Lookin’ So ‘Crazy’ Right Now
Why Beyoncé’s Lemonade Promotes Stereotypes of Women as “Crazy”
I never thought I’d see the day when I’d have anything remotely critical to say about Beyoncé. In my eyes, she’s been #flawless since her camo-clad Destiny’s Child days. In high school I bought pale pink Steve Madden lace-up stiletto boots modeled to look like Beyoncé’s pale pink Manolo Blahnik lace-up stiletto boots, which had been modeled to look like elevated and feminized Timberland boots. (I never wore them; I lived on Long Island and my social life took place mainly in 7-Eleven parking lots.)
Like the rest of the world, I’ve watched Beyoncé’s new conceptual video album Lemonade like, seven times this week. My sister has called Lemonade “2016’s Reynolds Pamphlet,” and indeed, it has set the nation aflame in its revelation of infidelity among our heroes. It had long been speculated that America’s ultimate #goals couple had experienced some trouble in paradise (for them, St. Barts,) but Beyoncé’s vivid confirmation of these rumors in Saturday night’s HBO premiere of Lemonade made the bedrock of our nation rumble as jaws nationwide simultaneously dropped to the floor.
There is much to be praised about Lemonade; it’s bold, bright, confident, risky, and subversive. I admire the way Beyoncé has chosen to address head-on what has long been considered a shameful secret, to have been on the other side of adultery. She provides a happy ending that, unlike so much of what we consume today, feels earned. She owns her feelings of betrayal, her anger, her confusion, her sadness. She makes powerful, contemporary statements about race and womanhood. As far as I’m concerned, Lemonade would’ve been perfect if only Beyoncé had left her baseball bat at home and, unlike in her better-times 2003 chart-topper, left the word “crazy” out of it.
In Hold Up, the album’s second video/track, Beyoncé floats down a vibrant neighborhood street draped elegantly in a tiered goldenrod-hued Roberto Cavalli gown. She passes Technicolor fruit stands and kindly neighbors as she alternately smiles and swings a baseball bat at cars, fire hydrants, shop windows, and ultimately the viewer, fire rising to lick the blue sky behind her. She teeters between shampoo-commercial-style feminine merriment and the clichéd hellish fury of a woman scorned as she sings about her husband’s infidelity:
What’s worse, lookin’ jealous or crazy?
Jealous or crazy?
Or like being walked all over lately, walked all over lately?
I’d rather be crazy
Beyoncé is, of course, not the first to embrace the “crazy ex-girlfriend” trope in her music (the appropriate template for her behavior in this video, although Beyoncé is, of course, not an ex-anything.) Alanis Morissette’s now-classic 1995 breakup song You Oughta Know begins with the singer’s voice composed and measured but quivering, with anger clearly brewing beneath the surface and becoming exposed as she shouts cathartically by the second verse. Carrie Underwood’s 2005 hit Before He Cheats covers similar subject matter to Hold Up, as Carrie digs her key into the side of her cheating ex’s “pretty little souped-up four wheel drive” before, like Beyoncé, taking a baseball bat to the vehicle.
I get it. I’ve been cheated on, and I’ve wanted to smash things. In college, my then-boyfriend called me “crazy” all the time, usually when I called his phone repeatedly in an attempt to find him when I had a hunch he was out being unfaithful. (He was.) After we took a short break from our relationship, I saw a flirty AOL Instant Messenger conversation between my boyfriend and a girl he’d hooked up with while we were broken up when I was using his computer to check my email. I wanted to smash his laptop, but I knew that if I did, I would only give him more confidence the next time he wanted to absolve his own bad behavior with the accusation that I was crazy. So I removed her from his buddylist.
The roots of the “crazy ex-girlfriend” can be traced back to hysteria, which originated in the 4th century B.C.E. as a female-only medical diagnosis of intense emotion thought to be the result of a “wandering womb.” What began with Hippocrates and Plato became somewhat of a diagnostic epidemic in the 19th century, and in 1859 physician George Taylor claimed that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria. Though the designation of women exhibiting a wide range of symptoms from nervousness to irritability to the “tendency to cause trouble” as “hysterical” was ultimately abandoned, the association of women with incapacitating, sanity-threatening emotion has persisted.
But many accusations or implications of “crazy” directed at women do not denote the attribution of pathological mental illness, simply banking on its stigma in our culture as a way to debase them. Women are labeled “crazy” when they speak “too loudly”, reach out “too often,” or express their emotions “too freely;” distinctions that are entirely arbitrary. That does not mean they are thought to be mentally ill, but rather in violation of our culture’s ideas about how a woman should behave as established by patriarchal tradition
The writer Hazel Cills addresses the trend of female artists owning the “crazy” label in her 2014 Pitchfork piece “Why 2014 was the Year of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” Cills argues that female musicians like Taylor Swift, Lykke Li, Iggy Azalea, and Sharon Van Etten are engaging in feminist acts by embracing and reclaiming the “crazy ex-girlfriend” stereotype. Cills explains their motivation: “When women’s romantic behavior is constantly scrutinized as being appropriate or not, the crazy girls say: fuck appropriate, these are my feelings without the bullshit.” Yes, I agree that as women we should own and celebrate our emotions; we should encourage our culture to accept the validity of the female experience, of every thought and every overthought that comes with it. But many who watch Taylor Swift’s performance in her music video for Blank Space as a wall-punching, ex’s-iPhone-submerging wild-eyed waif with a mascara-streaked face may simply misread this type of overblown display as confirmation of their existing beliefs about How Women Are, and it may be dangerous to distribute such ammunition to the type of people who may misuse it.
I admire Lemonade, and its woke-up-like-this-meets-woke aesthetic certainly does plenty to empower women. I am not criticizing Beyoncé’s decision to display her full range of emotions regarding an all too common, all too painful human experience. But Beyoncé is not crazy; she is having a normal reaction to a hurtful betrayal. Between “jealous” and “crazy,” Beyoncé chooses crazy, but only because it feels like an act of resistance or the lesser of two evils, the one that assumes less vulnerability. But jealousy is a valid human emotion, and instead of embracing the catchall label of “crazy” placed upon us and trying to reclaim it by exaggerating its features, we should be trying to clarify the difference between “being insane” and “expressing feelings.” Women should not have to censor their emotional behavior for fear of being called ‘crazy,’ and the first step towards changing this pattern is properly labeling this type of behavior.
In the film Mean Girls, Tina Fey’s character tells her female high school students “You have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores,” and I worry the same thing is happening when, as women, we call ourselves (and each other) crazy. We are trying to take ownership of something that has oppressed us by claiming it for ourselves, but in doing so we are only ensuring that the notion of women as crazy remains, like Beyoncé, a preternaturally relevant element of the zeitgeist.
