Let’s think about this. After one drink you “are not a hundred percent.” Heather [an Abilene-based MADD victims advocate] believes that we must keep people from driving who are “not one hundred percent.” OK. I’ll buy it. Let’s get impaired people off the road.
Going to the web site of The Women’s Health Channel, I find the following listed as symptoms of PMS:
“• Mood-related (“affective”) symptoms: depression, sadness, anxiety, anger, irritability, frequent and severe mood swings.
• Mental process (“cognitive”) symptoms: decreased concentration, indecision.”Does that sound like one hundred percent to you? I figure it’s a pretty good description of an unstable borderline psychotic. Oh good. I want to drive on the roads with someone who doesn’t pay attention, couldn’t decide what to do it she did, and wants to kill something. Me, probably.
We need to recognize the seriousness of PMS. People joke about it, as they do about drunkenness, but these women are public hazards. “Anger, irritability, frequent and severe mood swings”? (Now that’s a revelation.) “Decreased concentration”? Sounds like a bad drunk in a pool hall, a recipe for inattentive homicidal road-rage. I think the police should send squads into supermarket parking lots to check for these impaired women. Other cops should wait outside churches. To better protect the public we should have checkpoints on highways…. Ponder this from Planet Estrogen: “Additionally, several studies demonstrate reduced reaction time, neuromuscular coordination and manual dexterity during the pre-menstruation and menstrual phases.”
As Fred astutely points out, MADD transformed itself into the prohibitionist movement, version 2.0. I am a little concerned, however, that in calling for banning PMS-impaired driving, he has stolen my rightful spot as NOW’s favorite columnist. In noticing “the weird totalitarianism of the female”, Fred reminds me of a question I forgot to ask my critics a few weeks ago: If women are not instinctive totalitarians, can anyone please point to ten individual rights that women’s organizations want to expand, other than the right to murder? (Unborn children, excess children, supposedly abusive husbands, elderly parents, etc.)
Because there is not exactly a shortage of things that women’s organizations are actively working towards banning. Susan Faludi was worried about a backlash against feminism a few years ago. I don’t think she’s even begun to see anything yet.