No, you're not hormonal: How we teach women to gaslight themselves

I'm on vacation this week, so enjoy this reprint from last year!

Note: I’m on vacation this week, so please enjoy this reprint from last year!

“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.