In my experience, this monthly "masculinization" of women can actually bestow on menstruating women a few temporary male privileges as well. It's a built-in excuse for behaving "badly" (ie. honestly) and being angry or dissatisfied without losing your lady cred, and it's an excuse to eat outside your feminine diet. I've absolutely had friends who used this as an excuse to eat to satiety or to eat meat/sugar/etc. -- and it was the only acceptable reason to not diet for one week a month for at least one friend's mother.

Not to say this doesn't backfire ("what are you, PMSing?" in response to any female anger) and it's sad that women have to borrow a little masculinity to be allowed to eat and say what they want, but it's a weird little space of freedom too. Personally, I try to behave all the time like I'm on my period (albeit reduced Advil consumption) because having to point to a bleeding uterus to "excuse" your behavior is a sucky way to live.

My interpretation: menstruating women temporarily cease to be sexual objects (either thru their own or their partners' preferences), and since sexual availability is a sine qua non for conventional femininity, menstruating women are bound to be viewed as unfeminine, even aside from behavioral changes, if any.

I know this is not fair but sometimes I said about my marriage menage:

1 week of pre-menstrual syndrome
1 week of menstrual syndrome
1 week of post-menstrual syndrome
1 week in which the Red Cross is allowed to bring in war relief packages.

really: the doctor suggested my wife to care about her "mood modification" but she refused. I think that was not fair for me, for the kids and the rest of the family that had to bear an uncomfortable situation. So nobody can force anybody to get cured but please understand that behind some "tropes" and some "jokes" sometimes some difficulties are hidden.

What I think is interesting about this is that the implication is that it is BAD for women to act like a hyper masculine person. I am thinking particularly of the traits highlighted here :

Aggression
Being in charge
Allowed to show anger
Treated with a bit of respect (and fear in these examples)
Allowed to ignore or be casual their physical appearance

Seems a bit unfair that women are not allowed to be these things except once a month.

But it's more than just that they turn into "men" in the ads, they turn into "brutes." This ad is as much about gender as it is about race.

The menstruating women in the ads don't turn into men that look like their docile, white male boyfriends/husbands. Rather, they turn into a viking, a black boxer, and a Mexican wrestler; all of whom are positioned as evolutionarily arrested, either by time or by race.

The viking is supposed to be brutish and animal-like because he is from a time when human beings were supposedly less evolutionarily developed.
The black boxer and the Mexican wrestler are supposed to be brutish and animal-like because they are racialized as inferior.

The message is not just that women become like men when they menstruate-- the message is that they become like men who are (socially constructed as being) like animals.

This ad really made me laugh when I saw it a day ago. Today I got my period, and boy, I am feeling very viking-esque. I know there are problems with it, but c'mon, every once in a while you just have to laugh. Great use of visual metaphor if you ask me.
THAT'S RIGHT, YOU HEARD ME, IT'S EFFING AWESOME! NOW GIMMIE THAT REMOTE!

I wish I could remember who said "PMS doesn't make me crazy. It just makes me less able to cope with all the bull**** I handle the entire rest of the month."

Or, to turn the commercial on its head, we're all vikings and boxers and luchadores - it's just that 28 days out of the month, we work harder to be "lady-like."

I find it as another example of men trying to take something that isn't theirs. And it's also something that they just don't understand. I've always had a theory that deep-down, men (I'm aware that I'm generalizing, but I am responding to a generalization) are perplexed, but also envious or jealous of women's reproductive role, in that women are the only ones who can carry a child and give birth. It's why, I believe, that for millenia, men have tried to control our reproductive choices and health. It's why, when women are PMSing, they equate it to brutish men. It's something they'll never be able to understand, except from an outside perspective, no matter how powerful they are, no matter how much money they have, no matter how much brute strength they possess.
And as someone who suffers greatly from PMS, I find it highly irritating when men turn it into something we do to them.

We’re talking about a biological process unique to women,

Wow, okay, I have pointed this out many times in the past to no avail. women are not the only people who menstruate. trans dudes and genderqueer/nonbinary people with uteruses menstruate all the time. a non-woman is probably bleeding RIGHT NOW.

I am losing serious faith in this site as committed to any kind of social change when this keeps happening. it might seem like nitpicking, but erasure is srs bsns.

Society tends to reduce women to sexual objects, there for the sexual gratification of men. Most men don't want to have sex with a woman while she's menstruating, due to all things feminine being seen as humiliating. "You got your femininity all over my penis!" Thus, a menstruating woman is not considered an object fit for male sexual gratification. This is reflected in the purity rules of patriarchal religions. Since women are defined as objects for male sexual gratification, being incapable of fulfilling that role leads to a masculinization of menstruating women.

Interesting, given that normally the (assumed) period-related mood issues are cast as especially female in the weak/emotional/crazy sense---"she's being a hysterical/unreasonable/illogical/emotional female"---whereas here they're casting it in a masculine view of crazy: violent/strong/threatening (with the above-mentioned race issues besides).

With this switch they are portraying PMS as dangerous/frightening to men, rather than or in addition to annoying/irritating (as a weepy, sulky, or short-temper-in-a-girly-way ("you said something wrong, so I'll yell at you" and the like) woman would be). An angry small woman generally presents a different risk profile to a man than an angry larger battle-trained man does.

This could be an attempt to make a joke out of a gender-reversed, over-the-top domestic violence implication, or it could indicate an intolerance of female anger by coding it masculine (i.e. unacceptable for women) and pathologizing it---"periods make a girl angry, which is unnatural in women and makes them like men, and she needs to be fixed, so buy her our product." Or possibly both.

Just wanted to second Myles in the sense that the FIRST thing I noticed about these was race. I am curious about how this would be received by the target audience? I hammer hammer hammer on my students the notion that race means different things in different places, in no small part because I work in a part of the world where race is constructed very differently from how it is constructed in the US.

Also wanted to remind folks about the old (?) Sarafem ads. In case you missed 'em, they were ads for Prozac, marketed as a drug to help women with PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). In one ad, a woman screams and throws a lamp at her husband. In another ad, a woman can't get her grocery cart back in the row of carts and cries. I seem to also remember one that involved the woman eating a lot, but I'm not sure. Part of me almost prefers to be shown as a Viking (even with historically inaccurate horns) than as someone crying. This is because, obvs., I drank the Kool-Aid about masculinity being good. Sorry about that.

I find (and maybe this is weird) that while the first day or two of my period I am in pretty crippling pain, once that's over with I do experience a phase of very intense power that lasts for a good couple of weeks. I feel strong and productive...precisely the opposite of what society tells me I should be. In fact, you could argue that this feeling corresponds with the time in which I am NOT fertile...interesting, that. Yet one more reason I can't wait for menopause...

ps: I use the heavy amount of physical exercise I do (two hours a day) to justify my eating burgers etc. At the same time, I get raised eyebrows from people, even just for ORDERING the stuff. Alternatively, I get "I like a woman who knows how to eat."

Fabulous. I like a man who knows how to something other than sit on his ass and play "Angry Birds," myself, but I'm not supposed to say that.

I find this post especially timely because just yesterday I had a conversation-that-rapidly-devolved-into-an-argument with a classmate who insisted that, because I went through menopause at the ripe old age of 23, I "will never know what it's like to be a real woman."

I...wha....???

Dani Alexis, consider your classmate kicked in the shins by me. I have big feet. It will hurt a lot. I am 33 without children, and people say "Oh, when are you going to have them?"

I derive a sick satisfaction from saying "Well, I actually CAN'T have them." (My problem is related to the meds I take, but the outcome regarding fertility is the same -- no babies for Charlotte.) This is doubly pleasing when someone asks this oh-so-inappropriate question in a job interview setting. I want to say "Oh, don't worry. I'll be able to work my ass off ALL for your department," but I've started just being honest about my de facto infertility, seeing it as payback for asking the question in the first place.

C. Canterbury, Yah, right?!?! I am still trying to come up with a good standard rebuttal, since the 'Angry Birds' one doesn't work in all situations.

This series of ads pisses me off because I have not yet, nor ever in my life, had PMS psychosocial symptoms that legitimized the way people seem to feel entitled in writing me off because of "that time of the month".

Severe PMS might be common. I don't have it beyond the physical. Yet, because I'm female, it seems to give permission to people to dismiss whatever I said that they didn't like, and ascribe it to some nebulous concept of the menstrual cycle...

Don't even get me started on the Yaz/Yazmin commercials. Or the crimes of 'feminine hygiene products'.

/rant

I saw the ad as being directed toward the men--"Get your wife back by telling her about (or even making her take) this medication."

Either way, it's still problematic.