On Crazy Women: Iggy Azalea, Gone Girl, Fatal Attraction, and How Insanity Became Synonymous With A Lot of Other Things

Whilst cruising down the Durham freeway with a car full of fresh produce, I happened upon a local Top 40 radio station, from which the harsh, manufactured tones of Iggy Azalea were emanating. I was detachedly intrigued. I am more out of touch than ever with the pop music genre that I so vehemently despise, given that I no longer even have the occasional night out at a bar to expose me, however transiently, to the Hits of Today. Despite being perfectly content with my iPod full of Led Zeppelin, Tchaikovsky, Sondheim, Bartok, and myriad other works of High Quality Music (insert the raised eyebrows and pursed lips of a Bona Fide Music Snob here), I listen with amused curiosity to this sample of vacuous, soulless, talentless modern music, a song called “Black Widow”.

The song tells the tale of a spurned woman who threatens to take vengeance on her careless former beau. I’m pretty sure she’s implying that she is either planning to kill him, or has already killed him. The lyrics are not terribly subtle. Here are some examples, for your consideration:

“I’m gonna love ya

Until you hate me

And I’m gonna show ya

What’s really crazy”

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Whoa, that sounds kind of nuts. Who can possibly relate to lyrics like that?”

It gets worse. Iggy Azalea (whose Gestalt I will document here for posterity, since she will surely fade into unrecognizable anonymity quite soon: an innocent-looking, attractive white girl who has a throaty, guttural, Lil Kim-esque rapping style) continues with the following:

“I'm gonna l-l-l-love you until it hurts
Just to get you I'm doing whatever works
You've never met nobody
That'll do you how I do ya
That will bring you to your knees”

What you’re supposed to extrapolate from this verse is that this woman is genuinely “crazy”: irrational, illogical, unreasonable, and hyper-sexually conniving. This is a song about a mentally ill woman—not person, woman—who gets dumped, tries to win the guy back through sexual tactics, fails, and then kills him.

This is TOP 40 MUSIC???

Okay, I know what you’re thinking again. You’re thinking, “Come on, Rhea, it’s not that serious. It’s just a dumb pop song. Besides, women can be crazy sometimes, amiright?”

I don’t blame you, if that truly is what you’re thinking; we’re bombarded by images in the media of women behaving irrationally and emotionally. It’s a stereotype so well-worn that we’re hardly even cognizant of its stereotypy: the Crazy Wife. The Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Don’t piss her off, That Bitch Is Crazy. Whenever a woman’s behavior bothers us, we designate her as Crazy. We are comfortable with varying degrees of Crazy Women, a spectrum of hypersensitivity, jealousy, insecurity, and shrill rage that we’ve somehow come to accept as a universal truth of womanhood: Women Are Crazy.

There are so many issues with this stereotype that I scarcely know where to begin dissecting it (and if you know anything about me, you’ll know that I adore stereotypes; thus, a stereotype has to be truly offensive for it to disturb me so).  But let me start by attempting to prove to you that this glibly accepted notion of Crazy Women is so pervasive that a reference to another notorious Crazy Woman popped up in Iggy Azalea’s song about a Crazy Woman:

“I can't fall back go quick
Cause this here a fatal attraction so I take it all or I don't want shit”

I presume you all remember Glenn Close’s character in the 1987 film Fatal Attraction. Close portrayed a jilted mistress of a Manhattan attorney (played by a buoyantly bumbling Michael Douglas) who proceeds to Ruin The Man’s Life with her Excessively Emotional Behavior. The caveat here is that the character is truly mentally ill, and even goes so far as to slit her own wrists and boil Douglas’s kid’s bunny. She then gets shot to death (spoiler alert!) by Douglas’s wife, who Stands By Her Man and does the totally not-crazy thing by killing his Crazy Ex-Mistress. Good for her! Is this an anti-feminist film? Probably. But what film isn’t? (Not many.)

Iggy Azalea’s reference to the film is not so much a self-aware nod to the caricature she is depicting in “Black Widow” as it is a tacit acknowledgement that the archetype of the Crazy Woman is permanent, affixed, and rarely questioned. Harris O’Malley wrote a stereotype-damning article for The Huffington Post called “On Labeling Women Crazy” that I thought was excellent; it was triumphantly quoted throughout social media platforms for about two-point-five days and then it was scarcely mentioned again. In the interim, songs like “Black Widow” have come out. Tabloids have relentlessly mocked Taylor Swift for having a lot of boyfriends and writing mean songs when they break up with her. Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, about a woman who clearly has a whiff of Antisocial Personality Disorder, has rocketed to cataclysmic levels of popularity. We’ve all comfortably settled back in to the idea that women, when they behave in a way that’s objectionable in some way, are Just Being Crazy.

O’Malley admits in his article that, when he used the “C” word, “for the most part, crazy meant ‘acting in a way I didn't like.’”.  But why is it so tempting to chalk up unpleasant behavior in women to something essentially unrelated to unpleasantness, like mental illness? Is it because we as a society tend not to use “crazy” and “mentally ill” as mutually exclusive, interchangeable terms? Colloquially, “crazy” can be used as a synonym for “irrational”, “erratic”, “emotional”, “angry”, “shocking”, and any number of adjectives that are independent of mental illness.  Interestingly, there is no catch-all adjective for men when they act in a way that others don’t like.

But let’s return to Gone Girl for a moment. Truly, I found this book exquisite. I did, however, take issue with the fact that Amy had to be The Crazy One.  Do we really need another example in popular culture of a woman who is genuinely nuts, to provide additional fodder to the already crackling bonfire of anti-feminism? Why couldn’t pathetic, ineffectual, unlikable, insecure Nick be the mentally ill person, instead of the victim that we’re all forced to feel sorry for in the end? (Because, admit it, you did feel a little bit of righteous pity for the poor sucker, taking one for the team and sticking it out for his kid. I, on the other hand, momentarily hated the author for letting Nick be a martyr.)

But it’s not just the fact that Amy is “crazy” that bothers me: it’s the fact that her love for Nick tips her over the edge. In every form of media, women and love are inextricably intertwined. The default for a main character is Male and White; the only time a non-Male is needed is when there needs to be a romantic subplot, and the only time a non-White is needed is when there is a racially-specific subplot. (I’m sure you can think of an isolated example that deviates from this formula, but an isolated example does not a pattern make.) Why was Arwen even included in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy? To provide a romantic subplot. What was Hermione’s ultimate purpose in the Harry Potter series? To have Ron’s babies. How does Katniss end up, after all that revolution-leading? Married with babies. That’s the ultimate goal for women, isn’t it? Love, romance, babies? “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”?

That fantasy is the root of Amy’s insanity in Gone Girl. According to the media, power drives men and love drives women Crazy. It’s that simple.

All that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus bullshit was supposed to be humorous and harmless: the woman wanting to lock a man down in order to best her biological clock and procreate, the man hilariously fighting tooth-and-nail to preserve bachelorhood and independence. A comical tug-of-war between the sexes that somehow ends in happily-ever-after. Romantic comedy garbage. What we subversively ended up with was yet another facile, palatable, culturally accepted strategy for subjugating women.

Don’t hire her, women are too emotional for that kind of job!

You better get a pre-nup; otherwise, your wife may go crazy and try to take half.

My girlfriend won’t let me do that. She’s crazy.

I just don’t think a woman can be President. A President has to be logical and level-headed…

In most Western societies like the United States, institutionalized subjugation of women has more or less fallen by the wayside; necessity in turn demands that there be another way of dismissing women and ensuring that, despite the fact that women can technically pursue the same career opportunities and function independently of men, the superiority of men is maintained. Instead of taking away a woman’s right to vote or her physical safety or her right to wear whatever she wants to wear in public, we take away a woman’s sanity. We rupture her image so that she’ll toe the line—because what sane person wants to be labeled “Crazy”?

In Gone Girl, Nick admits that the thing he fears the most is an angry woman: “I was not good with angry women. They brought something out in me that was unsavory.” Given that this fear is shared by many real-life man, I would ask you to consider that this fear arises from a perceived discord between angry women and gender roles: traditional gender roles demand that men be spitfires—hunters, aggressors, protectors—while women are docile, nurturing, and calming. When a woman is angry, she is by definition not docile, nurturing, and calming. Anger is only acceptable when it is testosterone-fueled. In order to reconcile this perceived disparity with the ostensible modern-day rejection of such arcane gender roles, men must find another justification for why angry women scare them so much: it must be because Women Are Crazy! And an angry woman might prevent a man from doing exactly what he wants to do, which is unpleasant, which means…she must be dismissed.

What better way to dismiss someone than to disparage her very sanity? Brilliant, successful, fascinating Amy is reduced to a pitiable maniac by the end of Gone Girl, just another Crazy Bitch, which is a terrible shame. We don’t remember her witty prose or her ingenuity or the fact that she went to Harvard—all we retain from her character is the psycho way she ruined Nick’s life. If that isn’t anti-feminist, then I don’t know what is.

There are plenty of Internet memes circulating that explore the question, “Why do we need feminism?” I implore you to consider a different, but related, question: “Why do we think we need anti-feminism?” Is it the same reason why white Republicans seem to feel the need to see President Obama as a “nice” Black guy—the kind of Black guy who wears sweaters tied around his neck and goes to Harvard, instead of the kind of Black guy who wears bling and robs liquor stores—the need to see the “other” as something that fits neatly into a carefully shaped mold of acceptability and comfort? Or is it because women, when freed of institutionalized subjugation, possess skills and attributes that are a threat to the long-standing, cross-cultural, and nearly universally accepted dominance of men?

It’s true that the United States has still not seen a female President, but there are plenty of female surgeons, and I would argue that a surgeon, on any given day, wields more power than any Head of State. (Did Dubya ever stand over another human being with a knife in his hand, and then did that human being walk away from him, cured of an illness? Nope.) There have been female surgeons for a long time, and lots of men know this. Perhaps what men are really afraid of is not angry women, but powerful women. Women who may not feel the need to do “crazy” stuff to get their attention.

Because as long as women are the crazy ones, men are the sane ones.

I will complete this thought by explaining that there are two things that bother me the most about the “Crazy Woman” stereotype. Number one: overusing the word “crazy” trivializes mental illness and further marginalizes a group of patients who are afflicted by a genuine medical problem, like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and personality disorders. These patients are sick, just like any other patient, and the colloquial use of the word “crazy” only diminishes their suffering. Number two: I don’t like the fact that women sometimes refer to themselves as “crazy”. I hate that Iggy Azalea came out with this dumb “Black Widow” song, which will surely be snickered at by underage frat boys in bars who will nudge each other and guffaw about how this song reminds them of some Crazy Bitch they used to know. I hate the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. I hate that Lana Del Rey (one of the only modern-day singers I can even stomach) calls herself “f---ing crazy” at the end of her dreamy, immaculate track “Ride”, opening the door for idiotic, machismo-driven conversations about how “all hot girls are crazy”. The essence of the “Crazy Woman” stereotype is diminishment: diminishing mental illness as a serious medical problem, diminishing women and taking away their individuality—their flaws and quirks and foibles and triumphs—and replacing them with a blanket of Female Hysteria and Craziness.

I do believe that fear is at the root of all this. There are certain men who have seen what certain women can do when unencumbered by certain societal restraints. There are certain men who have seen a female surgeon, for example, operating with her elbows deep in bowels and blood, at the end of her thirteenth hour on her feet, nine months pregnant, when her water breaks and she delivers a screaming infant with no pain medication—and then returns to the operating room to finish the case. (This is a true story.) That is indomitable power. That is a feat that no man will ever say that he did—just a biological disparity, a Darwinian twist that forever leaves man inferior to woman: Man Will Never Bring Forth Life From His Own Body. Anything he can do, I can do better.

Maybe that’s why they’re afraid.

Am I crazy for thinking that?