If you’ve ever followed any of the sex advice doled out by Cosmo magazine, chances are you’ve probably ruined a perfectly good banana. Today, the women’s magazine has a reputation that precedes itself; what was once a publication focused on sexual liberation and women’s empowerment has now descended into a parody of itself. Yet I still read it exclusively while working out on the elliptical machine at the gym. I choose Cosmo over other reading material precisely for its lack of substance, and after years of only using the pages as something to sweat on, Cosmo, in its infinite fruit-filled wisdom, lost its ability to get a rise out of me. Or so I thought.
When reading the November issue this past week, I came across an article entitled, “Uh-Oh. Your Crazy Side Came Out. Now What?” The article went on to give four scenarios where women “lose their cool” and then provides ways to help you reassure your boyfriend that he still wants to be with you. This type of thinking is of course deeply problematic, but not atypical Cosmo fare. The article, however, is more troubling than usual because it reinforces an attitude towards women that extends beyond the bindings of a magazine. This is not a harmless pop science piece about decoding body language on the first date. This is an article that contributes to a culturally-perpetuated cycle of how men perceive women: crazy.
Such thinking saturates popular culture to a point that the examples are not even surprising, but it’s worth mentioning that even women now label themselves as crazy. In Melanie Fiona’s current radio hit “4 AM,” she opens with the lines, “Sitting here feeling kind of crazy/ But not just any crazy/ It’s the kind you feel when you love somebody.” She goes on to say that her lover is not home at 4 a.m. and won’t answer her calls, leading her to suspect that he’s with another woman. Why is this irrational? Fiona opens the song by blaming herself, a response that’s unfortunately too common when we try to filter our emotions in a society that’s conditioned to ridicule them. Now it’s not just men who dismiss women as “crazy,” it’s women confirming that “crazy” has indeed become a gendered adjective.
This type of emotional manipulation has a name: gaslighting. The term comes from a 1938 British play called Gas Light where the husband psychologically abuses his wife to convince her that she is going insane (he even dims the gas lights in the house and tells his wife that she is imagining it). The original premise is specific and extreme, but gaslighting itself extends to innocuous remarks that we’ve all said at one point or another. An article in the Huffington Post that was published in September entitled “A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not ‘Crazy’” begins with phrases that women have heard many times: “You’re so sensitive. You’re so emotional. You’re defensive. You’re overreacting. Calm down. Relax. Stop freaking out! You’re crazy! I was just joking, don’t you have a sense of humor? You’re so dramatic. Just get over it already!”
These phrases are examples of how gaslighting colors male-female interaction—that when confronted with women’s emotions that fall outside of our male-sanctioned code of conduct, the reaction is to delegitimize the emotions themselves, and by extension, the women who feel this way. And every time we call a woman “crazy” as a synonym for overly-emotional or irrational, we are contributing to the systematic marginalization that discounts opinions that are “too messy” to deal with.
This past weekend, I visited another university and heard a guy describe a girl as “crazy.” I decided to press him on what he actually meant, since the description of a “crazy bitch” is on the verge of becoming almost flippant. He then told me a story that involved alcohol, Taylor Swift and a unitard. Yes, the story was absurd, but what if a guy had been at the center of the story? Most likely, he would be labeled as “ridiculous.” But “ridiculous” is an elected action, a momentary performance before we revert to our stable selves. “Crazy” is innate, a bodily manifestation that should be tempered or mitigated for the sake of others. And by others, I am of course referring to men.
Our representation of the “crazy bitch” is nothing new—feminist theory has been tackling Freud’s idea of “female hysteria” for decades, and fetishizing mental illness is a recurring trope in cinema. What’s troubling is how women are seemingly subscribing to this cultural depiction of themselves by monitoring their behavior so they don’t have to find a rebuttal to “calm down.” What’s so effective about gaslighting is that it’s almost impossible to regain control. If I do “calm down,” I am submitting to your idea of social propriety; if I refuse, I am affirming your original idea that I am a slave to my emotions. Who wouldn’t want to avoid a no-win situation?
Ultimately, I read magazines like Cosmo and listen to the radio to gauge popular thought, and popular thought has decided that “crazy” is an acceptable term to describe a woman, but “bitch” and “c**t” elicit deserved outrage. Gendered language carries with it many implications, but first we must recognize when a new word actually enters this repertoire. As women, our only defense against such dismissiveness is to point out the cycle of emotional manipulation that both genders contribute to at every turn, because calling women “crazy” is just bananas.
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