“She was normal until we broke up. After that? I’m telling you man, she went CRAZY.”
I heard that one just last week, but I know that I’ve heard more than a dozen variations of the same sentence in the course of my lifetime. In fact, “crazy exes” are so popular that there are hundreds of memes and articles depicting them, as well as an entire entry in Urban Dictionary. It’s also a well-known TV character trope. And it goes beyond exes, too. There are crazy girlfriends, crazy friends, crazy sisters, mothers, stepmothers and mother-in-laws.
The thing is, why are these “crazy exes” almost always people who identify as women? As comedian, actor and musician, Donald Glover, pointed out in one of his stand-up shows: we hear men talk about the crazy women in their lives, but never the other way around. Again — why? Why is it always women?
Maybe it’s because we’ve been labeling women as “crazy” since the beginning of human history. Women were thought to suffer from “female hysteria” in the days of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, and this tradition of diagnosing women as hysterical continued through the Victorian era. The symptoms varied — some were thought to be anxious, others exhausted, some thought to have a stronger sex drive and others thought to have a weaker sex drive — but the in the end, it was labeled as hysteria.
It’s 2016 now, and while we cease to use the term “female hysteria,” the idea of a “crazy” woman still remains. It needs to stop.
First, calling a woman “crazy” invalidates and delegitimizes her real emotions and thoughts. Women deal with gaslighting on a daily basis. They are constantly told that they are too sensitive, overthinking something, or overreacting to a simple situation. This leads to the constantly second-guessing of whether we’re allowed to feel what we feel — which, of course we are. When women are called crazy and taught to believe that the way we experience our lives makes us “insane,” they’re victims of gaslighting, and that’s emotional abuse.
We all have every right to our own feelings simply because they’re our own and very real to us, even if those feelings make others uncomfortable. People who talk about the “crazy women” in their lives are essentially saying that these women were upset in a way that was inconvenient or undesirable for them: “She was upset, and I didn’t like that or see reason in it.” It ignores the possibility that a woman could be both emotionally expressive and rational, and also prevents people from recognizing and understanding how their actions affect others’ feelings.
Indeed, you might remember that in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Ron and Harry seem to struggle with this, too. Harry can’t fathom why Cho would burst into tears after their kiss, and Hermione seems to think it’s because she’s experiencing so many different feelings. Ron expresses his doubts that someone could feel a range of complex and entangled emotions simultaneously, to which Hermione famously responds, “Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon.”
Which brings me to my next point: while this isn’t really true — no one actually has the emotional range of a teaspoon — a toxic masculinity code dictates that men must act like it is. Men behave on a very, very narrow spectrum of emotion. Should any of their emotions fall outside of this spectrum, they’re emasculated. The world has not been kind to women who express their emotions, and it won’t be kind to men who do either.
Actually, the term “crazy” is more than just unkind — it’s problematic. It perpetuates the stigma that surrounds mental illness and other mental health challenges, and furthers stereotypes about people who struggle with these issues. Especially women.
I implore you: the next time you hear someone call a woman crazy, think about pointing it out, and why explaining it’s wrong. No, you’re not policing language or people, or even asking for political correctness. You’re working towards building a culture that values healthy emotional expression, mental wellness, and women.