No, you're not being hypersensitive: How we teach women to gaslight themselves
You're not dramatic, or hypersensitive, or hormonal. Your partner is just an asshole.
“Am I being dramatic? My husband says I am.”
“Maybe it’s just my hormones.”
“Am I being oversensitive?”
“I’m probably just making unreasonable demands.”
It’s impossible to spend even a few minutes in any forum that caters to mothers without seeing a woman wondering if maybe, just maybe, the problem is that she’s crazy*.
Inevitably, the post begins with some utter bullshit the woman’s husband has done—usually something outright abusive. She calmly tries to address the behavior with him, and then he blows up. He yells, or calls her names, or breaks things, or makes threats.
And somehow she wants to know if she’s crazy.
Perhaps the biggest lie of patriarchy is that women are the irrational, hyperemotional gender.
Women are not, en masse, shooting up schools, or raping people, or killing their partners for cheating, or abusing their partners, or acting as if being asked to put away the dishes (or God forbid, participate equitably in raising the children they helped to make) is literal slavery, or spending most of the day crying online about having to give 2% of their income to their children via child support, or simultaneously insisting that children are the woman’s job and that men deserve automatic joint custody, or moaning online about how marriage is so terrible and awful for men, while simultaneously demanding that women should continue to marry them, no questions asked, or…
The list goes on and on.
Society teaches men to act like whiny, entitled babies. And to then insist that their whining, their entitlement, their outsized emotional reactions are not even emotions at all, but pure logic.
Because what could possibly be more logical than asking a woman to put her body and life on the line to push out your child, and then insisting afterward that she is the one who owes you?
“Honey, ignore your stitches from giving birth to my child, and make me some fucking dinner. I deserve it, after all you’ve been through.”
Honestly, it’s amazing more men don’t live in fear of being poisoned.
The belief that women are more emotional, and that whatever a man says must be rational, serves a very specific purpose. It didn’t happen by accident.
When women believe they’re more likely to be hyperemotional—or labeled as such—they are more likely to distrust their own emotions. This makes it easier to gaslight them into believing everything is their fault.
It bears repeating: When women think they’re hyperemotional, or worry about being perceived as such, they become easier for men to manipulate.
They’re willing to do more than they should.
They hide their feelings.
They don’t call things unfair or cruel or abusive when they are.
They don’t demand more or better.
Instead, they ask others if they’re overreacting when, in reality, they’re more likely to be chronically underreacting.
Consider, for a moment: What have you seen men get away with by making women think they’re being hypersensitive? How often have you seen men make women think the woman is being the bad guy for requesting fairness? The narrative of false male victimhood is everywhere. It’s a driving force behind the incel movement. And women’s belief that their basic needs are crazy and irrational prop up this narrative.
This week, instead of asking yourself if you’re being irrational or overly sensitive or dramatic or whatever other coded sexist language you’ve been taught to use to discount your own emotions and gaslight yourself, try asking yourself these questions instead:
Am I underreacting to a serious problem?
Is my partner trying to gaslight me?
How does my partner benefit from making me think I’m being melodramatic?
Is the other person the one who’s actually being melodramatic and overly emotional?
How does making me question my own emotions serve patriarchy? How does it convince me to give more than I should have to?
What do I deserve that I’m not getting? And why do I think it’s ok for that to continue?
Am I treating my partner’s time and desires as more important than my own? Is giving priority to male emotions a cultural norm in my relationship?
*Crazy is an ableist slur, which is why men use it so often. They intend to slur women.
Feminist Advice Friday: Should we stay together for the kids?
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A reader asks…
I wonder if you have any research and thoughts on some partnerships meant just for raising kids until young adults or teenagers, and then relationships end. I am finding myself in that exact situation. I loved my child-raising days and memories. I would do many things differently to protect myself, but overall it was what I dreamed of.
I see couples divorcing in their 40s or after kids are not super young. What do you think of this phenomenon?
My answer:
A relationship doesn’t have to last forever to be worthwhile. And the fact that a relationship ends doesn’t necessarily mean that it never should have happened in the first place. I think we have a weird cultural norm where a divorce is a “failed marriage,” rather than just an ended marriage. The implication here is that the marriage should never have happened in the first place, or that the love wasn’t real.
But maybe it was. Maybe they were your soulmate for a while. Or a soulmate. Or just a worthwhile partner. You don’t have to rewrite the entire history of a relationship to end it. And staying together for a specific purpose is just fine.
There is a fundamental difference between staying together in a happy relationship that turns unhappy, and lingering in an unhappy marriage for the kids.
I reject the notion that people should stay in unhealthy marriages for their children. Several false assumptions are wrapped up in the idea that women have an obligation to stay for the children, and each of these assumptions is harmful both to children and society:
Divorce is always bad for kids.
My parents had a high-conflict marriage. I knew my mom was unhappy, and I knew staying together was bad for both of them. Kids know more than adults want to acknowledge, no matter how hard you might try to conceal your unhappiness or your fights.
Divorce is bad for kids when it disrupts a happy childhood. But for most children of parents who aren’t getting along, childhood does not feel happy. In many cases, divorce means your child spends less time with an abusive or incompetent parent, witnesses fewer parental conflicts, and has parents who are less stressed and distracted.
An unhappy marriage is better for kids than a divorce.
The relationships we experience as children feel familiar, comfortable, and normal. That’s why we so often replicate them in adulthood.
What do you want your kids to perceive as normal?
What do you want their model of love to be?
If you’re in an unhappy marriage, you have two choices for what to teach your kids:
Love means tolerating unkind treatment from the other person, forever. Unkind treatment is love.
Love means loving yourself and your children to get the fuck out of a situation that is not good for either of you. Self-care is love. Prioritizing your kids’ emotional and physical safety is love.
Kids need and deserve to see good, functioning adult relationships. They need to see that it is possible to leave when things are bad. And perhaps most critically, they need to be taught that women are people, whose feelings matter. Boys who see this are less likely to believe that they are entitled to treat their partners however they want while still expecting their partners to stay. And girls learn that their needs matter, and that they do not owe cruel or unkind or abusive men endless loyalty.
When you leave, you give your kids the gift of a vision of a healthy relationship. You give them a clear message: This relationship is not what you want or deserve for your own romantic future.
Your happiness doesn’t matter.
You matter, too. You only get one life. None of us know how long we will be here. The ultimate myth of patriarchal motherhood is that women’s happiness doesn’t matter. We tell ourselves that our time matters less than men’s, and so we don’t demand equitable partnership. We believe that our happiness is less important than everyone else’s. And perhaps most tragically, we believe that we have to choose between our happiness and our children’s happiness.
Understandably, almost all of use choose our children.
Your well-being and your child’s well-being do not have to be in competition. This is not a zero sum game. We are all better mothers when we are happy. Consider how hard it is to be patient, loving, thoughtful, gentle when you’re stressed. Now consider how the chronic, unrelenting stress of a bad marriage affects you as a mother.
How much happier would you be if you got out of a bad marriage? And how could that happiness empower you to become the mother you want to be, the mother your kids deserve?
So many readers have told me that their lives improved when they left their husbands—even if it was hard, even if some of the abuse continued, even if they had a hard custody fight to get through. I have yet to hear from a single woman who believes her divorce was a mistake.
But I know many women my mother’s age who believe that they wasted decades of their lives on miserable marriages.
Our generation must kill the myth that staying together for the children is the right choice.
It is time to act as if women matter, as if mothers’ happiness counts, too.
Because it fucking does.
I publish #feministadvicefriday every Thursday here and every Friday on Facebook. You can submit your own question to zawn.villines@gmail.com, by messaging my Facebook page, or anonymously by using my site’s contact form.
Another absolutely on point article. Thank you so much!