Someone doesn’t know a whole lot about the way the bodies of 60-year-old women work January 13, 2008 zuzu I mean, Jesus. A PMS joke for a post-menopausal woman?
Sweet Jeebus–THANK YOU for bringing this up. I was wondering if Oliphant just thought we all bled forever or something.
Of what I’ve heard from my 61 year old aunt and 62 year old mother, she would be more likely to: 1. Be taking OFF that jacket 2. Telling one of them to open the doors and windows, dammit! 3. Throwing something at those stupid men instead of crying.
Just more evidence that the whole “PMS” thing is just code for “LOL aren’t women stupid and crazy LOL”. Not that we didn’t know that already.
Whoa. Clinton can make bin Laden fold just by crying? I’m definitely voting for her–talk about your ability to win the war on terror! (Don’t panic, I’m not serious.) Oliphant is an idiot.
Just goes to show that “PMS” to these guys is not a physical process that stops at any point, just proof of women’s inferiority and a convenient justification for misogyny.
It bothers me to no end that people acknowledge (and obsess) about women’s hormones and how they make women stupid, irrational bitches, while ignoring the fact that men have a hormone called TESTOSTERONE pumping through their bodies. Which hormone do you think causes more rash decision-making?
Sickening cartoon. Actually though, not every sixty year old woman is menopausal or post-menopausal. My mother is sixty this year and has still not started menopause! Also, testosterone does not seem to, on its own, cause aggression. As pro-feminist writer Michael Kimmel explains in “The Gendered Society,” testosterone seems to unleash whatever aggressive tendencies are already there. As he explains, a study was done of five male monkeys. The monkeys arranged themselves in a dominance hierarchy. When all five males were given additional testosterone, they became more aggressive but only towards those monkeys who were LOWER than they were on the hierarchy. In other words, no amount of testosterone could provoke Mr. Third-in-command to pick a fight with Mr. First-in-command – he still knew better! I can’t explain it as well as he did, unfortunately, but it makes a good case for the idea that male bodies with their higher testosterone levels are not biologically determined to be violent – that they may ACT violently WHEN society and socialization present them with hierarchical opportunities for dominance. Still, testosterone does fluctuate, for example, by soaring after any sort of victory and plummeting after a defeat (for both men and women, by the way), so, yes, males who are feeling especially pumped up/happy AND have already been taught sexist and dominant behavior are, as SarahMC suggests, particularly irrational and dangerous.
I don’t suppose anyone has contact information for who to complain to that this piece of misogynistic crap got published….?
I had a professor explain once that while women might have some crazy hormones over the course of a month, men had a cycle of hormones that lasted about 24 hours. So their moods changed and their hormones changed more in a day then a woman’s did in a month. Me and my friends started saying that men PMSed ever day for at least two hours. So, clearly, woman are not the only hormonal ones out there.
Thank God Israel didn’t have a female in charge when Egypt invaded in 1973 or that England didn’t have a female in charge when the Spanish Armada tried to invade… Oh, wait….
I didn’t even THINK about the irony of him making fun of a post-menopausal woman’s PMS. Now, instead of me just being irritated with yet another jackass making the same wasn’t-even-funny-the-first-time joke, I can appreciate the cartoon for pointing out that the cartoonist is not just an asshole–he’s stoopid too.
Geez, what an idiot! It’s crap like this that makes me ashamed for my gender. PMS does indeed mean “Putting up with Men’s Stupidity”.