Friday, August 26, 2005

Guerilla Gorilla:
Irritable Male Syndrome

[It's Friday, and that's means it's time for Guerilla Gorilla. It seems that GG has made good on his intention to learn to communicate more in line with the accepted rules of American English grammar, and other than a few odd choices of word or phrase, this is a whole new gorilla! Of course, he seems to have kept his beret and indignation. And love of profanity.]

Guerilla Gorilla here, proud to be in much fuller command of written English. My education was, in part, fueled by consuming mass amounts of reading materials, including that drivel commonly referred to as "weekly newsmagazines." [grunt] And so my fascinating introduction segues into this week's post, culled from the freshly-printed pages of this week's Newsweek.

Jed Diamond has coined the phrase "Irritable Male Syndrome" (known to its sufferers as, apparently, IMS) and has also [grunt] written a book about it. Apparently, he writes, if a man suffers a drop in testosterone he can become irritiable, frustrated and angry. There's plenty more in that vein, including a test to determine if you have IMS.

Jed Diamond, you can kiss my hairy silver back.

If you are irritable, frustrated, and angry, you do have a problem, but it's called being a higher mammal. Humans and apes of both sexes can feel this way, and the way we should deal with it is to accept what you can not change, or go talk to a therapist, or punch a wall when no one is looking and then later you can claim you were trying to catch a fly with a baseball bat and whattya mean I have anger issues? Screw off!

Apologies.

Seriously -- I have a mate, and I know that there are certain... syndromes... that are real and documentable and you do not monkey around with that. [grunt] But other than that and a few other things, you humans need to get over yourselves -- you are screwed up mammals, and getting angry or going crazy or losing your virility is what happens when you're alive. Angry? Live with it. Frustrated? Join the rest of the planet.

IMS is bullshit, and even an ape like me can see that. Now quit it before I become irritable, frustrated, and angry.

2 comments:

Chandira said...

yup! BS. I thought testosterone increased all that, so how could a drop in testosterone levels do the same as an increase?

Anonymous said...

You go, Gorilla! Cherishing the ability to be grumpy is an inherent privilege of age. Touchy-feelie pop psychology is an epidemic here in the woo-woo world of NorCal. Ned Diamond is emblematic of the irritations we silverbacks here have with so many of our neighbors. Isolation is GOOD when you consider epidemiology.