Excuse my title, it’s just there to get the readers attention, so if you’re reading this, it has. For centuries now women have been called crazy, hysteric, loony, and many other demeaning words to suppress their genius. A few examples of this statement can be found in Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, and Gary Nunn’s article “The Feminization of Madness is Crazy.” Each individual person dives headfirst into the confusing, degrading, and Iutterly mad world of misogyny.
In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pepa has just been dumped on her answering machine by her long-time boyfriend. “Of all the misfortunes that can befall a woman — bad haircuts, broken fingernails — there is nothing worse than getting your aorta stomped by a man” (Kempley, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). Even though there are worse things in a woman’s life than breaking a nail. Pepa becomes “crazy” with sadness, and tries to commit suicide, but failing because her bed catches on fire. Although her initial reaction seems to be a bit extreme, she has every right to be upset! She wanted an explanation for why he decided it was over, but of course he wouldn’t return any of her calls. This just adds to more of the “craziness” we women have to deal with. What Almodóvar did that I really liked, was he used an old woman news anchor. In a New York Times article by Vincent Canby he states, “It’s also a place where a television anchor is a sweet old grandmother instead of a barely literate sex symbol” (Canby, Review/Film Festival Concentric Eccentricities in Almodóvar’s Tale). If I had a dollar for every sex symbol I’ve seen read the news, I would be Bill Gates.
In The House of the Spirits every women is her own, and her own is freaking awesome. The only problem with the women in Allende’s novel, are the men they have to deal with. Yes, that is extreme, but sometimes you need the extreme to get your opinion or idea heard.
In “The Feminization of Madness is Crazy,” Gary Nunn could not have written anything more genius than he did in this article. Women have gotten the short end of the stick for many many years. We were seen, and still are, as the weaker, more hysteric sex. See what I did there? “Hysterical. It’s a word with a very female-baiting history, coming from the Latin hystericus (“of the womb”). This was a condition thought to be exclusive to women – sending them uncontrollably and neurotically insane owing to a dysfunction of the uterus (the removal of which is still called a hysterectomy)” (Nunn, “The Feminization of Madness is Crazy). Just that word can show you how we as women have been categorized as an unpredictable and some would say, less than, gender.
Although I have been ranting about feministic issues, I would like to take the time to thank all of these authors with their innovative ideas that have been expressed on the printed page and the flickering screen. If everyone does at least half of what Almodóvar, Allende, and Nunn do, then our world would be all but broken!
