We’re all familiar at this point with hysterical woman tropes. Most women have probably been called irrational, delusional and/or crazy numerous times in their lives not just by men, but by women too. It’s ingrained in our society that women are simply not as emotionally stable as men and it has been, as reflected in rhetoric and general society, since Ancient Greece.
The word “hysteria” originates from the Greek word “hystera,” meaning womb because of how the uterus was theorized to result in certain mental afflictions. This was due to multiple factors, including the consensus at the time, which was that women were thought to easily succumb to mental illnesses more than men. And a fervent believer of this pseudo-scientific prejudice was Hippocrates who first wrote about the term “hysteria,” signified by but not limited to blindness, fatigue, hallucinations, seizures, and emotional outbursts/dramatic behavior.
Hippocrates postulated what caused hysteria included that women have naturally cold and wet bodies as opposed to the warm and dry ones of men, expediting their mental and physical decay processes. Thus, women were prescribed to have more sex because of benefits such as the widening of their vaginal canals to help cleanse their bodies of degenerative impurities.
It wouldn’t be until the 1600s that physician Thomas Willis suggested the root of hysteria rather lies in the brain and nervous system. And not until the 1800s that neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot proposed men could experience hysteria as well.
A student of Charcot, Sigmund Freud worked to further his mentor’s research on hysteria, which manifested in the form of his book “Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896) where he explicated his “seduction theory.” Freud observed that many of his female patients diagnosed with hysteria had experienced some kind of childhood sexual abuse from at least one parent. The suppressed trauma from which tended to resurface later in life, often in the form of physical symptoms, also known as what he coined as “hysterical conversion.”
A year later, however, Freud disparaged all of his previous work surrounding hysteria. He realized that if his theory was correct, that would mean this so-called “perverted acts against children” epidemic amongst not only working class families, but also elite families was real. His solution was the “fantasy theory,” where he claimed all those supposed “memories” from women were in actuality nonsense fantasies.
The discrediting of a theory like this from such a reputable psychologist almost validated practices like not believing women, not just in the medical field, but the mass mental institutionalization of women at the time, and overall the stereotype of hysterical women.
Yet, hysteria would not be touted as defunct and removed by the American Psychiatric Association from the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” until 1980. Hysteria is now referred to as an umbrella term as there’s no direct equation to any modern day diagnoses, so a common substitute is somatic symptom disorder, which covers conversion disorder, factitious disorder and illness anxiety disorder.
Hysteria has also been heavily associated with borderline personality disorder, a condition that is hard to distinguish because of how its symptoms overlap with various other mental illnesses. Due to this, BPD is one of the most misdiagnosed with its miscategorization occurring so often that there isn’t an accurate prevalence rate.
One contributor has been the systematic gender bias that women are more emotional, which has influenced the overrepresentation of women in BPD studies, resulting in women being diagnosed with BPD 75% more often than men. This belief has not only culminated in the aforementioned medical field indiscretion, but in addition, the pervasive assumption that a woman’s health problems are either due to her hormones or it’s all in her head.
As part of a feedback system, this has subsequently diffused into and is simultaneously a consequence of Western social hierarchies and the human consciousness. Since women are pegged as more emotional, men have an almost visceral reaction to label them as crazy when they express their emotions, in particular about men’s behavior. This can be seen in Hollywood’s portrayal of the “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” “Man Stealers” and “Asexual Career Women.”
It’s part of a larger trend of men absolving themselves of responsibility to reflect on their own actions so they can improve in the future, whether it be in a relationship or at work. It’s toxic masculinity reminding men and a slap in the face to women that women’s “irrational” feelings are secondary to disconnected men’s emotionally void comfort.
Men don’t want to improve, so they don’t, and when it gets too much, they leave. If a man were to ever show any type of improvement, it won’t be in the place where they learned it from. They just take what they could muster to pick up and move onto the next thing, pretending like that’s how they’ve always been. And yes, while most men are not trying to mentally institutionalize women as much and this whole argument seems blown out of proportion, that doesn’t necessarily mean men try to understand or even like women anymore than they did back then. In reality, they mostly want to just please other men.
If you’re a man who wants to genuinely become more empathetic to women, don’t just say this is all a generalization and you’re not like the rest of them because clearly that’s been said before. Listen to women and take the introspective time to comprehend how your actions have affected the women in your life. And stop resorting to calling women crazy!