Quickies

Quickies: PMS, LGBT atheists, girls playing D&D, and maternity leave

Amanda

Amanda works in healthcare, is a loudmouthed feminist, and proud supporter of the Oxford comma.

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5 Comments

  1. I do enjoy me some Cordelia Fine debunking. Even if we ignore the excellent points she makes about premenstrual syndrome and early human relationships, you would think this hypothesis is easily disproved. Women who are pregnant are much more likely to suffer from the negative emotional effects of hormones. If cave-lady’s being a little cranky from bloating were enough to scare off the cave-gents, pregnant stereotype cave-lady crying out of the blue and demanding pickles and mammoth-milk ice cream at 3 am would send him running.

  2. On the D&D thing, I can’t believe there are really still people still saying women aren’t interested in that.

    1. Oh, you’d be surprised the nerdy things men can’t imagine women enjoying.

      How would PMS make women only unbearable to infertile men? That…doesn’t make any sense.

      1. As I understand it, with a fertile man, the woman would be perpetually pregnant* (or nursing), thus suppressing her insufferable PMS.**

        [*] and barefoot and in the cave-kitchen, making mammoth sandwiches.
        [**] isn’t it another tenet of evo-psych that insanity is inherited from one’s children? With lots of kids, wouldn’t she be unbearable 24 by 7 by 365, not just a few days each month? Think it through, people!***
        [***] this paleo-evo-psych stuff always reminds me of a bad episode of the Flintstones.

  3. When humans evolved, the difficult part of reproduction was not getting pregnant, it was having a child not die before age 5 due to infection.

    Over evolutionary time, the average woman had 2 children survive and reproduce. We know that because if the average was slightly higher (2.1 for example), over a few hundred generations the population would have reached levels we know did not happen. (1.05)^500 = 4×10^10.

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