When asked why a recent relationship failed, a lot of guys seem to plead insanity. I don’t mean their own insanity; I mean their exes’.
“Oh,” they say, “she was crazy.”
Any number of conflicts, themes and motifs may have been behind the breakup, but if you want the Sparknotes version, it’s that the lady was bonkers.
Calling an ex crazy is, obviously, a cop-out. It conveniently absolves the accuser of any responsibility for the breakup while painting the ex as someone who simply could not be reasoned with. This is, unfortunately, a highly effective cop-out for writing off a female ex.
I’ve heard men called crazy as well, but not in the same gendered context. For a little background, the term “hysteria” derives from the Greek word hystera, meaning “uterus.” Nineteenth century Western medical practice attempted to diagnose the female body as a source of emotional instability, a tradition that, though discredited, still has its proponents. In some circles it’s still considered funny (hysterical, if you will) to joke that women on their periods are rampaging harpies incapable of rational thought. Then there are the endless articles coaching men on how to talk to women in their emotive, native language of sniffling, groaning and stroking a nearby throw pillow. It’s not that men can’t be crazy; it’s just that women are socially expected to be guided by pure emotion, so calling a woman crazy often doesn’t provoke further questioning. Men are from Mars, women are from Hystera.
The crazy woman trope has hung around pop culture so long you’d think it would take the hint and stop calling you at home during dinner. There’s Glenn Close as the iconic woman scorned in “Fatal Attraction”; Isla Fisher as kinky clinger bridesmaid in “Wedding Crashers”; and (admittedly more of a parody of this trope) the “Overly Attached Girlfriend” YouTube character, she of the piercing stare and deadened lower-face-half. The common factor in these portrayals is a male influence that derails these women’s mental hardware and reduces them to psychosis and obsession. (One must suspend disbelief that Vince Vaughan is capable of any of this.) Sadly, life seems to imitate art in this respect. I’ve heard guys speculate on the source of a woman’s perceived insanity, citing anything from “daddy issues” to a former boyfriend who perhaps didn’t “treat her right.” It’s callous to dismiss a woman as insane, but it’s just plain arrogant to assume that a man must always be the cause of said insanity.
Accusations of woman-crazy always remind me of a scene from Sylvia Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar,” wherein the protagonist, a patient in a mental ward, is visited by her vapid ex who asks her, worriedly, “Do you think there’s something in me that drives women crazy?” She laughs in his face. Which is something anyone reading this should try next time she hears someone call a woman crazy.
Charles McCrory is a junior English major from Florence.
