CALL ME A BITCH, CALL ME A SLUT, JUST DON’T CALL ME CRAZY

CALL ME A BITCH, CALL ME A SLUT, JUST DON’T CALL ME CRAZY

When a woman is referred to as crazy it tends to be for one of two reasons. The first is because she actually suffers from a classified psychological disorder. The second is because she is a woman who said something someone else didn’t want to hear.

A friend recently asked me why she can deal with being called a bitch, and even a slut, but can’t handle being referred to as crazy. What is it about crazy that makes it the most disarming of insults for a woman? One that makes us feel powerless and sometimes even hopeless? I told her that I suspect it has something to do with the implication that we can’t be trusted as authorities on our own lives, let alone the world around us.

On Homeland, which returns for season 4 this Sunday, Carrie is depicted as suffering from both kinds of crazy. Yes, she is bipolar, a condition that we have watched her battle with varying degrees of success. She’s also viewed as woman crazy. And here’s the proof: Regardless of her mental state, nobody ever trusts her sniper-sharp instincts. (“As disturbed and troubled as she is, she’s always fucking right,” Claire Danes has said). For the past three seasons, it was her love for Brody that her peers believed muddled her judgment. Now that Brody is gone, I suspect that her baby or, perhaps, a new love interest (I’m betting on Peter Quinn), could become the new reason she simply can’t be trusted. Whatever it is, in the eyes of others, her emotions remain a constant threat to her ability to reason.

Last year, The Huffington Post ran an essay by dating coach Harris O’Malley on the perils of labeling a woman crazy. In the piece, which went viral, he describes how he and his friends often call women crazy simply for acting in a manner that they do not like. “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,” O’Malley writes. He goes on to look at the way men have long attempted to control a woman by calling them crazy when they feel that she has stepped out of bounds—or rather, his bounds.

The perception that women’s “excessive” emotions are a threat to social order goes way, way back. “Hysteria” has its roots in the Greek word for “uterus,” and until the 20th century, doctors believed that female craziness was the result of something having gone awry in a woman’s reproductive system. Widely-accepted cures included pregnancy and masturbation. (The vibrator was invented for this very purpose!) In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association stopped using the phrase “hysteria,” having come to the conclusion that it was nothing more than an umbrella term used for so-called crazy women.

The fear associated with women’s roiling emotions was also fueled by the belief that our gender is incapable of keeping them from poisoning logic and reason. As Anna Northexplains in The New York Times, from the late 18th century through the middle of the 19th, women were not trusted to be able to understand the difference between fiction and life. “Novel reading for women was associated with inflaming of sexual passions; with liberal, radical ideas; with uppityness; with the attempt to overturn the status quo,” English professor Barbara M. Benedict tells North.

And yet, sociological progress aside (hello, Fifty Shades!), it seems that the pathway to Hollywood recognition is to play crazy. Cate Blanchett won an Oscar for playing a medicated Upper East Sider in Blue Jasmine; Jennifer Lawrence came unraveled in Silver Linings Playbook; and Angelina Jolie was institutionalized for Girl Interrupted. Danes, of course, has received two Emmy awards for her high-wire performance on Homeland.

In a Newsweek piece from a few years ago, Ramin Setoodeh hypothesizes that crazy female characters are so popular because women find very attractive (but mentally unstable) women less intimidating, and men find them sexy. “In most crazy-chick flicks, the female protagonist doesn’t just lose her mind; she loses her clothes. And sometimes she loses her sexual orientation as well,” he writes.

Personally, I’m not so sure. I think that for women—both the actresses and the fans—the crazy chick is a welcome respite from the perfect, and quite boring, women we usually see on screen. (Women who are often figments of a male filmmaker’s imagination.) As for men, well, when we’re talking about women who look like Natalie Portman, Angelina Jolie, and Jennifer Lawrence, they’re going to look hot no matter what they do. And I suspect that those behind the scenes are well aware of the ticket sales that come with a dash of crazy girl nudity. Because, really, how many people saw Black Swan just to see Portman and Mila Kunis go at it in the bedroom?

Though here is where there is hope for Homeland: With Carrie, we have started to move past the trope of lady craziness as a fetish, a condition that can morph a CIA operative into a burbling cauldron of lust. My hope is that this season Carrie moves away from being a crazy woman and can just be a crazy person. I’m not suggesting that the writers strip her of her conflicting emotions, but that they no longer use them to justify why her convictions are greeted with skepticism. After all, the girl is always fucking right. Isn’t that worth something?

Posted on:The Elle.com

 

 

 

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