By Bea Joyner
men, gather round, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Women, please stand back, it’s time that someone told them the truth. I promise you ladies, you will thank me for it later.
Men, do you find yourself getting irritable for no reason at times or does your mood change swiftly? Do you cry at a movie or while watching your young child at sleep or play? Have you found that your favorite pair of jeans are suddenly not as comfortable as they once were? Do you try to explain it away by saying they stayed in the dryer too long? Well, please let me explain what is happening to you — MEN YOU ARE PMSing!!!
So let’s define PMSing. PMS stands for Premenstrual syndrome. According to the dictionary, PMS “refers to physical and emotional symptoms that occur… before a woman’s period. Common symptoms include acne…bloating, feeling tired, irritability, and mood changes.”
No you don’t bleed, but hear me out before you run in the opposite direction or start screaming profanities. What you are experiencing in those moments is the same thing women experience that you love to say so loudly and/or behind our backs, THEY’RE PMS’ING!!!
The confusion and denial you are experiencing can be traced back to Dr. Sigmund Freud. He began studying these symptoms and claimed they only happened in women. He was beginning to get some notoriety and men needed an excuse to explain the various situations they were finding themselves in.
At a time when men were proudly sticking out their chests and claiming to be the only ones with wisdom and knowledge, Dr. Freud was giving them scientific proof. They used it as an excuse to claim the problems in their lives were caused by their wives and some of them ran into the arms of, you guessed it, another woman. And when she started acting the same way, they ran back to the wife. It was a vicious cycle. It was simply a case of men thinking with the lower middle part of their body instead of the upper part. Funny, how they never stopped to examine themselves and see that many times, it was their own mood swings that caused the problems. They just expected women to cater to them, no questions asked.
Which is why I want to be on the Board of who determines which studies get funded. I believe if we tracked men’s mood swings on a consistent, regular basis, you would find they have mood swings on a regular, trackable pattern. After all, men have hormones and since science says that’s what causes mood swings, men too could be PMSing. I agree, we would need another term, but I believe my logic is as sound as Freud’s. Ladies feel free to chime in!
