With a headline like “In Recession, Women Splurge As If Addicted” a story from LiveScience.com, distributed by Yahoo News and the AP, my hackles can’t help but be raised.

What luck then that I find my preemptive anger is right on target!

Firstly, the article opens, “This may come as little surprise to most people: In times of crisis, women are more likely to take a shopping spree than in normal times.”

GET IT? WINK WINK! WOMEN ALL LOVE TO SHOP.

We’re just a whole phalanx of Jimmy Chootastic Shop-a-holics! No surprise here! Nuh uh!

The gist of the article states that

Of the 700 women surveyed, 40 percent said depression was an excuse to overspend; 60 percent said “feeling a bit low” was a good enough reason. “This type of spending, or compensatory consumption, serves as a way of regulating intense emotions,” said Karen Pine, a University of Hertfordshire professor and author of “Sheconomics” (Headline Publishing Group, 2009).

Referencing a recent UK study of how people spend money in tough economic times — roughly, that like an addiction to drinking or using drugs, those rates go up in times of stress and anxiety.

Oh, but what’s this, seven paragraphs down from the top?

The problem is likely not confined to women. A 2006 study in the United States found 6 percent of women have it so bad they are labeled compulsive buyers, but so are 5.5 percent of men.

Oh! Well then! So it’s NOT just women then?

Well, maybe you’d like to change your headline then, yes?