Penthouse column.

This is an older one, already published. I’m putting it up here as part of a project where a bunch of facebook writers are linking stuff to create an online mag.

Gentlemen, I think the time has come to put aside our traditional squeamishness and discuss the undiscussable, without disgusting the all too easily disgustable. I think the time has come to grapple with the greatest threat to the dignity and repose of modern man, the modern woman, or to be specific, the pre-menstrual modern woman.

Of all the inconveniences and mortifications heaped upon us since the untaming of the shrews, I would argue that nothing so besets a man as the monthly indignities of PMT. We are the forgotten victims of this scourge, I’m sure you will agree. How were we to know that having been such decent chaps in tipping the nod to all of that liberation jiggery-pokery it would come back to bite us on the collective arse? I don’t mean via female bosses (kinda sexy in a way), or equal pay (kinda convenient when you’re a bit short of the folding stuff yourself), or any of the myriad little compromises we’ve had to make in the name of looking reasonable. After all, we still pretty much have the joint locked down on our terms.

Except for this one, little thing that got away from us.

The pre-menstrual monster.

Can you imagine our hardy pioneer forefathers wilting under the attack of some goggle-eyed harpy with an oestrogen imbalance, alternately screaming and crying and gorging herself on half her body weight in Lindt balls and Homer Hudson? Can you imagine those sturdy Turkish trench attacking lads of Anzac Cove meekly acquiescing to a frenzied shoe shopping spree just to avoid having their eyeballs raked out by a nutjob girlfriend in the throws of premenstrual psychosis?

No, you can’t because they wouldn’t have. And yet your modern guy, assailed once every month by a monster which could out-monster the alien from Aliens, does not dare even utter the entirely reasonable question, “Excuse me, my dear, have you gone insane with PMT again?”

You can imagine the outrage, and the scolding and the government funded postgrad courses in Wymyn’s Studies if the blokes lost their minds like clock work each month and started lashing out at all around them, while scarfing up staggering tonnages of chockies and melting the plastic on frocks which simply do not fit them. We’d never hear the end of it.

But women never hear the start of it? Why?

Well, because it’s potentially dangerous to even raise the topic with them of course, especially when they’re deep into the Madness and thinking seriously about biting your leg off just below the knee. And when they’re not in the Madness they don’t remember anything about being there last time, or at least they claim not to, and so refuse to discuss their most recent tri-state crime spree and the deep psychological scars you’re still sporting from it.

This inequitable my friends, and it cannot stand. I suggest some balance be brought back into these arrangements. If the ladies have decided it is appropriate to give free reign to their inner cave woman once every 28 days, perhaps we gents should be allowed to do the same for our caveman, and, well, go hide in a cave somewhere. Very far away.

Very, very far away.

Or even better, they could go! We could sell it to them as a health spa visit. Once every month. How generous is that?

Just think about it. There’d be no more keeping track of that secret calendar we Never Ever tell them about. No more wondering whether you’re getting your head ripped off because it needed ripping off, or because you’d simply walked into the hormonal equivalent of an exploding super-volcano. Our chocolate stash would no longer be imperilled, nor our dignity, nor any joint bank accounts.

And with that weird, spooky, synchronised period thing they sometimes get going, we could possibly even get rid of them all at once, fire up the TV, chill a few beers, and get together to strip our sleeves and show our scars and laugh about the bad old days when we let these wild animals run free.