For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for September 20, 2013

Hey Duck … why don’t you just shut up and enjoy the show? You’re worse than people who talk in movie threaters.

Women always seem to have a modern excuse for the way they treat their men. Men don’t need an excuse. We’re just apes.

Hormones ARE a real factor in how women act at certain points. Jokes aside, it can be very difficult to deal with. In extreme cases, it’s a total personality change.

Nah, April (the last kid) doesn’t come along until much later

Elly in her 30’s is just frustrated at John’s inapt ways. Ted knows nothing of women.

OK Hormones are a real factor once a month for most women. I know I usually shut my self up in my room at least once a month because I know how nasty I get and it isn’t any ones fault. If I stay out I am mean and nasty and cruel and it isn’t fair to my family or me.

Y’all seem to think women are the only ones affected by hormones. Hello? Men are RULED by testosterone. Sheesh!

Not sure why John would be talking about Elly with Ted. He couldn’t find a worse source of advice. Sometimes it’s nothing to do with hormones and all about exactly what she said — having to pick up after 3 “kids.” Sometimes it’s about just not having the energy to pick up after everyone anymore — along with all the other types of housework Elly has to do. If John won’t help clean up, he can help by hiring a housekeeper to help Elly.

Well, there’s the guy over in Rex Morgan who ended up with a nail in his head because he “dared to criticize his wife’s choice of wallpaper”.

It’s a comic strip folks…and one that didn’t even load today along with all the rest. Lighten up!!

Compensating for, uh, a teenie, uh…censored.

“As for menopause, this is the first of a running joke about Elly’s menopause which pops up again and again for the next 20 years.”

Yeah. I suspect a lot of people took that ‘strong left hook’ much too literally, which I take as a joke.

Anybody who starts talking about thirty five being ‘aging’, or menopause being imminent at that age should expect to have crockery or cast iron shied at him. Then or now.

The left hook was a joke. The menopause thing is an issue. There is humour in it, no doubt, but with issues like that one, less is more.

A lot of guys really don’t get that. How about if women started making impotence jokes about men in early maturity? Your sense of humour would survive that, right?

@SUSAN NEWMAN

“If that’s so, then what was Bush’s excuse?Male menopause???”

Nah. You must have noticed too that late in the 20th century, women suddenly became crippled by PMS. One of BigPharma’s early introduction of a created condition, which they have made billions ‘treating’.

Sure, women have always have had some issues, at least some of the time with their cycles. Oddly, we just managed to get rid of the Victorian ‘vapours’ and other cultural hobbles on women, only to embrace more nonsense.

It’s just a bit too convenient for the troglodytes, this PMS business. Some of us never had any issues with our cycles. Some of us have intermittent issues, a few really do suffer chronically.

Public perception of universal, crippling PMS is a cultural construct, designed to trivialize women yet again.

We really have to stop letting them do this to us.

If I were Elly I’d be incensed that John was talking about “my” problem with that idiot Ted! Of course women do the same thing, talk about their husbands to their women friends, but I don’t think men are as bugged by that. Each relationship would be different. Maybe John needs to find an older man to discuss the problem with, his father or father in law who has been married for many years and ask how he dealt with it when his wife got irked with him over his non participation in household duties.

The change of life at 35?? Where’d this loser go to school?

I’ll take occasional moodiness over the crippling agony and bleeding for one week per month (plus the odd operation to take organs out when they became too dysfunctional) I’ve had for over thirty years. When you end up in the ER more than once due to mind-bleeding abdominal pain, this kind of “humor” is belittling and unfunny. I’d like to see some of the chauvinist pigs on here pass a kidney stone so they could fully appreciate what menstruation is really like for a lot of women.

1. John really does need to help around the house. Just because Elly’s home doesn’t mean he can’t help out around the place because she doesn’t work outside the home. Being a stay at home mom is a FULL TIME 24/7 job that doesn’t let up until they fly the nest. 2. Peri-menopause can start as early as the 20s, depending on the family history. 3. PMS affects each woman differently. Some women are lucky that they have never had any symptoms. 4. John is exaggerating about Elly throwing punches.

Her husband gets on my last nerve. Uurggh!!!

John is a typical male chauvinist pig. Or to borrow a line from somewhere else, maybe he’s just drawn that way. But, it IS just a cartoon – meant to make you smile and not to get your goat!