New Girl Finally Admits The Truth About 'Her Friend'

When I was a younger man, there came a time in every relationship I ever had with a woman — personal or professional — when she would fly all the way off the handle in a way no sane person could have ever predicted and I would ask her, gently and kindly, "Honey, is it...that time?" If the perfectly innocent, reasonable question made her even angrier — or, worse, caused her to cry — it told me two things: that we weren't going to be in one another's lives much longer, and that I was right in diagnosing the problem. If, on the other hand, she ruefully, adorably confessed that her parts were revolting against her, I could at least respect the fact that she had come to terms with her innate feminine weakness, and use our common ground on this issue as the foundation of a meaningful, long-term relationship.

Since its premiere last fall, I have been wary of Fox's New Girl because I couldn't get a read on its titular Jess. Is she a sweet, goofy ditz who needs all three of her male roommates to look after her and protect her from all the harms that could befall her in this cruel world of ours? Or are her flirty, feminine dresses just camouflage for a textbook program of "soft power"? I realize that might sound far-fetched, but just think about the ways she's always getting the men she (platonically) lives with to carry out her wishes without ever asserting herself! But the latest episode definitively takes a side: Jess is all girl. We can tell, because she gets her period, and she doesn't just talk about it: she surrenders to it. She acknowledges that she is a slave to her hormones. And thus she — and the show, which was created by a woman (this episode was written by another woman) — acknowledge what we know, which is that, even when they deny it, all women are.

That said: even as she moans that she feels like "a fat man is sitting on [her] uterus," Jess doesn't realize how good she — and all women — have it. She points out that her roommate, Nick, shouldn't express any dismay or discomfort about her womanly travails because he's angry every day of his life, but fails to follow that thought to its logical conclusion: even though men clearly have more cause to be angry about life's many challenges, we don't get the built-in excuse, once a month, to let off steam with impunity. If we get angry in public, or even just in front of our closest colleagues, we don't get let off the hook because we're helpless to resist the cycles of the moon. Instead, our anger — our defiance of rules and conventions — puts us in the position of possibly losing our jobs, and for what? Well, for taking principled stances that make us the envy of all our peers, in my own most recent case. But those only come up once every nine months or so. The rest of the time, we may only be drunk — and though I personally may feel that drunkenness should be every bit the get-out-of-consequences-resulting-from-emotional-outbursts-free card that a woman's menses are, not all multimedia conglomerates' presidents agree.

So I can understand why Winston decides that he has sympathy PMS. I can understand the appeal of taking a day off work to nurture himself the way all women do who aren't lying to themselves about their bodies. It's exhausting to be a man: no one is more exhausted by it than I. But then where would it end? Anger is men's burden; we take it on because we are strong enough to bear it. Menstruation is women's burden, and if they give themselves over to the pain...well, I won't say it's because they're weak. But then, I suppose I don't need to. They remind us every month.

It's impossible for me not to draw a line from this episode of New Girl and the Presidential election we barely survived just days ago. I think we might all like to spend a day on the couch hugging a hot water bottle and watching trash TV. But the country can't be womanly and give in to its pain. Male rage founded this country, and I, for one, will always be a patriot.