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 is, perhaps, no better example of this than The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s classic autobiographical novel about a woman driven to insanity, in part, by the constraints imposed on her by society. Published in 1963, the novel influenced generations of women, inspired a wave of female confessional writing, and continues to have an enduring appeal. Earlier this year it was announced that Kirsten Dunst is to direct a new movie adaptation.
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.
Take Taylor Swift, for example: she is worth $ 250m (£190m) and is one of the US’s richest self-made women. Impressive, eh? However, Swift is routinely mocked by the media; painted as a clingy man-eater who races through boyfriends then enacts lyric-based revenge on her ex-lovers.
Swift could have ignored the persona the media had created for her but she chose to satirise it with her hit single Blank Space. This featured lyrics like: “Got a long list of ex-lovers/They’ll tell you I’m insane,” and was accompanied with an over-the-top music video in which she acts out the crazy woman she is painted to be. “Everybody in these tabloidy gossipy blogs thinks they have you pegged, like ‘Taylor’s boy-crazy,” she told Vanity Fair. “I’m work-crazy. That’s the thing that I’m crazy about, that I don’t stop thinking about.”
Swift isn’t the only woman to have subverted the entrenched narrative around “crazy women”. Indeed the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (on Netflix), tackles it head on and has become an unexpected hit. The musical-comedy features Rebecca Bunch, a high-flying but depressed New York lawyer, who quits her job and moves to California because her boyfriend from summer camp lives there. So far, so “crazy woman”. But the show’s theme song dramatises its tension and demonstrates there is more: “She’s the crazy ex-girlfriend!” the chorus trills. “What? No, I’m not! That’s a sexist term!” replies the star. “The situation’s a lot more nuanced than that.”
One person I’d wager would not be able to see that nuance is Donald Trump. The presidential nominee routinely calls women “crazy” and reduces them to their bodily functions. In an ironic twist, however, it looks like Trump might be getting served a little taste of the crazy medicine society has been serving women up for centuries.
“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.
Related: Time to change the language we use about mental health | Mind your language
As more people start to diagnose Trump as crazy, discussion has sprung up around the suitability of the word. Stop calling Trump “crazy”, urges a recent CNN article. It makes the rational argument that crazy stigmatises mental illness and equates mental illness with incompetence. Basically, it explains, “crazy” is not a nice term and you should be careful how you use it.
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.
The term "crazy" shouldn"t be thrown around lightly – ask any woman
