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!
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