I didn't realize just how damaging this attitude was in the way I related to women.
Part of my journey toward getting better with women was having to unlearn a lot of old attitudes and habits when it came toward dealing with the opposite sex. I, like most men, grew up in an world where certain attitudes toward women were just "the way things were" and we absorbed them without thinking about them.
One of them was the tendency to use labels like "crazy" or "irrational" without thinking. And once I noticed my tendency towards tossing "crazy" out as a verbal short cut, I couldn't not see it everywhere.
It's a habit that we men need to break; it's damaging to relationships, trivializes genuine mental health issues and -- most importantly -- hurts women as a whole.
There are certain words that are applied to women specifically in order to manipulate them into compliance: "slut," "bytch," "ugly/fat" and, of course, "crazy."
"Crazy" may well be the most insidious one of the four because it encompasses so much. At its base, calling women "crazy" is a way of waving away any behavior that men might find undesirable while simultaneously absolving those same men from responsibility. Why did you break up with her? Well, she was crazy. Said something a woman might find offensive? Stop being so sensitive.
The idea of the "crazy" woman is so vague and nebulous that it can apply to just about any scenario.
"Crazy" Women
The association between women's behavior and being labeled "crazy" has a long and infamous history in Western culture. The word "hysteria" -- defined as "behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion, such as fear or panic" -- is derived from the ancient Greek word "hystera," meaning uterus. Until the early 20th century, female hysteria was the official medical diagnosis for a truly massive array of symptoms in women including but not limited to: loss of appetite, nervousness, irritability, fluid retention, emotional excitability, outbursts of negativity, excessive sexual desire and "a tendency to cause trouble."
Gaslighting and Emotional Manipulation
When someone talks about the woman who he broke up with because she called too often or seemed get emotionally involved faster than he was comfortable with, because she got angry with him over the way he acted, she was always arguing with him about stuff or even that she wanted different things from the relationship, it's not uncommon to hear, "That's why you don't stick it in the crazy." The man is absolved of any responsibility for the break up;
The trend of labeling women "crazy" is part of the culture that socializes women to go along to get along. When women are told over and over again that they're not allowed to feel the way they feel and that they're being "unreasonable" or "oversensitive," they're conditioned to not trust their own emotions. Their behavior -- being assertive, even demanding or standing up for how they feel -- becomes an "inconvenience" to men and they're taught not to give offense and to consider the feelings of others before their own.
Casually, even reflexively calling women crazy and the stigmatization of "crazy" (i.e., inconvenient or uncomfortable) behavior has become a way of trying to keep women behaving in a very specific and limited manner. It perpetuates the madonna/whore dichotomy -- that women are either submissive, demure and sexually restrained or irrational bytches on wheels, the emotional equivalent of riding Space Mountain after five shots of Mescal.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harris-oamalley/on-labeling-women-crazy_b_4259779.html
Part of my journey toward getting better with women was having to unlearn a lot of old attitudes and habits when it came toward dealing with the opposite sex. I, like most men, grew up in an world where certain attitudes toward women were just "the way things were" and we absorbed them without thinking about them.
One of them was the tendency to use labels like "crazy" or "irrational" without thinking. And once I noticed my tendency towards tossing "crazy" out as a verbal short cut, I couldn't not see it everywhere.
It's a habit that we men need to break; it's damaging to relationships, trivializes genuine mental health issues and -- most importantly -- hurts women as a whole.
There are certain words that are applied to women specifically in order to manipulate them into compliance: "slut," "bytch," "ugly/fat" and, of course, "crazy."
"Crazy" may well be the most insidious one of the four because it encompasses so much. At its base, calling women "crazy" is a way of waving away any behavior that men might find undesirable while simultaneously absolving those same men from responsibility. Why did you break up with her? Well, she was crazy. Said something a woman might find offensive? Stop being so sensitive.
The idea of the "crazy" woman is so vague and nebulous that it can apply to just about any scenario.
"Crazy" Women
The association between women's behavior and being labeled "crazy" has a long and infamous history in Western culture. The word "hysteria" -- defined as "behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion, such as fear or panic" -- is derived from the ancient Greek word "hystera," meaning uterus. Until the early 20th century, female hysteria was the official medical diagnosis for a truly massive array of symptoms in women including but not limited to: loss of appetite, nervousness, irritability, fluid retention, emotional excitability, outbursts of negativity, excessive sexual desire and "a tendency to cause trouble."
Gaslighting and Emotional Manipulation
When someone talks about the woman who he broke up with because she called too often or seemed get emotionally involved faster than he was comfortable with, because she got angry with him over the way he acted, she was always arguing with him about stuff or even that she wanted different things from the relationship, it's not uncommon to hear, "That's why you don't stick it in the crazy." The man is absolved of any responsibility for the break up;
The trend of labeling women "crazy" is part of the culture that socializes women to go along to get along. When women are told over and over again that they're not allowed to feel the way they feel and that they're being "unreasonable" or "oversensitive," they're conditioned to not trust their own emotions. Their behavior -- being assertive, even demanding or standing up for how they feel -- becomes an "inconvenience" to men and they're taught not to give offense and to consider the feelings of others before their own.
Casually, even reflexively calling women crazy and the stigmatization of "crazy" (i.e., inconvenient or uncomfortable) behavior has become a way of trying to keep women behaving in a very specific and limited manner. It perpetuates the madonna/whore dichotomy -- that women are either submissive, demure and sexually restrained or irrational bytches on wheels, the emotional equivalent of riding Space Mountain after five shots of Mescal.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harris-oamalley/on-labeling-women-crazy_b_4259779.html
