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I sure have. We all know how we're supposed to apportion our budget (10 percent into savings, no more than 30 percent towards housing, etc.), but how many of us really stick to that? And when we veer off course, what are the sirens pulling us away? I spend too much on cabs and Greek yogurt, for instance. This Mother Teresa figure drops $650 on dry-cleaning and a cool grand a week on skin-care.
So, to satisfy that voyeuristic impulse and perhaps do a little pop sociological research in the process, we're asking for XX Factor readers to participate in an experiment. We'd like to have a handful of women, from various parts of the country and occupying different income brackets, keep scrupulous track of their expenses for a week. We'll publish the results on Double X, the new Slate women's site that's launching in May. (We won't use your real name on the site, unless of course you want us to.) If you're interested in participating, send an email to DoubleX.slate@gmail.com with the subject line "Track My Spending," and we'll send along more details.
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Meghan, Dayo, Dahlia, the study that purports to show that when women are premenstrual they tend to spend more impulsively sounds like so many of the other specious findings of evolutionary psychology about how women behave during different phases of their hormonal cycle. These researchers seem obsessed with proving that female humans, like other female mammals, actual experience estrus, or go into "heat." They can't stand that that human female ovulation is hidden, and as a result are obsessed with finding clues to female behavior (shopping sprees, dressing more provocatively) to prove that we are actually controlled by our hormones. It doesn't seem to matter that their research (and the silliness of some of these "experiments" is epic) often proves nothing; they always conclude it proves their case. I find the case, however, rather insidious. How is it different from the arguments of a generation ago that women are just too emotional, irrational, and controlled by their hormones to actually be in positions of power? Think of all the women teachers, co-workers, bosses you've had over the years. Have you ever actually been able to tell where any of them is in their menstrual cycle by their behavior? And think of their male equivalents. Is anyone doing research to explain why they seem rational some days and nuts on others?
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Meghan, that British study doesn’t surprise me much, either. Any woman who’s ever purchased a Lancôme mascara knows that rationality has very little to do with the ways in which we consume. But I did just have my own strange shopping-based epiphany that I wanted to share: I’ve been home with two sick kids for more than a week now, and it was one of those whomping-awful, sleepless, beg-them-to-drink, feverish weeks in which time stretched out in crazy new ways, and I periodically fell asleep with kid-sick in my hair.
We visited the doctor three times. But we were at Target four times.
Target!! Who knew that when your kids get that sick, Target somehow becomes the only answer? Anybody’s guess why our near-daily treks to seek out better-flavored Tylenol, a more accurate thermometer, or more illuminating Clone Wars coloring books became so cathartic. Maybe it was a cozy place to kill an hour when you couldn’t be in the house for one more second? Or maybe there is something about the immaculate stacks of well-designed kitchen organizers that is soothing when your kitchen looks like you have been robbed? All I know was that every last aisle of the place seemed to feature a woman with mussed hair and gray circles under her eyes, pushing along a cart full of two wheezing toddlers and dozens of items that nobody needed in the first place.
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Meghan, that study on hormones causing wild-eyed shopping sprees among British women might irk those sensitized to stories blaming estrogen for every whimper, whine, or catfight under the sun. But let's not forget that men have hormones, too! And they do even stupider things. The unseemly recessionary splurge on a purse or bangle is nothing compared with this doozy of a story from Florida, summed up as follows:
Cost of undergraduate degree from Georgia Tech: $100,000.
Night of partying at a strip club: $53,000.
Dad’s reaction to son’s $53,000 one-night bill: priceless.
Snap! Nothing like a booze-fueled, grope-heavy graduation night on the town to hammer home the lessons of the credit crunch.
Now, from a strictly scientific standpoint, a sampling of 443 British women has more clout than this random tale of a frat boy gone wrong. But doesn’t this kind of lend credence to the theory of hormones? Casino owners provoke profligacy with mere oxygen—surely the pheromones hothoused in a dive bar full of oiled-up strippers in the Florida panhandle are 10 times more potent.
No one seems to have much pity for the frat boy. Because, duh. The real question is why the dad let his son go out and buy the sexual attention at all? Though I suppose, in a roundabout way, that’s what clothes-obsessed women are doing in reverse.
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A new study conducted of 443 women in Britain found they were more likely to indulge in an "impulse buy" and to "overspend" during the days leading up to their period. As this BBC News story puts it, "Almost two-thirds of the 153 women studied who were in the later stages
of their menstrual cycle—known as the luteal phase —admitted they
had bought something on an impulse and more than half said they had
overspent by more than £25." The psychologist leading the study, Karen Pine, speculates that buying is often emotional. Hmm, really? I haven't read the study yet, so I can't tell how scientific it is. But if there is anything to it, it points to just how complicated budgeting in a time of real belt-tightening is. For years, economists acted as though spending were based on rational ideas about value; behavioral economists have shown that the way people actually make decisions seems to have much more to do with psychology. Are psychologists now going to say hormones at the root of everything? If so, should women all go on the pill for the duration of the recession? Maybe it really is time for the government to make the pill available right next to the Advil.