PMS

Some months, I feel the precise moment when the lights go out. One second, there is goodness in the world; in the next, it vanishes. Other months, the clouds descend gradually, till happiness is just a muted haze.

That's what strong weed does cupcake.

The months when I can feel a muffled happiness are the good ones. Joy reaches me bundled in cotton, but at least it’s there. Having appropriate emotional responses is as hard as moving through treacle, but at least I can move. Sometimes I only remember what time of month it is when I find myself surprised at how hard joy has turned. The light is glowing on the chestnut branches, a friend’s eyes are glittering — but inside me, there is only a flicker.

Months? I'd get that checked out. Most human women get there cunt on about every moon cycle. Are you a reptiloid?

Also are you on LSD?

Sometimes it’s not cotton, but glass between me and the good world. I see the chestnut and the friend clearly — but I’m on the other side, and though the glass is invisible, I can’t get through. Other times, everything loses its glow. The trees which ordinarily call out “Go for a walk!,” the books which say “Read me!,” the problems asking to be solved all go mute. I can’t find my happiness — I can’t even find my wanting. My hands and face go numb along with my mind.

But it is a cotton pony! Three points.

Jesus get to the PMS already.

Clinically, this is called “dysphoria.” This is precisely what it sounds like: euphoria with a minus sign. An unshakable sense that all’s bad with the world. Free-floating despair. Etymologically, it means “hard-to-bear-ness,” and that’s exactly how it feels: Everything is too heavy.

Culturally, it's called "being a bitch" and refusing to "adult" about your bleeding. Everyone knows you can control it, and actively choose not to.

I try to tell myself there is nothing to be sad about. My voice tumbles down the precipice, fading away without ever reaching the bottom. Ordinary sadness, even moderate depression, can be talked to; PMS doesn’t speak the language. The usual links between thought, feeling, and action all seem to have snapped.

So reason and logic is something you can't control. So why do you claim you have it when at least 25% of your life is you having no choice but to be irrational and illogical? You feel you should be allowed into politics and run corporations do you?

I know all of this will go away by the time my period starts, and every ray of light on a chestnut will be a miracle again — but it doesn’t help much to know this. Imagine you found out — experienced in a viscerally felt flash — that everything was empty on the inside , even people. Would it help to know that a day — maybe a week — later you would forget what you had felt?

You forget what you felt, because you're a child and don't give a shit about who you hurt. But we remember. You were being a bitch, and it's important you get called out on it during you 2 day "happy" phase and you apologize and make amends. Because you're an illogical child and give into a "bad" day due to never having had responsibilities in your life. You know that toxic masculinity where you have to walk-it-off no matter what the fuck happened? That's what happens when you have real responsibilities in life.

If I keep repeating, “Everything is okay,” I can hold onto the words — a spell keeping my own darkness at arm’s length. What I can’t do is feel the truth I’m holding; I don’t have the hormones with which to feel joy.

Seriously reptiloids, get that shit checked out. That's abnormal. And stay off the drugs. I once said "everything is ok" when I ingested 30g of hallucinogenic mushrooms one time and took 4 hours to come down.

This is what PMS is like for me.

Complete psychotic melt-down?

It’s not about men

I know it's not, it's 100% your fault, but you'll blame men because you have a child's mind. Try dating a bitch one day.

Skies dusking a desperate black isn’t exactly the first image that pops to mind when you hear “PMS.” An irritable woman engaging in “ear-splitting yelling, irrational arguments and fits of tears” is a little more familiar. Moodiness and irritability (and fits of tears, too) are certainly part of my PMS experience.

Yes you are being a bitch. Put a cork in it, walk it off, and adult up.

A few cycles back I entered a favorite coffee shop at 11:45 a.m., hoping to order a quiche.

I think I see the problem. I too go to car dealerships for a brunch.

The barista told me they didn’t serve items off their lunch menu till noon. I snapped something at her, backed away from the counter, and felt the world collapsing beneath me. I was starving and powerless.

My God seek help. I don't mean therapy, we're past that. Get into a psychiatric facility pronto.

I had nowhere to turn. Unbearable possibilities were closing in around me: waiting for 15 minutes, deciding on another place, finding an item off the breakfast menu. All felt desperately beyond me.

McDonalds serve's breakfast all day.

Another time, on a holiday together, my boyfriend asked me if I was planning to brush my teeth before leaving the hotel. I snapped something along the lines of, “Don’t tell me what to do!”

Bitch confirmed. But it's not about men, it's about quiche. Men just pay the price because you're a fucking irrational child.

A woman’s “irritability” is how men experience PMS. Moodiness is the visible ripple on the surface of a woman’s suffering. I snap because all the goodness has gone out of the world and I’m scared. I snap because the soundtrack to everything is Shostakovich, and I can’t turn it off. I snap because I’ve been smiling for hours from a place unreachable by joy. I snap because I’m exhausted from trying not to snap all day.

You snap because you don't care if you snap, because you feel safe being a cunt to someone you probably lie to and "claim" to love. You don't care about him, because you have no responsibility.

On that holiday with my boyfriend, I snapped because my feelings heard, “You have bad breath and I wish I was on this holiday alone, and you’re just taking up space.” (Unlike the readers of “Handling Her Period Like a Man,” Ben cares about his girlfriend’s inner life, so when I explained myself, he made it abundantly clear that just taking up space couldn’t be further from the truth.) Was this irrational? Is it irrational to see a straight stick in water as bent? Is it irrational to miscalculate simple sums when you have a splitting headache? Is it irrational to shiver when you have a fever — even if it’s warm outside?

He told you what you wanted to hear because he's hopefully plotting his escape from the relationship with a child in a woman's body and is tired, (hee hee) of being your emotional tampon. Three points from the top of the key!

There is some evidence that women with severe forms of PMS (more precisely, PMDD; see below) perceive neutral faces as if they were faces expressing negative emotions. I think this happens to me — and I can’t turn this off, just like you can’t turn off that straight stick in water looking bent.

Psychotic break, with a dose of hallucinatory schizophrenia.

Society treats PMS as if it were a man’s problem. (More generally, society treats mental health problems as if they were problems only for those who don’t actually suffer from them.)

Well you refuse to deal with it as an adult, so who is left? Oh right, a quiche serving coffee house. Try handling your own pathetic problems for once. It is the fucking man's problem, and the correct answer is to do what was necessary back in the old days, is confine you to a moon-hut where you could bleed out with the other cunts and have female attendants, and you're confined there until you prove your cunt ass is ready to enter society. Everyone's happier. You hate men already, and we're tired of your fucking ass, we have shit to do, not buy you pads at 2:30am.

"Men are the primary victims of bitches with PMS"

~Hilary Clinton

If women got cold before their period, men would be complaining about their irrational shivering. If women’s eyesight got worse every month, society would be asking how we could stop them from rudely bumping into men.

Yeah I'd give you a blanket. And also tell you to shut your cock washer.

You're the problem here cupcake, you're a bitch and do nothing about it. You're a pathetic child and should be treated like one.

Let me say it again: It’s not about men.

But you'll be a cunt anyway. I promise to abandon you for a quarter of our relationship and go stay at this chicks house I met on tinder while you're "busy" dealing with cotton trees and whatever Sylvia Plath poetry you were going on about.

Enter PMDD

Huge caveat: I’m not a psychologist, and I have read very little of the primary literature on PMS/PMDD. I’m basing these general remarks on Wikipedia, and on the TEDx talk which I’ll discuss below. Based on my cursory glance at the literature, it’s also quite clear that I’m something of an outlier. Please bear this in mind, and take what follows with a grain of salt!

So basically you know nothing. Since it's TEDx, you're in negative numbers now.

Over the last few decades, some scientists who call themselves feminists have noted the deficiencies of this male perspective on PMS, and argued that, to a great extent, women’s premenstrual irritability is caused by societal expectations about PMS. So far, so good. The problem is that these researchers then conclude that PMS doesn’t exist at all — it’s just a cultural myth.

There are no feminist scientists. They just make up the conclusions then fake an experiment to give them that conclusion. PMS does exist, whether it's because you bleed, or you're making excuses because you just want to be a bitch, or you're simply a bitch 25% of your life, I don't give a shit, you're being a bitch. To the moon-hut th0t!

In a TEDx talk titled “The good news about PMS,” which exemplifies this movement, psychologist Robyn Stein DeLuca presents research suggesting that while a genuine, serious disorder called “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” affects 3 to 8 percent of women, everyone else’s “symptoms” amount to culturally induced autosuggestion.

Well you do have weak minds, and you are a bitch, I conclude that dating you requires me to avoid you except those two days of the month you actually are pleasant, nice, pleasing, horny, and worth being around. Then it's time to bail.

As you may have guessed, I (probably) satisfy the diagnostic criteria for PMDD. If DeLuca is right, my story is irrelevant to the vast majority of women.

AWALT

I’ll try to argue that this isn’t so — that there is an important continuity between PMS and PMDD, and denying this amounts to adopting the male perspective on PMS — but this argument will be largely speculative, and won’t directly question the scientific evidence DeLuca provides. In fact, some of this evidence has convinced me that there really are women who think they suffer from PMS but in fact do not. So — be warned, and judge for yourself.

Or you all are cunts, which is probably the case. And illogical and irrational 100% of the time.

But first, I want to make a point which stands even if all the scientific evidence is exactly like DeLuca paints it. In “The good news about PMS,” who is the news good for? The women with moderate symptoms who thought they suffered from PMS but are now being told they don’t? Is it good news for them that “science tells them” that they’re making their moods up? What about the 3 to 8 percent of women who actually suffer from PMDD?

This isn't science, it's nonsense. Science does actual experiments and measures actual things, not self-reporting surveys.

That is by no means a negligible number of women. For comparison, the lifetime prevalence of depression is 8 to 12 percent. Some 5 to 10 percent of men under 40 suffer from erectile dysfunction. Can you imagine a TED talk called “The good news about depression: You’re making it up”? Or: “The good news about ED: You’re just not trying hard enough”?

Hehe. ED is mostly made up. Here's why. ED does happen. It is primarily related to heart issues like CHF and hypertension, which is why Viagra was discovered having a lovely side effect as a heart medication, one that women often take BTW. So then it became a boner pill cuz $$$. Also why you can't take it with nitroglycerine which causes drop in blood pressure.

The other reason ED exists is because, you old burned out whore, you've been together 40 years and you're not attractive to him. No matter what the "love" is, 18 year old nymphettes are what get his boner going. Mix that with some heart and obesity issues, and your fat ass, and not only does his hydraulics not work without a pill, he can't keep it up because you're boring. Even changing positions can screw his fantasy up in his head. Go read about it sometime cupcake.

He has ED because he's tired of your shit and ate and drank himself to dull the pain, got heart problems, and he's not attracted to you anymore. The vast majority of men take Viagra for their wives so they shut the fuck up and they can pretend they're attractive.

And it’s not just the prevalence — PMDD is a serious condition. Deadly, in fact: According to some estimates, 15 percent of women with PMDD attempt suicide.

All women try suicide, it's attention getting you see? You whores crave attention at all times. AWALT.

Good news my ass.

Does your ass bleed too?

I do share DeLuca’s resistance to the medicalization of PMS. If the aim of diagnosing PMDD is to stuff the sufferer with poorly understood pharmaceuticals, then we’d better limit the diagnosis to those who really can’t be helped in any other way.

Smoke some weed. It's not just for all day anymore. Then you'll go to Mcdonalds for a couple hours and forget to be a bitch.

But we shouldn’t forget that this is an artificial cordoning off of those who have it worst.

You're a societal problem. To the moon hut!

To call the low prevalence of PMDD “good news” is to succumb to medicalization: It’s to accept that only those who are “disordered” suffer.

I think you all should be locked up. By law. Compulsory. To be free you have to prove you aren't a bitchy cunt. And the allegation of any man #SheWasABitch gets you sent to the hut again.

It’s to accept a binary scale on which someone with five of 11 prespecified symptoms is diseased, but someone with four doesn’t have the right to complain.

You have them all lunatic. One measure, if you are a bitch to even one human, to the hut with you.

Similarly, if we’re trying to rigorously study a psychological condition, it makes sense to start with stringent, well-defined, and testable criteria.

Easy. Were you a bitch today?

This is why the evidence on PMDD is so much less equivocal than the evidence on PMS: PMDD was defined to be more easily studied!

Feminists are lazy, and not scientists. Gender studies is not STEM.

Concluding that PMS doesn’t exist is a bit like concluding that fermions don’t exist outside of laboratory conditions, since we haven’t quite been able to observe them there.

I've dated a lot of women, I assure you that "whatever" it is, you all suffer from it a quarter of our relationship. Doesn't matter if you're making it up or not, you're all collectively guilty of cunting off at the mouth.

DeLuca uses the fact that there are hundreds of PMS symptoms as evidence against its reality. This is puzzling: You might think each symptom is evidence of PMS, and the number of symptoms is evidence of PMS’s seriousness!

I estimate 3.5 billion worldwide.

Of course, I’m being unfair. Imagine a magician telling you that every time he shuffles a deck of cards, something “magical” will happen.

Well he won't be a bitch about it.

And each time, something does happen: Sometimes pigeons fly out of the deck, and sometimes he smiles a smile somewhat different from the smiles you’re used to. You’d be right to complain: What’s so magical about a smile?!

I wouldn't complain, that guy would have top Vegas booking. He'd own a private island.

DeLuca’s contention is that PMS is like this: Women claim to be experiencing a special sort of magic each month, but they can’t specify in advance what the magic trick will be — and some of the “tricks” turn out to be entirely ordinary human experiences.

It's not magic, you're being a cunt, on purpose, because of you're feeeeeeelz. PMS is just the excuse you use to justify being a cunt for a week.

This is a legitimate worry — but it’s one that applies equally to the study of many other psychological complaints. Psychology is full of baroque lists of symptoms which suggest that we aren’t carving nature at the joints yet. Some of the symptoms of PMS may be pseudo-symptoms, some are probably culturally conditioned, some are strongly affected by sufferer’s beliefs about mental health. (The latter two features — which apply across the board in psychology — don’t mean they aren’t real symptoms.) Psychologists just haven’t separated the wheat from the chaff yet — but that’s no reason to preemptively conclude that it’s all chaff.

Who cares? You're being a cunt, refuse to rectify the situation, use it as an excuse, and no one wants to be around you.

Causes don't matter, only results. How about we use your feminist outcome based equality. 25% of the month you can be a bitch, and 25% of the month I can wholesale beat your ass for no reason and 911 will be blocked on the phone. Sound fair? I mean, we're both hormonal and irrational.

DeLuca is right to complain that it’s extremely hard to study a syndrome with hundreds of symptoms, many of which are ordinary human experiences.

Maybe study it based on billions of cases.

Test for their disjunction, and you’ll find it present at many other points in a cycle. Test for individual symptoms, and they might be replaced by something entirely different the next time around (and not be present at all in the woman next door, who has other symptoms).

Is subject being bitch? Y/N

There may also be subtle cancellation effects. For instance, crying is certainly one of my PMS symptoms, but I’m not at all sure that I cry more in the last week of my cycle than at other times. Some months PMS hits me with emptiness rather than tears, and at those times I fail to cry at things I would have cried at otherwise. Quite possibly, the two effects cancel each other out. The study of PMS requires some extremely subtle experimental design. But this is a problem for psychology — not a problem with women.

You're a bitch, and men have to handle you. You are a legitimate problem for more than just you. You need to be taken off the streets.

DeLuca is also right that medicalization is dangerous.

No it's not, you're a threat to others. Have a couple margaritas if you don't like pills. Smoke a fat J. Do some pushups. Shut your fucking mouth.

If there are PMS symptoms which affect 80 percent of women, they surely can’t amount to a syndrome — they’re just normal aspects of the female experience.

So then I'm right, you're just being a bitch to be a bitch. I'm shocked.

The externally visible symptoms of PMS, like irritability, are overblown, and often amount to women merely submitting to cultural expectations. The emotional profile of the premenstrual phase is much more subtle than the culturally sanctioned “turning into witches” view.

Then you have a weak mind and should not be allowed in politics or business.

But she goes troublingly wrong when she infers from the complex emotional profile of the premenstrual phase — and from the failure of third-personal, male categories like irritability to fully capture PMS — that PMS doesn’t exist at all. She goes wrong when she assumes that cultural causes of suffering invalidate the suffering.

Well men are right that you're being a bitch. No one cares why. Either solve your shit or leave.

DeLuca is also right that the belief in PMS-caused irritability can serve to discredit women.

You already admit you are irrational and illogical. You admit you have zero control over your "syndrome". You cannot be reasoned with. You should be taken into custody by authorities.

What does this discredit? It just means, like lumberjacking, you should not do jobs you're biologically incapable of. Like anything where you have any power, like the military, government, business, etc.

It can be an excuse not to take legitimate complaints seriously, dismissing them as groundless feelings.

Your #MeToo lies already did that. What's one more thing to uncover your lies and discredit whatever husk is left?

But denying the reality of PMS can also serve this purpose, by depriving us of the language to articulate what we’re feeling. If PMS isn’t real, then when I snap, I really am just being irrational. DeLuca’s viewers are quick to pick this up. Here’s the top comment on the YouTube video of the talk.

No one denies it, we don't care. You're being a cunt, you speak the language of "cunteez". So, deep breath, once again, deal with it like an adult, walk it up, shove a handful of tampons up there, shut the fuck up, and bring me a beer for having to deal with you.

So… are we saying that when she acts like that she doesn’t have the excuse of PMS? Because… then that means she’s just being a jerk for no reason.

Because both have the same outcome. being a cunt for either a biological reason, or a psychological disorder. Pick two.

Thanks science.

Should have chosen gender studies.

However imperfect the stereotypical picture, it allows me to explain my (overre)actions. I can say, “I don’t really mean it; I’m PMS-ing.”

I bet we can do an experiment. Every time you say that, I slap the shit out of you. After a year, we'll see if you still have PMS. If you do, then it's real. If you don't, then you're just a bitch that needs a five fingers to the face.\s

I may be ridiculed, but at least I’m partially understood. I wish I could say instead, without incredulous stares, “I’m sorry I snapped — it’s the time of month when my soul and my hands both feel numb” — but it’s still better to have an imperfect language than to be mute.

No mute is better, because you're being a cunt. 90% of the problems with women would be solved if you had a mute button, preferably activated with an ass slap.

We’re fed a myth about women turning into witches each month. In fact, women have rich emotional lives affected by scores of things, including, but certainly not limited to, their menstrual cycle. For some women, like me, the effect of cycle on emotion is particularly pronounced, and can range from slightly dampened spirits to utter hopelessness.

Myth?! You literally said that's exaclty what happens to you! And your boyfriend! Jesus, are you on your period right now? Who let you out of the hut?

In a culture raised on myths, these are the cases which result in witch-sightings. DeLuca notices the myth — and proceeds to erase the woman along with the witch. I suggest that we part ways here, instead striving to retrain our eyes — and learning to see the suffering human behind the witch-mirage.

Witch, bitch, get rid of both of them. Also, I specified in my order the sex bot not come preinstalled with the PMS DLC.

A few words about coping

Are you an incel?

I’m apprehensive about posting this. I’m tackling two taboo topics in one: mental health and the female experience, and I’m publicly sharing a personal story — anecdotal evidence — on top of that.

Must be your time of the month.

I don’t know if posting is worth the vulnerability, but I do know that in an ideal world, this wouldn’t be a vulnerable topic to begin with. I’m writing simply because I’m sick of keeping quiet.

Well you're attention whoring, so I'm sure you'll push through and click publish.

And be honest, when you're a bitch you're never quiet about it.

PMS/PMDD is surprisingly hard to recognize in yourself. I’ve known since high school that I could get hopelessly sad the day before my period started. It was hard to miss: bawling my eyes out about nothing at all one day, blood the next. But I didn’t realize until recently — when I started using a cycle-tracking app — that my mood (and sleep, focus, and digestion) is consistently worse in the second half of my cycle. Until recently, I thought I “just got depressed” sometimes, and had no idea that only two out of the four weeks were ever bad. (If you ignore the fact that the start of the first “good” week usually features debilitating cramps.)

You could, you could pay attention to what you're doing, look at a calendar, and realize you're in your cunty bitch phase, and do something about it.

Knowledge of the patterns in my own moods has given me back the sense of control which PMDD takes away. I wish I’d known earlier. If PMS — the real PMS, not the irritability — weren’t such a taboo topic, I could have.

Wow you are a hero. You figured out how to use a calendar and track your cotton pony express package.

Here's a tip, go to amazon, set a regular drop shipment every month for tampons, when you see it in the mail, you know you're being a bitch!

I’d like to end with a short list of coping strategies for PMS/PMDD. (They’re also helpful for depression, anxiety, and mood instability in general.)

Shutting up is not one is it.

I dismissed them earlier, but little words like, “It’s okay” and, “It will get better soon” really are a magic charm. You don’t need to feel their truth for them to help you to wait it out.

No it's not, that's forcing work on other people. You fucking say it, to yourself, at a hotel you pay to stay at for a week.

I also find it helpful to tell myself: “It’s okay not to be okay.” Darknesses have a tendency to get self-reflexive — if you can at least remove the outer layer of self-blame, you’re making progress.

You need strong anti-psychotic meds.

Knowing that what you’re going through is PMS/PMDD — and that you’re not making it up — is super helpful.

Because then you give yourself license to cunt to the world. You're a bad person and you should feel bad.

You might want to use a cycle-tracking app to help gain this knowledge. I use Clue, and I generally recommend it, though it’s not perfect. When tracking moods, it makes you decide whether you’re experiencing PMS or just sadness/sensitivity. It’s hard to know what to do if symptoms appear earlier in your cycle than usual! It also seems to assume that PMS happens in one continuous chunk each cycle.

It will remind you start being a bitch, whether you feel that way or not!

This 15-minute yoga sequence is a lifesaver. In fact, it’s the single most effective resource I have for combating PMS. Unfortunately, the voiceover is super annoying (“shift your attitude towards gratitude”?!) — but you can always mute it, and the poses really work for me. I’m risking sounding entirely unscientific when I say this — I have no idea what the mechanism is — but this sequence reaches deeper into the darkness than words. I’ve cried tears of wholeness at the heart-opening part at 6:43, tears that bridged the gap between thought and feeling when words couldn’t.

For fucks sake lady, you're a ginger aren't you, I say that because clearly you're insane and the only reason a guy fucks you is for the roller coaster. I feel bad for your future kids while you're being a single mother bitch.

If yoga isn’t your cup of tea, sometimes just focusing on your breathing (slowly, pausing before each new inhale) can lift the weight a tiny bit. Meditation can work too, though there’s the danger that it’ll push you even deeper inside your head. I find it helpful as a way of noticing just how many thoughts are lurking behind my mood — and, sometimes, converting the mood into something that can be talked to.

You really think you'll do any of this shit? What did you mom do? Or was she a bitch too and normalized your made up problems?

I’ll say it one more time, louder: A disorder that makes women turn into witches — or bitches — is a social construct. Hormonal fluctuations which dim your inner glow, on the other hand — that’s lived experience.

I don't care what it is, you're actively choosing to be a bitchy cunt, and you could not do it, but you don't give a shit. You're one of those assholes that shits out a baby, and takes it to an R rated movie the next week because "why should my life have to change?" because you don't give a shit about anyone but yourself, like all bitches.