Hormonal Swings of Women

Men have joked for many years that a woman could not be trusted as President on the grounds because, in the throes of PMS, she might have an uncontrollable impulse to "push the button." A variant on this joke (relating to menopause) entered into supposedly sober public discourse as recently as 1970, when ex-Vice President Hubert Humphrey's personal physician opined that

Even a Congresswoman must defer to scientific truths ...

there just are physical and psychological inhibitants

that limit a female's potential ... I would still

rather have a male John F. Kennedy make the Cuban

missile crisis decisions than a female of the same

age who could possibly be subject to the curious

mental aberrations of that age group.

In point of fact, there is no really clear-cut evidence that the famous hormonal mood swings of women have any empirical basis (Fausto-Sterling, no date). The belief may very well be a self-reinforcing one, in the same way that the m

. . .
ormal,' and thus not an obvious subject for inquiry when looking at the 'abnormalities' of menstrual mood changes." A simpler explanation may be at hand; the male cycle has no such overt effects as a menstrual flow. The male cycle has not become a part of folklore. It is most unlikely that many men are even aware of it, and still less likely that they (or the women around them) have any notion of what point in the cycle they may be in at any given time. If male lack of first-hand knowledge of female physiological experience is comprehensible and in a sense innocent, the same cannot, however, be said of the way that the (male-dominated) medical profession has chosen to interpret this experience. The most bizarre, but heavily publicized, instance of this interpretation is "premenstrual syndrome," extremely familiar under the acronym of PMS. The popular literature characterizes this as "a 'genuine illness,' a 'real physical problem' whose cause is at base a physical one" (Martin, 1992, p. 113). In this they are only following the scientific texts, which argue that at least twenty-five percent, or even a hundred percent of women experience "emotional disturbance" (Fausto-Sterling, no date, p. 96). Assuming this is true, it is
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