Last night I reread a NYT piece about medicating women’s feelings, and had the same reaction that I had to an Atlantic piece from a couple of years ago about the wisdom of menopause.
Why should women’s temporary emotional states, especially those so heavily influenced by hormones, be elevated to wisdom, but men’s heightened hormone-induced emotional states should be considered some kind of biological poisoning?
I am in my mid-50s, so I’m writing from the trenches here. I have lived the sleeplessness and the feeling that I’m in a rental body. If I become convinced that, in spite of all the evidence, my wonderful, affectionate husband no longer loves me and is just looking for the moment to tell me he’s leaving, and spend a day confusing my family with my uncontrollable sobbing, I am not “expressing some hidden wisdom.” I am in the center of a hormone storm, and it takes what few shreds of discernment I can muster to keep from saying something awful, because the only thing I can cling to in the deluge is the vague hope that I won’t feel this way tomorrow. That’s not wisdom. It’s an emotional hallucination, brought about by a physical chemical imbalance.
We would never tell a woman with postpartum depression that it’s a natural part of life and that she should embrace it with grace and learn from it’s wisdom. That would be stupid and cruel. We don’t tell a man in a testosterone-fueled rage that he is accessing valuable intuition.
I cannot understand the desire to turn the estrogen fluctuations into something deeper, or the urge to recast the expression of the most primitive parts of our brain into some new kind of rationality that only women get to have.
Give me the pill. Real life is too astounding, complicated, and short to waste time on imaginary horrors.