS mood swings?
The fact that women from previous generations did not show rage during PMS (AFAIK, at least not to the degree that modern women do in the US), and the fact that modern women in the US (where PMS symptoms are accepted and joked about) do, means that it is not an inherent evil that we must put up with, but something that is controllable.
That is, it is controllable if society makes people feel that it is unacceptable behavior to be a jerk for no other reason than you are feeling bad.
I am feeling more and more like this is a personal issue for Polerius for some reason. Although the fact that he ignored my question in my previous post would seem to indicate he does not want to talk about it, so, OK.
Could you maybe provide some examples, preferably from this thread but from other sources if you like, of “women showing rage during PMS”?
Your assumption is mostly correct.
I’ve been thinking about this behavior for a long time, from many angles, to get an understanding of it and its causes.
Examples:
[QUOTE=kiz]
You just described me back in my PMS days to a complete T
[/QUOTE]
My comment, which you quoted as proof of someone raging, was a joke about being locked up like a wolfman. I do not actually behave like a wolfman. That was comedic hyperbole. If you would like examples of how I actually behave, you can view my other many posts in this thread, in which I describe such actions as sending a somewhat over-emotional email to an employer, dissolving in tears of weepy gratitude when my husband makes a small gesture of sympathy, and complaining excessively about minor irritations in my life.
I think the image of a snarling, howling woman throwing pots and pans and screaming at people is primarily a media construction. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but I think most of us do manage enough self-control to avoid those sorts of violent displays.
I think there are quite a few reasons that it’s come more into the common consciousness now than it has in the past. First, women’s issues in general seem to be getting more publicity, and women are more open about talking about them. Also, I think women were seen as emotional and irrational in general, rather than having occasional hormone swings. I think it’s an improvement.
Secondly, now that women are in the work force as often as men (and with ever more similar jobs), they aren’t at home when they have PMS or with the ability to take a day off as for Female Problems as often as they might have previously. Adding the physical symptoms to the emotional ones is kind of a problem, as being in pain all day is exhausting and it gradually breaks down one’s ability to handle the emotional bits as effectively.
My point about the CEO wasn’t that PMS is uncontrollable but that your interactions with people you spend all your time with are going to be different, because they see you at both your best and your worst. My coworkers have never seen me cry, for example, but my husband sure as hell has. The interaction is fundamentally different, and he sees me when I’m pissed off and exhausted after a shitty day… as I do him. Now, we could each expect that the we conduct ourselves such that one’s shitty day doesn’t affect the other in the slightest, but it doesn’t bother us that much, so we give each other some space and make something nice for dinner. For us, it’s a lot easier for the one that feels good to be accommodating than it is for the one who’s on their last nerve to suck it up, but everyone’s different. I wouldn’t expect others to work the same way. Of course, it’s not like either of us is acting like a total raving sociopath, either. Crabbiness is different from truly out-there rage, but I’ve never really dealt with that.
I understood that, which is why I added the “OK, not really” part of your post.
But the first thing I quoted was real, i.e. when you said “you only realize your jerkishness in retrospect”, basically where you admit behaving like a jerk during PMS.
And the wolfman comment, while obvious hyperbole, does indeed show us what you perceive to be the degree of your PMS-induced jerkishness. If you had mild PMS mood alterations, you would never have used the wolfman example, even as hyperbole.
I don’t think it’s as much a media construction, as it is an overall cultural meme here in the US (maybe elsewhere, but I wouldn’t know).
For example, you yourself used a hyperbole about having to be locked up like a wolfman, the ‘media’ didn’t construct this analogy.
And there are lots of posts in this thread of people making statements (not sure how many are joking and how many not) implying a similar approach to PMS: Women become uncontrollable animals during PMS, so the best thing is to avoid them during this period like you would avoid a rabid dog.
This sort of acceptance and humorization of jerkish PMS behavior is part of US culture (from movies, to TV shows, to magazine articles). And I think the acceptance and humorization of this behavior does help make it more widespread because if someone sees this as acceptable, to a degree, then they won’t feel as bad doing it themselves. If society (in movies, TV shows, articles, everywhere) heaped scorn on this behavior, I think it would make at least some women think twice before behaving this way (as I imagine happens in some other cultures today and happened in US culture in the past).
Finally, about the ‘it looks like personal issue’ comment: Why would it be a surprise that men who have to go through this every month are personally invested in the topic? I think the surprise would be if all the men posting in this thread about all the coping mechanisms and avoidance tactics are not personally invested in this behavior.