The XX Factor

There's a lot to chew over in Esquire's forthcoming profile of Brad Pitt, including his admission that his drug use during his marriage to Jennifer Aniston got out of control. But one of the most striking revelations in the profile comes from Frank Pollaro, a friend of Pitt's who collaborated with him on a furniture line. Since he began his relationship with fellow mega-star Angelina Jolie, Pollaro explains, Pitt's done something unusual. As the New York Daily News reports, Pollaro told Esquire, "This is a guy who has tried not to do any sexy scenes with other women since he's met Angelina. He's crazy about her, and she's the same way about him."

It's not exactly unusual for Hollywood couples to get jealous of their partners' on-screen love scenes. Lisa Rinna has tweeted about getting jealous when her husband, Harry Hamlin, is shooting sex scenes. Patricia Arquette wouldn't watch then-husband Thomas Jane in Hung, the show in which he played a gym-teacher-turned prostitute. Eve McGregor has said that being pregnant while her husband Ewan was filming sex scenes with Kelly Macdonald for Trainspotting was exceptionally difficult. Of course, many actors have learned to manage the painful emotions brought on by watching a loved one love someone else on screen. Rarer are the actors who have decided to spare their significant other that misery entirely.

Though Pitt's been known more for action roles in recent years, early in his career he was famous for sex scenes in movies like Thelma and Louise (which he later called "discombobulating"), Meet Joe Black, Fight Club, and of course, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in which he starred with Jolie. Hollywood math dictates that Pitt could have kept playing romantic roles pretty much forever—and kept playing them opposite actresses in their twenties. But Pitt also has action roles and, increasingly, comedic chops to fall back on. Not to mention that he’s dabbled in Serious Acting roles for films like Tree of Life and Moneyball.

Has Jolie reciprocated her partner’s vow? It’s hard to say: The actress has appeared nude in a number of movies since she began seeing Pitt in 2005, including Wanted and Beowulf. Yet she hasn't done a sex scene since Mr. and Mrs. Smith (on whose set the relationship supposedly began.) A shower sex scene was originally included in the script for 2010’s The Tourist, but it was reportedly cut at the request of co-star Johnny Depp's then-partner, Vanessa Paradis. 

Good for Pitt for being so sensitive to the needs of his relationship (although the gesture seems oddly fussy for a pair of professional thespians.) That said, as an A-list actor, he can better afford the luxury of turning down roles than most older actresses. The majority of roles for women in the top 100 grossing movies released in the United States in 2012 were for characters 39 or younger. Even actresses with similar profiles to Pitt's—mega-stars in presumably high demand—have continued to do sex scenes. Kate Winslet shot sex scenes for both Revolutionary Road and The Reader. Julia Roberts got in bed with Bryan Cranston in Larry Crowne. And Charlize Theron has done sex scenes in a significant number of her movies, from serial killer drama Monster to Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman's Young Adult. Maybe substantive, juicy roles for women are simply more likely to include sex, whether it’s because audiences enjoy seeing attractive actresses naked or because great female parts usually revolve around domestic life and relationships. In any case, it’s hard to completely divorce Pitt’s promise from the privilege that makes such a move possible.  

Pitt's gesture of respect for Jolie may be good for their family. And it might be good for him creatively, too, helping him leave behind his early status as man-candy, without going the overly dour route that Leonardo DiCaprio chose to walk. But it's also a reminder that, compared to many actresses in his position, he's got the option to turn down certain kinds of work, in full confidence that there will be other parts out there for him.

Earlier this week, Slate’s "Dear Prudence," Emily Yoffe, featured a letter from a young attorney who was seething with resentment because many co-workers in her law firm regularly left the office early. Their explanation? They had children and needed to tend to them. “These co-workers often acknowledge that they're being unfair,” the attorney writes, “but state that ‘when’ I have kids I'll get to leave early, too.”

I get annoyed when the kid card is played. As a working parent who for years struggled to juggle my professional obligations with my parental ones, I’ve paid baby sitters to stay late (and forgone other things to do that), used vacation time to attend grade-school graduations, and traded off early departures with other co-workers (not all of them parents) so my husband and I could go to awards ceremonies, etc.

Of course, as Prudie’s answer noted, parents may well return to work via their laptops after dinner is over and the kids are tucked in. Still, I empathize with the young attorney who regularly looks up to see them leaving because “I have kids.”

Not everyone does. Not everyone wants to. Not everyone can or should. But they may have other people they need to look after or projects they need to complete. Perhaps they share the care of an elderly parent or grandparent. Or maybe they’re taking graduate courses to better position themselves in a competitive market. Or swing dancing, for God’s sake, just because they want to.

The point is that children, like a lot of other delightful things in life, are usually a choice. And the decision to have them implies that you’re willing to make adjustments and that the world doesn’t adapt to your needs all the time. Cutting back on your social life, for example, is an option. Cutting back on obligations that allow you to support a child you chose to have is not.

I’ve worked on holidays and over weekends so parents can spend time with their children, in the interest of equity and to be a good co-worker. But I’ve also had colleagues argue that they should get every Christmas off “because I have children.”

People without children have lives that are as legitimate and that they cherish as much as people who have children. This unwavering entitlement—I need time off; I have to have this holiday; I need to leave a half-hour before everyone else does, every day—kills office morale. (And obviously this doesn’t apply to emergencies.)

A family-friendly workplace can be a wonderful thing, but there is more than one way to have or to be family. And the quality of life for people without children shouldn’t be affected because someone is pulling the kid card.

If it’s a day that ends in y, there must be a horrible and obnoxious trend in child-rearing for which we must scold parents mercilessly. (Let me check my calendar. Yup.) The latest “outrage,” courtesy of the New York Post and Lindy West at Jezebel, is that rich parents at fancy New York private schools are—quelle horreur—sending their nannies to school events in their stead.

Now, I enjoy hammering obnoxious rich people as much as the rest of the middle class. I was horrified to learn about the thriving business of renting out handicapped people to be personal FastPasses at Disney World. But sending the nanny to the bake sale? That’s inspired.

I don’t have a nanny (I have my mom), and my kids are in a (fabulous) suburban public school, not Horace Mann or the Birch Wathen Lenox School. But, aside from our widely disparate tax brackets, I can totally relate to these parents. The entire month of May for parents of school-age children is a scheduling obstacle course. There are field trips and fun days and field days (yes, those are all different things). There are carnivals and class plays and preschool graduations. Just when you’ve run through the figurative tires and climbed the wall and swung across the monkey bars—Bam! Out of nowhere comes the swinging punching bag of a late-announced class presentation or assembly to broadside you.

May is the most extreme example, at least on my family’s calendar, but the school year is filled with such events. It’s getting to be too much. I love chaperoning the preschool field trip to the zoo, and the quality time I get spending one morning in class with my kindergartener is far more memorable than the 50 emails I miss at work while I’m there. But parents—especially working parents—can’t possibly be at every event.

The Post quotes a woman named Amanda Uhry of Manhattan Private School Advisors as saying, “They’re sending nannies for bake sales, book clubs, for the ice-skating group. Parents can’t be bothered two days a year for an hour.”

Hahahahahahahah. Uhry’s own examples give lie to her claim that parents are needed “two days a year for an hour.” Bake sales? Book clubs? The ice-skating group? The article adds that paid employees are also “working fund-raisers, designing sets for school plays and taking seats at graduations and public performances.” Why are parents designing sets for school plays? Isn’t that what the art teacher does?

There are disturbing examples of parents sending in the help for entrance interviews and parent-teacher conferences. One might ask why parents can’t see a difference between an entrance interview and a bake sale. An equally good question: Why can’t the school itself see that difference?

In her Jezebel post, West extrapolates that parents who send the nanny to the occasional fundraiser are “outsourcing absolutely all parental duties” and asks, “Why bother having children if you never want to see or speak to them?” It’s almost not worth addressing, but … really? In this day and age, parents spend half their time worried that they’re underparenting (thanks Jezebel!), and half their time worried that they’re overparenting (usually in the car on the way to schlep someone to a practice or game or recital). I can’t speak for the 1 percenters who send their kids to Horace Mann, but among my parenting cohort, I can say that our evenings and weekends are pretty full to the brim with kid time. We play in the yard or go to the zoo/museum/rec center, at least when there are no baseball games/basketball games/swim meets. We get a sitter, if we’re lucky, once a month. And when those nights roll around, the kids are usually pretty excited to be rid of us. Something tells me they wouldn’t even notice if we skipped the bake sale.

Feminist concern with representations of women in comic books and video games is hardly a new thing, nor is it always greeted with support—just ask Anita Sarkeesian, whose Tropes Vs Women has inspired intense backlash from territorial gamers. But as more and more women enter these previously male-dominated fields, the possibility of feminists effecting change from within the industry has, logically, skyrocketed. Take the case of Meteor Entertainment/Adhesive Games, where a female employee recently punked her boss, and with outstanding results.

Meteor Entertainment is the creator of the free-to-play mech game Hawken, in which users build their own virtual robots and use them to fight other users’ robots. But the tale of the master prank actually begins with a tumblr called The Hawkeye Initiative.

Founded on December 2, 2012, this project creates and solicits original art that addresses the over-sexualization of women in comics by replacing them with a male hero—Marvel's master archer Hawkeye—standing in the same pose. (Moviegoers may know Hawkeye from Jeremy Renner's hotsy-totsy portrayal in The Avengers.) A manly man with super strength and agility, Hawkeye posed as, say, Black Cat from The Amazing Spiderman makes a powerful visual point: that comic book women's costumes, body shapes, and poses undercut their superpowers by overemphasizing their sexuality.

A Meteor employee and fan of the Initiative, who goes by the handle K2, was disgruntled by prominently displayed office art of a scantily-clad woman. (K2 dubbed the woman "Ruby Underboob.") She conspired with co-worker and artist Sam Kirk to change out the poster with one of a man, equally sexualized and equally naked. And thus was born "Brosie the Riveter."

Luckily for our merry mischief makers, Meteor CEO Mark Long loved it. In fact, he copped not just to having sexual art around the office, but also to contributing to the creation of that art. He wrote in an email: "I didn't just hang the picture on the wall. I collaborated on the design with the artist. He and I came up with the Rosie idea. The underboob is pretty much all my fault. Since then, I've learned about The Hawkeye Initiative and the larger gender-flip meme going on in comics and games, which is righteous and transgressive. I'm a dumbass, but at least now I know I'm a dumbass!" He and his employees are now in an "open dialogue about gender in comics and gaming."

K2 told XX Factor, “I'm glad to see awareness of the gender-flipping meme spreading. I hope and expect to see a lot more of it, and other innovations on the theme, too. There's more than one right way to do this. The Hawkeye Initiative has put out a call to action for more real-world plays in the gender equality space. The more—and the more real-world—the better.”

K2 is also collecting stories of action on the tumblr GenderShenanigans.

All too often, Internet feminism of the kind practiced by The Hawkeye Initiative preaches to the choir, rarely resulting in or even aiming for concrete outcomes. In the case of Meteor Entertainment and their intrepid employees, though, the idea behind The Hawkeye Initiative produced tangible results. That’s my kind of feminism.

On Monday, 184 couples got hitched in a mass marriage ceremony in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. But what made the day special wasn't the collective pledge to love, honor and respect. To obtain a license to wed, the local government had asked prospective grooms to submit photos of themselves posing with their indoor latrine.

This unusual move was the latest push in a national drive to improve sanitation; past efforts had included subsidies, public shaming, rewards for those who reported public defecators, and even fining town drunks to raise money for a communal toilet. But despite the government's grandiose claims to have installed 87 million commodes in villages within the past decade, India's 2011 census told a different story. According to the results, fewer than half of Indian households had a toilet in their home; of those, a much smaller percent were connected to a working sewage system. By way of comparison, nearly two of every three Indians, or roughly 800 million people, owned a mobile phone.

The lack of lavatories is particularly troublesome for women and girls. A 2011 report by SHARE, a sanitation and hygiene research project funded by the UK Department for International Development, drew a link between a lack of sanitation facilities and sexual violence against women. According to the report, girls younger than 10 had been raped on their way to use the public toilet. In one Delhi slum, boys hid inside the stalls at night, waiting to rape anyone who entered. Earlier this month in Bihar, one of India's poorest states, where only 15 percent of rural families have access to toilets, a senior police officer spoke to the BBC of a "worrisome trend": young girls and women being raped as they relieved themselves in the fields. The officer went on to estimate that 400 women might not have been raped last year had they had access to a toilet in their homes.

Given this context, we can only hope that the government's latest campaign, "No Toilet, No Bride," succeeds where others have not. Last year, India's minister for rural development urged parents not only to consult with astrologers when considering marriage for their daughters, per local custom, but also to ask whether their new husbands’ homes would have the proper facilities. In response, several states rolled out local initiatives to up toilet usage in their districts.

In the state of Madhya Pradesh, where Monday's wedding took place, the local government has developed a scheme to marry off women and tackle sanitation in one go. As part of a program called Mukhyamantri Kanyadan Yojana (MKY), the state will pay for the mass ceremony and provide qualifying couples with housewarming gifts totaling 15,000 rupees (about $270). But to qualify, a groom must provide evidence of the toilet, specifically a signed affidavit and pictures of himself with the family crown. (If one doesn't yet exist, he must prove his intent to install one within 30 days of the wedding.) Not only is MKY a hit, but officials say that, this year alone, almost 1,800 couples have already wed under the program, according to the Wall Street Journal. Local photo shops are reporting a similar uptick in business as husbands-to-be rush to print the pictures taken from, not surprisingly, their mobile phones.

Liberal blogs and, of course, public radio are up in arms over this story about an Oregon woman who was raped because, due to massive budget cuts, there were no cops available to take her panicked phone call to the police. The rape occurred last August in Josephine County, a rural district that responded to the loss of millions of dollars in federal subsidies by firing 23 of its 29 police deputies and restricting the remnant’s availability to Mondays through Fridays. (The woman placed her call on a Saturday.) It's a very sad tale—and one wrapped up in the waning of the logging industry, which the original subsidy was designed to support—but I advise readers to be careful and hold on to their wallets, because the people peddling it have an agenda. This is what those big government types do, you see: Tug at your heartstrings and get you into an emotional place so that they can lure you into voting to raise taxes for more government spending. Well, I for one am not fooled. 

Look, no one is for rape. But that doesn't mean the nanny state tax-and-spend solution is the answer. A government handout—for law enforcement or otherwise—just, to quote Rep. Paul Ryan, "lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency."  All this feminist hand-waving about rape is really just about turning women into victims hooked on federal aid. Real feminists want women to be strong and pick themselves up by their bootstraps, instead of living their lives depending on things like police showing up to your house when you call 911.

I have three words for you women who don't want rapists breaking into your house: Get. A. Job. That way, you can earn money and pay for a private security firm to guard your house while you sleep. That's the sort of private enterprise and self-reliance that this country was built on. Government is absolutely terrible at job creation, after all. If they restored those federal funds to Josephine County, where the rape took place, or passed the public safety levy that the patriotic conservative voters rejected, how many cops would they have hired? Ten? Twenty? Even if they hired 100 police officers, that's fewer jobs created than if every household in the county hired a private security officer to prevent rapists from getting into their houses. 

For those who scoff at the old-fashioned American free market approach to personal security, I recommend the wise words from the Josephine County sheriff's office: "Consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services." Exactly. I recommend France, where they love this wooly-headed socialist nonsense. 

A new report released this week from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that Facebook remains the leading social network among American teenagers. It’s also the most reviled. While some teenagers interviewed by Pew claimed they “enjoyed using it,” the majority complained of “an increasing adult presence, high-pressure or otherwise negative social interactions (‘drama’), or feeling overwhelmed by others who share too much.”

In other words, Facebook—as any adult with a profile knows—feels a lot like high school. “I think Facebook can be fun, but also it's drama central,” one 14-year-old girl said. “On Facebook, people imply things and say things, even just by a ‘like,’ that they wouldn't say in real life." Said another, “It's so competitive to get the most likes [on a Facebook picture]. It's like your social position.” Ninety-four percent of American teenagers maintain a Facebook profile, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it. “Honestly,” one 15-year-old girl told Pew, “I'm on it constantly but I hate it so much.” 

If Facebook is high school, other social media platforms can function as opportunities to escape from Facebook's pervasive social structure—the online equivalent to cutting class and hanging out beneath the bleachers. “While ‘drama’ is the result of normal teenage dynamics rather than anything specific to Facebook, teens are sometimes resentful toward Facebook from this negative association,” Pew reports. Online spaces outside of Facebook—all of which attract just a fraction of Facebook’s teen user base—become places “where teens seek out spaces free of adults, and teens who want to avoid the drama of teenage life try to inhabit alternative social spaces.”

On Instagram, which is used by 11 percent of teenagers, “people tend to not come off so mean,” one 13-year-old girl told Pew. “Because all they really want is for people [to] like their photos.” And the medium can influence the message: Instagram is perceived as a supportive environment, but on Facebook, “if they say something mean, it hurts more.” Twitter (used by 26 percent of teens) can help cut through the drama of Facebook because “there's only so much you can say,” one 18-year-old boy said. “On Facebook, they say so many details of things that you don't want to know.” Snapchat (which Pew didn’t collect subscription rates for) can help relieve teenagers of the identity maintenance pressures of Facebook, which logs users’ photos and comments for instant recall. Said one 13-year-old, “it's better because I could pick the most embarrassing photo, and know that they'll see it for 10 seconds, and then I'm done.” And Tumblr (5 percent of teens) helps teenagers detach entirely from Facebook’s imposed social structure: “I like Tumblr because I don’t have to present a specific or false image of myself and I don’t have to interact with people I don’t necessarily want to talk to,” one 15-year-old girl said.  

One 16-year-old boy told Pew that he signed up for Twitter because “everyone’s saying Facebook’s dead.” But despite reports of a mass exodus, most people aren't leaving. In fact, teen Facebook usage climbed one percentage point between 2011 and 2012. Facebook is the living dead: the most popular, least relevant social network where teenagers and adults alike gather out of fear of missing out on things that don't even make them happy. Facebook is "a major center of teenage social interactions, both with the positives of friendship and social support and the negatives of drama and social expectations," Pew reports. And without it, what would they make fun of on Tumblr?

Where do you even start with Barbie? Few toys inspire such feminist gnashing of teeth as the 11 ½-inch plastic doll, with her blindingly white skin, impossible figure, and fathomless wardrobe. And now her Dreamhouse tourist attraction has descended, like the hut from the Baba Yaga story, on Berlin, where it’s been greeted by topless protestors waving burning crosses and men ironically dressed in pink skirts and blond wigs. “Occupy Barbie’s Dreamhouse,” they cry, condemning the doll for promoting consumerism, narcissism and unhealthy body ideals. Their placards—and torsos—are scrawled with slogans like “Pink stinks!” “I will free you from the horror house,” and “Life in plastic is not fantastic.”

It’s easy to sympathize with the 99 percent here: The Barbie Dreamhouse Experience, which opened its doors last Thursday in the middle of grey Alexanderplatz, is a 26,900-square foot shrine to all things pink, shimmery and superficial. Inside, kids can “bake” virtual cupcakes on touch screens (Is it worse that it’s virtual baking or that it’s cupcakes?), lust after Barbie’s shoe collection, loll around in stiletto-shaped chairs, work a catwalk, or lip-sync pop tunes on a karaoke stage. Why, you might ask, can young visitors only choose careers such as “pop star” and “supermodel?” “Pretending to be an engineer is a hard concept for a four or six-year-old to play out,” Mattel’s Stephanie Cota told the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, demonstrators called the exhibition a “seemingly endless walk-in closet.”

In defense of this feminist’s nightmare, the house’s advocates have marshaled the language of fantasy and play. “I feel sorry about how some people interpret our giant pink playground,” said Christoph Rahofer, of EMS Entertainment, which co-created the dreamhouse experience. Even Michael Koschitzki, a member of the demonstrating youth group affiliated to Germany’s far-left party, die Linke, felt the need to hedge, “Our protest is not directed towards little girls and their dreams.”

Perish the thought. I won’t waste your time running through all the reasons why the Barbie dream in particular is so perverse—the layers of racism, materialism, vanity, body insecurity, and passivity billowing around it like so much gauze—but I would like to challenge the idea that anyone today can get away with anything simply by invoking that hallowed word: dream. We cannot reject Barbie’s ridiculous mansion, we infer, because doing so would trample on little girls’ dreams. It would poison their play. The defense of the Dreamhouse is built into its name, as if any attempt to speak out against it would necessarily crush the tender shoots of youthful imagination under a big slab of adult agenda.

Look, I get the gossamer loveliness of dreams, the bigness of them. I swoon for Keats and Gatsby and am getting weepy just thinking about the gorgeous rebuttals that will probably appear in this post’s comment section: In Praise of Dreaming, Dreams Make Us Human, etc. But despite what they tell you, a dream is not the same as a plan or a vision or an aspiration. It is the ultimate in passivity, something visited upon you while you are asleep. Or it’s what a princess does as she gazes out the window and waits for her happy ending. Do we need to telegraph to girls that the be-all and end-all of their young lives is spinning out beautiful mental pictures that have no basis in reality? Because, ultimately, that’s where the dreaming defense gets its juice: It’s a way of assuring critics, “this isn’t real, it’s nothing to worry about, it’s just a game.” (“Baking a digital cupcake on a touch screen in the Dreamhouse kitchen won’t confine you to stand by an oven for the rest of your life,” insists Rahofer.) But if Barbie’s proportions, celebrity and overall way of being aren’t attainable, then why dangle them in front of girls’ faces in the first place? Why invite tourists into the glowing pink rooms with the endless shoes and the runways and the sugary treats that never get eaten? (This is a rhetorical question: The answer is $29 tickets and a gigantic gift shop.)

I have a modest fantasy in which Mattel and co. stop using the word “dream” as their get-out-of-jail free card. But while it’s a pleasant thought and good imaginative exercise, sometimes you need more than fantasy. Sometimes you need to wake up and get to work.

In a piece for the May 20 issue of The New Yorker, The Mindy Project creator and The Office veteran Mindy Kaling writes about one of her favorite parts of her job as an actress, particularly in a role where her character is dating a lot. She gets to kiss people, particularly those who might be otherwise unavailable for smooching because they are married. She says:

The problem is, kissing is no longer appreciated as a satisfying end in itself, as an inviting pair of lips and, possibly, a tongue, to interact with for a delightful moment. No. Kissing has now been cheapened into the nominal gateway gesture to sex. Kissing is to sexual intercourse as the phrase “Can I talk to you for a second?” is to a full-blown screaming fight.

She argues that we should take kissing less seriously so we can enjoy it more. “The fact of the matter is, marriage is a serious business and kissing is not. Just because I want to kiss someone doesn’t mean I want to love that person, share a bed with him, remind him to take his Lipitor, tell him not to use so much salt, or share one AOL e-mail account,” she explains. But her point about kissing as an act independent of sex actually argues for taking lip-locking more seriously in pop culture.

Sex is an awfully hard thing to choreograph in film and television. Some of the challenge comes from the simple limits of what you can show, whether you're trying to make sure your movie falls under a certain ratings threshold, or because you need your episode to get past network Standards and Practices. (Red Widow creator Melissa Rosenberg once told me that ABC wouldn't allow any thrusting during heterosexual sex scenes.) And some of the problem is that we all like different things during sex. It can be hard to pick an act, position, or choreography that gets everyone in your audience hot.

But you can show all of a kiss. More so than a hug, which can be platonic, or the taking of a hand, which can fizzle, a kiss is a gateway that can lead to disappointment, sex, or even just more kissing. No matter how old you get, in a new relationship, a first kiss is a ritual of excitement and anxiety. This isn't to say that sex doesn't elicit all of these same emotions, or open up similar questions about compatibility, trust, and emotional longevity. But kisses are where it all begins. So maybe it's time to take Kaling's advice to appreciate kissing for what it is. And whether a kiss is scot-free or the start of a life-long commitment, pop culture could get sexier and more romantic by focusing on what it can display—rather than bemoaning what has to stay off-screen.

In all the controversy over the new DSM-5, it was inevitable that a long-standing fight over premenstrual syndrome would be revived. Eighty-five percent of women claim to have suffered from this disorder, but repeated research shows there's actually no relationship between daily moods and shifting monthly hormone levels. The debate is nothing new. In her classic 1993 feminist text The Mismeasure of Woman, Carol Tavris argued that the idea of PMS persists because it gives women an excuse to express anger and irritation in a culture that expects them to be unendingly cheerful and pleasant. (It also panders to the belief that women are irrational victims of their own hormones.) Being able to blame your socially incorrect emotions on chemical shifts is intoxicating: Tavris showed that even when confronted with evidence that menstruation doesn't affect mood, "Many women are highly resistant to the evidence that their beliefs and expectations about PMS might be influencing their symptoms."

But PMS is increasingly understood as a "culture-bound syndrome," a disease of societal expectations, not biological influences. Psychologist Joan Chrisler spelled it out bluntly in 2002: "It's convenient for women to use this … . The discourse is me, not me, my real self, my PMS self. It allows you to hold onto a view of yourself as a good mother who doesn't lose her temper."

Culture-bound syndromes can vary wildly, and some of them are really weird to outsiders. Parts of West and Central Africa have epidemics of men who believe that their penises have been stolen. As with PMS, the distress to the sufferer is entirely real, even though the empirical evidence demonstrates that there isn't a biological source for the suffering. Other examples include the dhat syndrome in India, the Native American “ghost sickness” and the Korean “fire illness.” 

Of course, referring to problems like penis-stealing or PMS as culture-bound syndromes may well convince sufferers that they are being dismissed. But research shows that women who self-identify as suffering from PMS and who take active steps to reduce stress, avoid unnecessary conflict, and set aside time for themselves start to feel better. Hot baths and minimizing your contact with difficult people is a good idea, it seems, regardless of whether you blame your bad mood on impending menses or a lousy day at work.