Ask the average person— male or female— to describe a woman with PMS, and you're likely to hear terms such as irrational, disturbed, emotional, enraged, crazy, and cranky— and those are just the clean terms! Those who don't have PMS either consider it funny or scary, and sometimes both.

The emotional mood swings that supposedly characterize PMS are often parodied in the media. On television and in the movies, women with PMS are alternately weepy or crazy, gorging on potato chips or chocolate, and in general, baffling the men around them with unpredictable behavior.

PMS on TV

These representations are not accurate, but they’re usually played for laughs. Television sitcoms are a good example. In the last thirty years, numerous television shows, from All in the Family in the 1970s to Everybody Loves Raymond in the twenty-first century, have made fun of the emotional turmoil caused by women with PMS.

In 1990, the television show Roseanne aired an episode called “PMS, I Love You,” in which Roseanne Conner, the main character, drives her entire family crazy because of her PMS. Her husband describes her PMS as being like a “24-hour roller coaster ride with Sybil at the switch.”

More recently, Raymond, the lead character on Everybody Loves Raymond, proposes tape-recording his wife’s PMS-induced rampages so she can hear how irrational and antagonistic she’s being.

Here’s a thirty-year history of TV sitcoms and PMS:

• 1973:All in the Family—PMS pushes Gloria to yell at her mother, Edith, in an episode called “The Battle of the Month.”

• 1983: Taxi—In the episode “Simka’s Monthlies,” Simka, the Eastern European wife of cabdriver Latka, goes berserk; cabby Elaine explains to the men that she has premenstrual syndrome.

• 1988: Married with Children—Peg and Kelly Bundy and neighbor Marcy get PMS simultaneously on a camping trip. They growl, snarl, and demand chocolate; they scare the men so badly that the men prefer to face a bear that has trapped them in a cabin rather than face the women.

• 1990: Roseanne—Roseanne drives her family crazy she’s PMS-ing.

• 2000:Everybody Loves Raymond—Debra rages and there’s no medication for PMS that can relieve her symptoms.

The media finds it convenient and funny to write off a woman’s anger as PMS. It gives the woman a reason to kick butt, seek and let her emotions fly. It also gives the male characters an to admit they’ll never understand women.

Rhea Parsons, assistant professor of psychology at Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York, has analyzed images of PMS on television, including the Raymond episode. She argues that although these portrayals are meant to be funny, this kind of misrepresentation is harmful to women because it leads to the development of inaccurate ideas about the reality of PMS. “PMS is not portrayed as a women's illness,” she writes in her article, The Portrayal of PMS on Television Sitcoms, “so much as an inconvenience to men…Perhaps the biggest change is that current characters on television actually say ‘PMS” whereas thirty years ago, it was ‘understood’ by the women's ‘irrational’ behavior.”