Toby Young Toby Young

My hormones are all over the place. It must be the manopause

[Getty Images/iStock] 
issue 27 September 2014

Women spend ten days a year in a grumpy mood, according to the Daily Mail. The top triggers include being overweight, feeling undervalued, having a bad hair day, breaking a nail and the wrong time of the month.

The standard reaction to this among the men I know was to question the number of days. More like 100, surely? My reaction was slightly different. I’m not convinced there’s any such thing as a ‘grumpy day’ for most women, any more than there is a ‘happy day’. Rather, all days contain peaks and troughs and the variation isn’t between good days and bad days so much as days on which their mood swings are violent and frequent and days on which they’re relatively stable.

OK — I’m being provocative. Trolling politically correct feminists is such easy sport it’s difficult to resist, but the truth is I recognised more of myself in this Daily Mail article than my wife.

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