Image appears on Wikipedia’s “Menstrual Cycle”
page. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So we were studying the menstural cycle last week in my integrated interpersonal communications theory / women’s studies / sex education class. One lecture that was pretty cool was on the pretty intricate, interdependent dance between Follicle-Stimulating Hormone, Estradol, Luteinizing Hormone, and Progesterone over the course of an average of 29.5 days. What’s cool is that often one hormone will block secretion of another until another moves past a certain threshold, permitting the first one to spike, or yet another hormone will signal another hormone-secreting area to continue secreting it’s hormone till yet another event says do something else. It’s actually more technical, and more precise, and cooler than that, but at this point, anyway, Wikipedia or other sources are still a more reliable source than I’d be.

One thing our professor did mention: if you look at the enclosed graph, over around the right hand side, roughly marked by days 22-28 — the time most women who experience PMS report, well, experiencing it — all the various hormone levels aren’t going up they’re going down! She said “so when you hear that PMS is all about ‘excess’ female hormones the answer’s actually quite the opposite.”

Now we could just stop there and goggle about that for a minute but I’d like to mention the connection that popped into my little brain as soon as she pointed that low-hormone tidbit: various studies (plus the personal experience of several friends who use their own hormone supplements) much of the distemper and violence traditionally associated with testosterone in men is also more correctly attributed to reduced levels of the hormone!

So! Men who lash out after experiencing a severe loss of “face?” Lowering levels of testosterone. Cranky old men? Declining levels of testosterone. And now I’m hearing about something similar when women are experiencing declining levels of… oh, and while I’m thinking about it there’s also that big plummetting post-partum drop in progesterone that’s blamed for all manner of problems from headaches to depression. (Too lazy to Google citations for any of that, but citations there are.)

Anyway, point being that to the extent it’s a misconception that “sex” hormones cause emotional problems, and to the extent it’s a misconception that “sex” hormones cause emotional problems specific to each gender rather than declines in both those hormones causing… not quite identical but certainly suspiciously similar problems in both genders…

Well, to the extent any of that’s true… and I’m really only saying it could be… maybe we’re more alike than different.