PMS as a feminist issue
The Happy Feminist has a really good post called Pre-Menstrual Syndrome: a Confusing Springboard to Prejudice. She does a really good job of out-lining some of the politics of the way PMS is issues involved, but to me it's clear it's from the perspective of someone who has never had serious symptoms before or during menstruation. I wanted to write a little bit from the perspective of someone who has had both mild and severe symptoms at various stages of my life.
Most of The Happy Feminist's points are about the number of women who don't have pre-menstrual symptoms as the media portrays them. I understand why a lot of feminist analysis of premenstrual problems emphasise on the fact that many women don't have any symptoms associated with menstruation, and the majority don't have severe symptoms. PMS is often used as an excuse to discriminate against women. But I feel that this defence often gives up too much ground, it feels like conceding that discrimination against people who are suffering from severe symptoms would be reasonable, and that nothing can be done for those who have symptoms.
Most jokes about premenstrual symptoms are referring to psychological symptoms, not physical ones. I don't have severe physical symptoms myself, but I did have severe and unrelenting psychological symptoms for 3 or 4 years. Depression, Anxiety, absent-mindedness, and dizzyness would last one week out of four if I was lucky and two weeks out of four if I wasn't.
It's difficult to have a medical condition which is fodder for mediocre comedians everywhere. It's hard when your friends are telling jokes about it. It's harder still when no-one can tell that you have it, because you're certainly not going to tell them after they've made some stupid joke. The derision with which PMS is treated makes it that much harder to live with.
And live with it we have to, individual women have to learn to deal with whatever symptoms they have pretty much alone. There's often sympathy from other women, and some women may get support from men, but generally you're the one with the symptoms and the point is to make sure that they don't bother anyone else. This is true on both a structural level - 5 days sick leave doesn't go very far divided by 12, but also on an individual level. I was barely functioning up to half my life, but I worked so hard to make sure that that no-one else would notice. That's the point of most of the jokes, of course, making fun of women who dare to let menstruation get in the way of men's lives.
Then there's the medical problem with PMS, which is that no-one seems to give a shit. I once had a doctor tell me that there used to be quite a lot of interest in PMS, but then they found out that Prozac worked, so they stopped bothering (I only wish I was exaggerating). No looking at the root causes, no attempt to turn it from a syndrome into something we actually understand and can dilineate - once a drug company was making some money out of it that solves that problem.
I think it's fantastic that some people can make things easier by taking the pill, and others can make things easier by taking prozac. I found the root cause to my problems (it was dairy products - I'd been intolerant for years and I hadn't known it), but I did it by myself. I read many different books, I tried many different things, and finally stumbled on something that worked. That's not good enough, we need to find out what's going on and how we can change it.
PMS needs to be treated like any other medical condition or disability - and all medical conditions and disabilities should be treated better. There needs to be support and resources for people whose bodies don't work the same way every day of the month, until we can find out why it happens, and how to stop it.
