Watch out, ladies! And feminism! Because guys are totally onto you and your dirty periods. According to a study cited on the blog What Men Think of Women, men can tell when women are on their periods – just by listening to them talk! Well, some of the time, anyway. From a writeup of the research in the Times of India:
Men can actually tell from a woman’s voice when she is having her period, a new study has claimed.
For the study, conducted by Nathan Pipitone at Adams State College and Gordon Gallup from SUNY-Albany, the researchers asked three groups of men to listen to voice recordings of ten women who counted from one to five at four different points over their menstrual cycle.
According to Popular Science, all four recordings were played in a random order and then the first group of men were asked to guess which were made while the women were on their period. The tests revealed that the men were correct 35 per cent of the time, which was described as a ‘significant’ result.
That’s right, ladies! Men can tell whether or not you’re are on the rag – a third of the time!
I myself have developed a technique that can bring this success rate to well over 50 percent – just by listening to women talk!
All you have to do is to pay attention to subtle audio clues, like her saying:
“I just started my period.”
“My period came early this month.”
“Crap. I’ve got awful craps – because of my period.”
“Aunt Flo is paying her monthly visit.” (Note: this works only if she does not actually have an Aunt Flo.)
“It’s shark week! “ (Note: This works only if it is not actually Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.)
“It’s that time of month again. The time when I use tampons, in my vagina.”
“I have reached that point in my menstrual cycle during which blood leaks from my hoo-ha.”
So what does all this mean? According to Christian J at What Men Are Saying About Women, it means the jig is up, feminists! In a post titled How Men can Decode “Women’s” Menstrual Cycle.. , he writes:
This information is what feminist have been trying to hide, delete and deny for many a decade. They are of the opinion that the menstrual cycle is irrelevant and superfluous to their cause and one can understand why when one looks at the studies on how women are affected by it.
In the worst case scenarios, their behaviour are effected to such a degree as to make them totally dysfunctional and even bedridden for the period(intended) of the cycle. The other side of the argument is ofcourse that it is swept under the carpet and not discussed or taken seriously..
Just some added benefits from feminism, as they live in ignorant, self induced silence..
You might as well pack it in, ladies and manginas – because men know!
A third of the time.
NOTE: I have no idea why Christian J. put the word “women” in quotes in the title of his blog post. Like his now-legendary two-dot ellipses, this is a mystery that may forever remain unsolved. Or you could ask him, I guess.
EDITED TO ADD: This post has now inspired a completely disingenuous “Yahoo Answers” query from an antifeminist concern troll who seems to be pretending that this post was not DRIPPING IN SARCASM. Add your answers, if you want!
Is that what we’ve been doing? I had no idea I was supposed to care if men can guess that blood is pouring out of me. I’m such a terrible feminist.
Where did this idea that feminists are hiding a simple fact of biology to further the aims of feminism come from?
You mean how feminists want birth control covered by insurance companies? No…that has to do with having periods, not not having periods.
I iz confused.
Do these idiots know how stupid they sound?
That is a rhetorical question, I know they are incapable of knowing that.
I use my birth control to not have periods. Am I an evil feminazi, trying to fool the poor menfolk?
It’s misandry to be on your period. It’s super misandry to use birth control to not have periods.
That’s true. I think menstruation is mostly irrelevant to feminism. The only exception is that it’s wrong when misogynistic doctors treat menstrual problems like they’re no big deal.
More like superFLOWus, amiright??!??!?!?!?
I always like to use the phrase “There are Communists in the funhouse.” myself, just to see folks try to figure that one out.
The angels have the phonebox.
I’d have to read the study but there may be something to it but only insofar as subtle sexual readiness indicators. Which of course has fuck all to do with feminism or how evil women are trying to oppress poor beleaguered men with tampon commercials.
It’s almost cute how these guys get all “EWWW COOTIES” about women and their bodies. Reminds me of when I was 7 years old and the neighbor boy was convinced that girls had all manner of cooties and that these said cooties could jump several feet, kind of like fleas.
He turned into a real horn dog in high school. I guess he found a good spray.
What???
I mean, sorry, what???
Someone needs to tell this dude that you can’t just unrelated phrases together and present that as your argument.
*string unrelated phrases together
Blah blah blah. I’m stupid too.
It’s also important to realize that if the men in the study had no idea which one was the correct, they still would have gotten 25% correct.
I don’t have much training in statistics, but 35% of the time makes an upper-bound estimate, while 13% (10/75) makes for a lower-bound estimate. A statistician could narrow that down a lot, but for the simple back-of-the-envelope calculation, it’s actually the range 13-35%. A third of the time is being generous.
I actually have a sister who has menstrual issues to the degree where she is sometimes bedridden, I don’t see what that has to do with anything else. It doesn’t make her any less competent or valuable…
See, I think that’s one of the central mistakes they are making. Feminists don’t deny that women who menstruate sometimes are affected by mestruation, they deny that it makes women incompetent, their opinions less worth respect, their lives and labor worth less, etc.
Sexists don’t really want to do discuss menstrual issues, what they want is to be able to dismiss anything a woman says or does in disagreement with them as “she’s on her period” without actually having to address her claims.
“A woman’s voice changes during certain times in her cycle”, okay, assuming for the moment that is true, why would that have anything to do with anything other than perhaps estrogen levels effecting voice pitch and such?
Maybe he’s trying to be inclusive of menstruating non-women? (Probably not XD) But not every woman menstruates, and not every one who menstruates is a woman in any case.
I totally don’t know your sister’s situation, and I know that easy access to hormonal birth control is a privilege that I have and many other menstruating people don’t. That said, issues like this are why I take pills continuously, and only have a period every 3 or 4 months.
She might know all about that already, I just bring it up because I didn’t realize it was possible until my physiotherapist told me about it last year, and I’ve been talking to medical professionals about my problems for much longer than that.
There doesn’t seem to be a single comment on that website on any article posted. Is he just talking to himself over there?
Since there’s no link to the actual study, I have no idea how many participants there were so no way to judge what the standard errors would be, but pure chance would indicate they should get the right answer 25 percent of the time. So that extra 10 percent, how significant is it? Significant at the 99 percent level? Okay. Significant at the 90 percent level or lower? Meh. This 35 percent could still just be noise and randomness.
@Crumbelievable: I found 2 posts with 1 comment each. So clearly, he has a HUGE audience. 🙂
Also, found this lovely quote from him:
“I have on my Google reader a site named “What Black Men Think”, having been pointed in that direction quite a few years a go and keeping an interest in my coloured brothers has always been there as I have met many and have a very good personal friend as well..”
What a gem he is.
Yes. Actually being female is proof positive that you are an evil feminazi-it really seems to require no more than that.
I’ll have to go tell that womyn’s spirituality crowd my mother hangs out with that they are Doing Feminism Wrong. Because they’re always ready to give me shit about how OMG!TRAGIC! it is that I hit menopause super-early and thus have forever lost the joys of cycling with the Sacred Earth/Moon/Crab-Nebula Mother. Also, I will never squeeze a small person out of my vagina, thus dooming me for all eternity to some kind of pale imitation of True Wymynhyyd. *eyeroll*
I never took statistics but…
35% is a lousy percentage. That’s less than the 50/50 average you would expect just from guessing.
To paraphse Anchorman, “Thirty-five percent of the time, it works every time.”
paraphrase*
Also from Anchorman
Brick Tamland: I read somewhere their periods attract bears. Bears can smell the menstruation.
Brian Fantana: Well, that’s just great. You hear that, Ed? Bears. Now you’re putting the whole station in jeopardy.
Ever since I went off the Pill, I’ve had less than 35% accuracy in predicting my own periods. Why have men been keeping these detection methods secret?
I’ll have to go tell that womyn’s spirituality crowd my mother hangs out with that they are Doing Feminism Wrong. Because they’re always ready to give me shit about how OMG!TRAGIC! it is that I hit menopause super-early and thus have forever lost the joys of cycling with the Sacred Earth/Moon/Crab-Nebula Mother. Also, I will never squeeze a small person out of my vagina, thus dooming me for all eternity to some kind of pale imitation of True Wymynhyyd. *eyeroll*
To be fair, it does kinda sound like they’ve been doing it wrong.
Their reaction to this study can be boiled down to three words: women, hormones, bitches. It’s seriously no more complicated than that. They delight in anything that seems to support their belief that all women are bitches.
I’m pretty sure the MRAs think they can guess when I’m on my period too… xD
Mind you, a whole bunch of them claim that they’re not attracted to women but “fertility’ or chromosomes xD So I’m sure they can tell if you’re on your period by smelling it or sensing it or however they figure out whether I’m fertile or what my chromosomal makeup is XD
Actually, blind guessing would be 75% accurate.
“Sounds like Springfield has a discipline problem.”
“Maybe that’s why we beat them at football nearly half the time!”
To be fair, it does kinda sound like they’ve been doing it wrong.
Well, yeah. But they’re doing it wrong wrong! 😀
It’s not clear what the 35% stands for, so it’s not clear if it’s good or bad. That’s why I hate science reporting. Unless I know the protocol and what 35% stands for (is that only for positive identification of women who were menstruating or does that include both positive id of menstruating women and non-menstruating women?) this is contentless.
The MRAs, of course, just read “men menstruations hormones bitches” and are done analyzing the results.
“You might as well pack it in, ladies and manginas – because men know!
A third of the time.”
Only a third of the time? That seems low. I’m only speculating here but it seems to me that men should be able to guess whether or not a woman’s menstruating and guess correctly about half the time — even if, or especially if, they’re guessing at random. They ought to be able to guess correctly more than half the time if they’ve got any reliable means of identifying menstruating women.
Either a woman is menstruating or she’s not. (There is a kind of interim state but we’ll count that as “menstruating”.) So that any given, random woman, on the condition that she’s within her fertile years, presents, menstruation-wise, a watchful, puzzled male with two choices: she’s on the rag or she isn’t. The male only gets two options: he can call heads or tails. (No pun intended…) If he’s presented with a series of women, each one of whom could either be menstruating or not menstruating (so as to prevent any chance of prior knowledge on his part affecting his call) he ought to be able to get about half of his calls right simply by guessing at random. (He might do better and he might do worse, but the odds say that he should be able to hit his mark about half the time. I’m expecting, BTW, that his guesses will be informed by his knowledge that most women, most of the time, are not menstruating.)
If the man has any prior knowledge that affects the odds in his favor, he should be able to better those odds: he should be able to guess correctly more than half the time. If, OTOH, the man suffers from any preconceptions that worsen the odds in his favor, he should be expected to get somewhat under half his guesses right. 35%, last time I checked, was under 50%.
Please poke holes in this (again no pun intended)…
I do love that Christian J decided that means we’re dysfunctional and horrible on our periods. Does that mean he thinks those women were incapable of counting to five while on the rag, or did they recite the numbers in a really mean way?
Actually they’re guessing at 1 in 4, not 1 in 2, but you’re on the right track.
I stand corrected. A statistician would need more information to narrow down my range above.
“Actually they’re guessing at 1 in 4, not 1 in 2, but you’re on the right track.”
So, what you mean is, the study was set up so as to give the participants a 25% chance, not a 50% chance, of being right, and therefore the 35% accuracy which was achieved is somewhat better, rather than somewhat worse, than might be expected. Got it. Well, yes, that’s impressive, but not amazing. I, too, would like to know how much data went into the hopper before the conclusion was reached.
So MRAs reckon hormones make women bitches about 25% of the time, but hormones make men rapists 100% of the time? Is that about right? I think I prefer being a woman under that system! 😉
No, men are completely rational and intelligent. Only silly wimminz are controlled by hormonal impulses.
Yes…it is funny that Christian J interprets “temporarily not very attractive to me” as “totally dysfunctional and even bedridden”, and it’s also pretty weird that he fails to notice that what the study is about is not how women react to menstruation but how men do.
She’s on hormonal birth control, but she still has one every month, she also has muscle relaxers for some of the worse cramping. Part of issue is that she gets nauseous and slightly anemic at the same time, and the former aggravates the latter.
I will give a cookie to the person who can tell if I’m on my period or not!
Nah, little kids must be the only rational ones. 🙂
There are Communists in the funhouse
I love it! I’m so using that.
Also, “Which of these four is on her period?” is leading. A better study would simply present all the samples and let them choose whether each individual one was on her period or not.
“Closed for maintenance”
What I’m curious about is why they chose menstruation? If you wanted to talk about evolutionary biology or some such, wouldn’t it be more relevant for men to be able to tell when a woman is most fertile?
I can see that the MRA is just being an asshat, but why were the scientists so interested in this question?
Calling them “scientists” might be drawing a long bow …
“I can see that the MRA is just being an asshat, but why were the scientists so interested in this question?”
There’s this myth that women turn into crazy irrational beings during menstruation.
>>Actually they’re guessing at 1 in 4, not 1 in 2, but you’re on the right track.
How do you arrive at that number? I haven’t been able to find the protocol used. A woman is 25% chance of menstruating at any given time (assuming a regular cycle, 7 days out of 28) but there’s nothing that says they were picking up random women for their recordings. They might have deliberately chosen half their samples to be non-menstruating women and the other half being menstruating women. Or 75/25. Or any combination under the sun.
Even if we’re picking random women in a crowd, they’re not guessing at 25%. You’re only counting when they correctly identify menstruating women. You need to identify both false positives AND false negatives. In that case:
Odds of being right
= Odds of picking Yes TIMES Odds of Yes + Odds of picking No TIMES Odds of No
= X * 0.25 + (1-X) * 0.75
= 0.75 – 0.5*X
Assuming they’re picking Yes or No at the same rate (0.5) that means they’re right 50% of the time. Their best strategy, if they don’t have a trick to improve detection, would simply be to assume women are not menstruating and thus be right 75% of the time.
Would this be a ‘real’ study, or more like an exercise for first year students? Like an assignment to design and carry out a study? Cause those always seem to be about alcohol or women-are-weird/sexy.
“So MRAs reckon hormones make women bitches about 25% of the time, but hormones make men rapists 100% of the time? Is that about right? I think I prefer being a woman under that system! ;)”
You wouldn’t DARE you foul misandrist!!!!!!11111111 1010101010101010101010101010 xD xD xD