It Was a Hard Blow for Me as a Therapist and Feminist When I Realized Hormones Do Affect Us
I’m a second-wave feminist, a therapist, and someone who had a rocky peri-menopause and menopause, followed by a relatively peaceful post-menopause. Maybe you can relate. We second-wave feminists fought for most of the civil and human rights women have in the U.S. and Europe today. In doing so, part of the narrative we embraced is that hormone fluctuations do not affect women. At all. This narrative was in response to the decades of patriarchal arguments and jokes about women, their fluctuating hormones, and having women be in charge while under the influence of their hormones. You’ve probably heard them. Here’s one from as recently as 2008.Never mind that Hillary, like me, was well past PMS by 2008. Even if she hadn’t been, Gloria Steinem has a great quote for that: “If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn’t it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?” — Gloria Steinem Post-menopausal women must then be either the most rational and stable of all women, or they behave like men behave all the time. Which negates the superfluous and spurious “argument” against the Hillary Clinton presidency. To say nothing of the unstable totalitarian male wannabe we did elect. Male comedians and political pundits aren’t the only ones that joke about women’s hormones. I’ve made a joke about it as well. When I read that peri-menopausal and menopausal women should stay away from caffeine and alcohol I quipped, “Just try prying wine and coffee out of our cold, sweaty hands and live to…
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