Menstruation disorder

This is a bit of a follow-up to one of the links I posted yesterday. My favorite quote:

Hundreds of researchers have tried unsuccessfully to prove that women are more likely to have mood problems premenstrually than at other times. University of British Columbia researcher Christine Hitchcock says, “Something like half of women say they have premenstrual problems, but when you ask them to keep daily ratings of their moods, the data don’t reflect that.” Another study showed that men identified PMDD symptoms in themselves as commonly as women did.

I’m always a little bit on the fence with stuff like this, because I have known some women who get knocked the fuck down by their periods. I also know that during my period, I am likely to burst into tears over something trivial at least once.

On the other hand, if I am busy at work, and if I have just had a fight with a friend, and if the house needs cleaning, and then something trivial happens, I am also likely to burst into tears at least once. It seems, to me, to have more to do with being taxed than being bloody; that is, getting all bloody and cramped is awfully taxing, and piles that extra little bit of luggage onto the rest of life. And the women I know who get knocked the fuck down are down with physical symptoms; literally, they are bleeding too much to get out of bed. Which has a predictable effect on one’s mood.

I am also kind of on the fence because I have conflicting feelings about the DSM. Classifying disorders has a lot of advantages, which I won’t get into because it’s a whole nother post; the classification process, however, requires a lot of boneheads and douchebags to weigh in with erudite opinions on the homogay vaginae. But really now. When you classify a disorder that literally half the population on earth suffers from, you probably need to redefine what you mean by “disorder.” Maybe it’s not normal, or natural. Maybe the ladyparts aren’t supposed to be so long-suffering. Well, you know, maybe we should have been sea apes, and walking on land or watching television is unique and horrible in all the world. But it’s what we do, as a whole, as a group, as a species, so maybe it’s not sick anymore.

This all reminds me of what my abnormal psychology teacher told me about sociopathy. You may not know it, but there’s no DSM entry for sociopathy. There are diagnostic tests for it, and doctors can talk about treating it, but officially, it’s not a disorder. And it never will be. Because if we were to take this group of symptoms — little to no care or compassion for others, a belief that the “rules” do not apply to oneself, an inability to empathize, aggressiveness — and call it a sickness, we would not have a single healthy CEO or politician left in all the world. Sociopathy, despite what we think of it when it leads to people like Ted Bundy, represents a set of characteristics we envy and consider strong and good and right. These are characteristics that are compatible with what we define as success.

And, I’ll take it that extra step: the characteristics that make up sociopathy are characteristics we define as ideal masculine traits. This is not to say this is how men are, only how we ask them to act if they want to be called men. To whit, one diagnostic test for sociopathy, which helps gauge empathy and caring behaviors (or lack of them), has a significantly higher threshold for women. That is, on a scale of 1 to 100 (100 being very empathic), if a man scores below a certain number, he’s considered to have so little empathy he could be a sociopath. To be considered a potential sociopath, women must score below a much higher number, because whether or not a woman is actually empathic, she’ll have been trained to exhibit more empathic behaviors, because empathy is considered appropriate to her gender.

What I’m saying is, there are two disorders here that affect such a large number of our population that it belies the meaning of “disorder,” a term that indicates an abnormality. Two disorders that seem to call a majority of the world “abnormal” — which, the last time I boarded the logic train, really makes “abnormal” the new “normal.” The disorder that pathologizes women gets a green light. The disorder that pathologizes men gets a movie industry, and a bailout.