Pre-Massengill Syndrome

So I'm up late last night doing the thing that I occasionally do: staring at Laura until she wakes up and then dousing her with the wellsprings of my cheesy love. I doted, I complimented, I massaged, I even made moon eyes with my slanty eyes. It was 4 a.m., and I was sleepless and giddy. Laura was--in this order--awoken, tired, flattered, happy, asleep within minutes.

A few hours later, I'm watching the first hint of my monthly menstrual bonanza dye the water in my toilet. And I'm thinking, so was my upwelling of love just an unpredictable fluctuation of womanly hormones?

I'll bet anyone anything--c'mon, folks, I'm feeling hot--that PMS is a constructed phenomenon. It was first documented in the 1930s, at the tail end of an medical era notorious for misogynistic misdiagnoses of feminine "disorders." I believe that my estrogen and progesterone levels change before, during, and after my period. But how much do these hormonal changes really affect my emotions? My guess is less than I have been led to believe. Since I harbor deep conspiracy suspicisions about almost everything, it wouldn't be hard to convince me that the perpetuation of a possible myth about PMS is perpetrated by pharmaceutical companies who produce period pills that produce periodic profits.

I would love to comission a cross-cultural survey asking women about the changes in their emotions, comparing women in countries that have widespread information about PMS to women in countries where there exist no PMS cults. I would love to research the jokes, oral histories, and informal media of many cultures for references to women's emotional changes as they are connected to their periods. PMS seems like a big load of bullshit. Can somebody prove this?