It must be hard to be a dude living with PMS. All of the crazy, the constant screechy abuse swirling around your immediate environment. But you put up with it, you try to smooth it out, to make it tolerable, because who else is going to satisfy you sexually if not that tornado of a woman you call your partner? Dudes have got to tough it out. The Got Milk? guys know exactly where you're coming from.

Or at least that's what their latest ad campaign would have you believe. Its website, entitled Everything I Do is Wrong, sympathizes with these poor victims. Because there's nothing worse than observing a hormonal trainwreck from the outside, am I right? Women, man. Can't live with or without. Luckily, milk alleviates the symptoms of the lady-crazy (allegedly--or not). So feed your woman dairy and you'll be good to go.

We've seen this kind of advertising rhetoric before, where women are screeching, irrational harpies and men their sympathetic victims. Somehow, in the thousands of years that humans have been around, we still haven't gotten over the fact that hormone levels--and sometimes moods--change throughout a menstrual cycle. We still love the idea of the uncontrollable bitch. It still sells products, even something so commonplace as milk. 

Maybe it's all in good fun. But the idea of women as undesirable (but ultimately necessary) living partners just doesn't seem to want to die. Ad campaigns still love to paint us as inherently crazy on a level that men can't even fathom. 

Yes, PMS can give you sucky moods. Personally, I'm a lot weepier pre-bleed than at any other time. Most women I know who get PMS symptoms just kind of get sad--sometimes depressed to the point of needing medication. I've had friends who've developed some pretty nasty menstruation-related conditions, like painful ovarian cysts, that were so bad they had to go on hormonal birth control just to stop them. But those are pretty solid medical states, not an unidentifiable, uncontrollable "crazy" like these ads love to suggest.

It's been a while since the term "hysteria" was thrown around to describe purported female madness, but from ads like this, it's pretty clear the concept is more or less intact. Depicting women as being less mentally sound than men for their mysterious biological functions ("hysteria" comes from the word for uterus, after all) helps the patriarchy subjugate women to a place where they're expected to be less rational, less capable. It allows men to brush off an argument from a woman as "bitchiness" or "PMS". If our minds are so swaddled in hormones and madness, we can't possibly be expected to perform at the same level as the clear-headed, rational male human. Or so the narrative goes. 

I'll be thrilled to see the day when ads that operate at the expense of an entire gender are seen as passe and old-fashioned, like the condition of hysteria and its various awkward treatments. It's a tired trope, an old sit-com routine, and it isn't doing anyone any favors.