CNN: Menses Make Women Vote Like Maniacs

The monthly visitor, a "study" claims, tends to make women... more extreme, depending on their relationship status.

Actually it's not the menstruation, it's the peak fertility part of their cycle. But "menses" sounds funnier.

It looks like single women become diehard liberal partisans when they're fertile, and women in committed relationships become more... well, Republican.

I have no idea if this is true. I suppose there might be some biochemical mechanism that causes women to think more about their future when ovulating. Maybe there's a biochemical impulse to start thinking about future security. If so, I imagine that would mean single, liberal-leaning women might start thinking about Daddy Government, and married women might start thinking about pro-family policies.

But supposin' don't make it true, and "studies" are, by and large, a non-scientific enterprise chiefly occupied with extracting money from taxpayers to produce junk women's-health pop "science" for slick-covered magazines like Cosmo, and, once upon a time, Newsweek.

Still, whatever, I suppose it's possible. Hormones are powerful things.

This guy proposes a dumb theory to put down married women:

Here’s how Durante explains this: When women are ovulating, they “feel sexier,” and therefore lean more toward liberal attitudes on abortion and marriage equality. Married women have the same hormones firing, but tend to take the opposite viewpoint on these issues, she says.

“I think they’re overcompensating for the increase of the hormones motivating them to have sex with other men,” she said. It’s a way of convincing themselves that they’re not the type to give in to such sexual urges, she said.

Wow. How about a more obvious answer -- if an ovulating single woman is thinking about the natural consequence of sex, childbirth, and therefore becomes more interested in abortion, how about married women are viewing that same natural consequence and thinking about pro-family policies?

But no, it's a defense mechanism to keep them from humping the gardener.

By the way, I have no idea why a primordial hormonal brain impulse, connected intimately to possible childbirth, would result in women thinking about "marriage equality."

Call me crazy, but when I think about primordial hormonal brain impulses, I'm thinking they tend to be pretty simple, and directly related to the biological imperatives of a living animal, such as survival, reproduction, and some very basic things like social status within the herd.

And not abstract questions of higher-level rationalization like "Shouldn't gays, who have relatively little to do with childbirth and nothing at all to do with the rush of hormones preparing me for bearing children, also have the right to marry in a socially-advanced industrial Western nation?"

Hey, Researchers: Maybe women's ovulation is also triggering a revulsion to Mitt Romney's $5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy. You never know what might have evolved in lower hominids' brains 1 million years ago.

Maybe the early hominids had some kind of prophecy about Mitt Romney's Vampire Capitalism.

Maybe that warning's been magically hard-coded into women's brains in order to make sure Barack Obama wins an election a million years later.

Science

Any insufficiently skeptical "science" is indistinguishable from Magic.

posted by Ace at 04:54 PM

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