Stop Telling Girls They’re Hysterical

There goes Caitlin Flanagan again, banging her drum of gender stereotypes, this time to the tune of “girls will be hysterical girls.” In her New York Times opinion piece yesterday, “Hysteria and The Teenage Girl,” Flanagan does her best to perpetuate the idea that all teenage girls are unbalanced, emotional wrecks from whom we should regularly expect incidences of mass hysteria.

Mass hysteria like that which took place in the case she bases her piece on: a “cheerleaders with Tourette’s” incident in upstate New York last Fall. Over the course of several weeks a total of 14 girls came to experience uncontrollable, unexplainable verbal and physical outbursts. Doctors, coaches, parents, and school officials all failed to find a reason why these girls woke up one day and collectively suffered these debilitating symptoms. After describing this episode, Flanagan discovered that it was actually not that rare. There are well-documented cases of mass hysteria, the “most retrograde and non-womyn-empowering condition,” Flanagan writes–with the most retrograde and non-womyn empowering delight. She explains, “both history and myth are filled with stories of girls exhibiting bizarre symptoms around the time of puberty – from Cassandra and her raving (she was right by the way), to the girls of the Salem witch trials (who were killed for being non-compliant types). She then concludes that teenage girls are more likely to exhibit “extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.”

First, what happens when you Google “hysteria and the teenage girl” is that you get millions of hits and they don’t generally include teenage boys. When you Google “hysteria and the teenage boy” you get millions more articles… about teenage girls.

Second, when cases of mass hysteria happen and involve men and boys they’re not usually called cases of “mass hysteria.” We give them a fancy “non-womyn” name, like Mass Psychogenic Illness. One of the first documented and most famous cases of an inexplicable mass event was The Dancing Plague that took place in 1518. Up to 400 people – both men and women – spontaneously began dancing without the ability to stop themselves. Many of them died from strokes, exhaustion and heart attacks.

Third, Mass Psychogenic Illnesses (MPIs) are characterized by several traits, but perhaps none so relevant to the gender of those suffering from an episode than the fact that it occurs in socially cohesive groups experiencing anxiety and stress. In general, MPIs have no clear cause, the symptoms are generally not life threatening and appear and disappear spontaneously. Notably, they occur in cohesive, segregated groups (which could be another way of defining cheerleaders if you want to trade in stereotypes) and symptoms tend to arise when these groups are under stress or when there is a disruption of the ordered reality of the community. Girls and women do make up a larger percentage of those who fall victim to these illnesses, but it is arguable that they also make up a larger percentage of closed circles of emotionally interrelated, cohesive social groups.  As we have so recently and publicly discussed, girls and women have “anger issues” in that they are socialized to not demonstrate anger, but instead to sublimate it where it can sometimes then manifest itself as anxiety or depression.  That is, girls are not born less angry and more anxious.  They’re rewarded for being less angry and more anxious.  So, it should come as no surprise to anyone that large groups of stressed out girls and women collectively facing the dissolution of a cohesive social structure might be more disposed to fall prey to mass psychosis.  It is arguable that men and boys experience similarly jarring episodes of anger and anxiety-channelling mass psychosis, but we call it male aggression and fund military industrial complexes to deal with it.

Flanagan moves from her massively gender-essentialist, superficial and gross analysis to the anecdotal and personal to say most parents of teenage girls are familiar with emotional outbreaks and high drama, and compares raising a girl through puberty to surviving “The Exorcist.” So, I will make the same shift here.  Not only was I a clear thinking teen-age girl, but I am the mother of three very close in age teenage girls. There are days in which they experience, sometimes all at the same time, strong emotions. But, so does my husband. And my father. And my nephews.  And my brothers. They may not be able to express it the same way, but it happens none-the-less. My 15 year old is one of the most unflappable and even-keeled people I know. And I pity the fool who mistakenly gets into an argument with one of my younger daughters as each can dismantle, with rational precision and logic, the most complicated argument, while buffing her nails.

Flanagan closes with the particularly ironic advice that what girls need is “protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist.” For example, the perpetuation of dangerous stereotypes in the pages of well-respected news media outlets.

What girls really need is not to be characterized as inherently mad or inclined to the irrational. I’m with Yashar Ali when he says “Women You Are Not Crazy.”  However, let’s nip it in the bud and make sure young girls know they’re not either.

Tags: Angry women, Caitlin Flanagan, gender bias, hysteria, mass hysteria, misogyny, sexism, Teenage girls