The term 'crazy' shouldn't be thrown around lightly – ask any woman
The term 'crazy' shouldn't be thrown around lightly – ask any woman
Arwa Mahdawi
The ‘crazy woman’ trope stretches from Plato to Plath. Perhaps the rise of the craziest man in the 21st century will force a rethink
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Crazy appeal … Sylvia Plath, as played by Gwyneth Paltrow in the film Sylvia.
Women are crazy. This isn’t me being hysterical; it’s historical. The trope of the crazy woman stretches from Plato to Plath to popular culture. Women, we have been told in thousands of ways for thousands of years, are simply more emotional and more irrational than men.
Madness-as-womanness is something we were first sold by the Ancient Greeks. The problem with women, they decided, was that they had wandering wombs. So, thanks to a few wise men, half the world’s population was diagnosed with a sex-specific disorder: hysteria. As medicine progressed, the definition of hysteria evolved until it was eventually discredited. Nevertheless the idea that women were biologically wired for instability became engrained in culture. What’s more, women started actively buying into the idea. The crazy woman began taking on a crazy appeal.
. . . . .
There are many types of “crazy woman”, each fulfilling slightly different roles. In the taxonomy of crazy women, Plath’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is the doomed heroine, the woman that society wants to keep as a girl. While Esther gave crazy character, a majority of “crazy women” are caricatures of female sexuality. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and history has a lot of scorned women: Miss Havisham, the psychotic spinster in Great Expectations; the bunny boiler, made famous by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction; the psychopathically sexual Amy Dunne in Gone Girl. What all these characters have in common, however, is that over time they have become more than a trope; they have become a cultural norm. The “crazy woman” has become a kneejerk way to put women in their place and remind them that, no matter what they achieve, they are inherently flawed.
. . . .
“Is Donald Trump just plain crazy?” asked the Washington Post. “During the primary season, as Donald Trump’s bizarre outbursts helped him crush the competition, I thought he was being crazy like a fox,” the article explained. “Now I am increasingly convinced that he’s just plain crazy.” It wasn’t just that particular journalist who gave Trump the benefit of the doubt at the start of his campaign. Initially, his eccentricities were largely explained away. Trump was a man, so he wasn’t mad – he was a maverick. He was crazy like a fox. Now, however, people are starting to wonder whether he is crazy like, you know, a woman.
. . . .
Call me crazy, but women are painfully aware of this. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that in thousands of years of dismissing crazy women, it will take one of the craziest men of the 21st century to make us rethink how we’ve used and abused the word.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/commentisfree/2016/aug/07/term-crazy-shouldnt-be-thrown-around-lightly-ask-any-woman
