Stop Calling Women Crazy

Dear Humanity,

I’m going to ask you nicely. Please stop calling women crazy. It would really mean a lot to us. Originally, when this topic first entered my thought process, I was going to target and focus this post solely on why men should stop calling women crazy. After writing a long, drawn-out article on just that, I realized, us women; these girl on girl crimes, are just as bad. However, for the sake of argument, I’m going to have to throw you straight boys under the bus. Just a little. My apologies. You’re not all so bad, right?

When did it become okay to start labeling a non-diagnosed, perfectly healthy woman crazy? For hundreds of years, “female hysteria” was a common diagnosis routinely made exclusively in women who exhibited symptoms such as sexual desire, shortness of breath, and my personal favorite – “a tendency to cause trouble.” Thankfully, female hysteria is no longer recognized as mental illness, and such diagnostics faded out in the early 20th century. Good thing, too, because if any of these said professionals were to walk around the West Village on a Saturday night, we’d all be stripped of our bandage dresses, sent to the looney-bin and locked away for good.

So, you see, we’ve been labeling women crazy since the beginning-of-freakin’ time, and while saying “since the beginning of time” might be a bit of stretch, it has in fact been long enough for society to think that it’s acceptable to throw labels at people under false pretense. Kind of like how using the word “crazy” to describe a woman who just genuinely cared about you is a bit of a stretch. See what I did there.

Now, this isn’t meant to argue that there are, indeed, some crazy bitches out there. I’m not talking about the ones that need to be taking medication for it, and can occasionally be seen wailing knives outside of her ex-boyfriends house. I’m talking about that girl who texted you the day after the two of you went out, or the girl who was torn to pieces and cried for 6 days over you cheating on her. The girl you spoke to your buddies about, and swore she must be crazy since she, like, texted you. I have no business making a medical diagnosis, but I’m pretty sure these aren’t crazy bitches. These are women. Women who have the capacity to love, and just want that warmth reciprocated. She’s just showing you feeling, not signs of mental illness, and we need to stop confusing the two. Stop labeling genuine, caring, wonderful women crazy.