Stop calling me crazy just because I’m on my period

PMS. It’s probably something we’ve all heard of. Either we think we’ve had it, we know a female that gets a bit cranky roughly once a month, or we’ve been guilty of saying ‘oh it must be her time of the month’.

It is true, admittedly, that women’s emotions can go a little mad around the time of their period. The word hysteria actually comes from the Greek word for womb, so whether we like it or not, craziness is linked to women, even on a subconscious level.  I will be the first to admit that once every four weeks I have immense cravings for anything that resembles chocolate and will not cease until I have found that, turning me into a sort of crazed chocolate monster. Others can get the typical PMS you see on TV. But that doesn’t mean that we can, or should, be labelled as crazy in general. I think the fact that we can openly express our emotions instead of bottling them means we are not crazy; we are actually very sensible.

But it does piss me off when, if I get a little passionate about something, somebody snidely says ‘oh she must be on her period’. No. Maybe I just think you’re wrong, and I don’t appreciate sexist comments brushing my opinion under the carpet.

This is something I, and I’m guessing a lot of other girls, experience quite a lot. That time I was the only one doing any work in the group project, got a little angry and someone pipes in with a ‘is it that time of the month?’. Or the time I’d been having a really bad day and then spilt yogurt all over my skirt, ended up crying, and then teacher asks whether you need to go to the nurse for anything? Or even, if I’m right and someone else is wrong and me sticking up for what I believe means it’s ‘that time of the month’.

But why does it happen? I mean, obviously, men don’t have periods, which is quite an obvious reason as to why they don’t get this. But men can be crazy too.  Psychologically, humans react to internal factors. So, if somebody is crying we may naturally jump to the conclusion that they are an emotional, crazy person on their period, rather than maybe their cat has just died. So, as men, for the most part, tend to conceal their emotions, women are the ones who appear to be ‘crazy’.

‘attn:’ recently published a video called ‘don’t be so quick to call a woman crazy’. This, I think, promotes exactly the right message: that you can’t just call a woman crazy and use her period as an excuse. It’s not fair, and it manages to belittle women even if it’s a joke. The video also revealed some recent research which suggests that only 15 per cent of women actually get “PMS” and that every day events trigger emotional responses. So the ‘oh it must be her time of the month’ is a pretty invalid response.

Does it really matter that sometimes people jokingly say ‘oh must be her time of the month’? Well, yes it does. It snubs out women’s opinions, and labels them as crazy and therefore untrustworthy. And it allows women not to be equal to men. I’m not trying to kill off the world of friendly banter, but I’m trying to show that sometimes calling a girl crazy because she happens to have a womb is both inaccurate and completely belittling. So please, don’t ‘remind’ girls they’re on they periods anymore, they know anyway.