You know the old joke about the woman who goes to her doctor to find out whether she has premenstrual syndrome and he says, ”The good news is that you don`t have PMS. The bad news is that you`re obnoxious.”
Well, if you asked social psychologist Carol Tavris, the good news is there is no PMS. ”The bad news,” says Tavris, ”is that women are the same as men. Just as irritating, charming and grouchy.”
But to rush out with a headline, ”No More PMS! Fem Psych Doc Says Forget Your Cycles and Just Get Happy,” would be to oversimplify. The myth of PMS is just one of many afflictions Tavris goes after with scholarship and wit in her new book, ”The Mismeasure of Woman” (Simon & Schuster, $23).
Tavris takes on any number of fables for our times from the Incredible Disappearing G-Spot to the Self-Esteem Explosion.
”I don`t want to invalidate women`s experience,” Tavris says. ”Many women show the classic signs of what some people call true premenstrual syndrome. The untold story of PMS is that it deflects all of our attention from the fact that men have moods and symptoms-backaches, headaches, stomachaches-but it`s not called a syndrome.”
She takes particular exception to what she calls the ”self-help industry.” The success of this industry, Tavris says, is the clearest sign of the successful domination of male norms.
”If women ran the institutions, men would be asking: What should we do to get in? Do I dress right? Smell right? Need to work on my communications skills? But I don`t want to get angry. Then they won`t like us.”
Tavris sees all the books on women who love too much, are co-dependents and have fairy-tale complexes and syndromes as an attempt to measure women by male standards.
”I would put a moratorium on the word `self-esteem` and chuck it for a decade.”
The current fad in psychology-Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse-is part of a ”sex panic,” Tavris says, that occurs during periods when sexual roles are changing and people become obsessed with sex.
She doesn`t dispute the tremendous problem of such abuse, but she does question the vogue of assuming people who suffer certain symptoms-there`s that word again-must have been abused as children even if they can`t remember it.
She cites a radio ad: ”Are you suffering from unhappiness, despair, eating disorders, sexual disorders and can`t remember what happened in your childhood? Then call Adult Survivors of Sexual Abuse and begin the healing process now.”
She speaks of a ”love bath” that occurs in self-help groups similar to cults:
”A vulnerable person comes in, breaks down and then is built up by other sufferers and lost souls. When you confess in a group, `My father molested me` and everyone cheers and applauds, that is a powerful experience.` Having a simple explanation to explain everything is also part of the appeal.”
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In decrying the anatomical fad of the G-spot, the now-disputed site of female ejaculation, Tavris writes in her book that the spot was hot because of a best-selling book in 1982, ”The G-Spot and other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality.”
In describing the authors of the book like soap opera characters, Tavris is at her sarcastic best. She gives us ”Alice Ladas, the Reichian
`bioenergeticist` . . . John D. Perry, the psychologist-entrepreneur . . . and Beverly Whipple, the nurse (now psychologist).”
But if psychologists make a bundle off silly syndromes and sexual freak shows, at least they don`t harm women. She cites recent efforts by
psychologists to treat men and women as crazy by balancing Self-Defeating Personality Disorder (gals) with Delusional Dominating Personality Disorder
(guys) as acceptable, official diagnoses.
Tavris` real gripe is with ”the medicalization of female problems-the continuing effort to drug and operate on women.”
By calling the normal conditions of being female ”disease, deficiency, pathology and sickness,” the groundwork is set for drastic medical solutions from hysterectomy to breast reduction and augmentation.
No movement with a heavy dose of jargon is free from the wrath of Tavris. In taking on the eco-feminist, menstruation-is-next-to-goddessl iness movement, Tavris says, ”It makes about as much sense to me as would a male celebration of the `scrotal powers.”`
Saying, ”Women do not benefit from doctrinaire regulations of the one right way to be, whether the right way is an outmoded notion of medical correctness or a modern notion of spiritual correctness,” she hopes to end the idea that the sexes are hopelessly opposite.
She`d like to see women tough it out a bit more and men to talk it out a little better.