00:01Do you ever feel like you can only be one of two things?
00:04The cool girl next door, the crazy bitch.
00:08Like other words used to shame women,
00:11crazy is aimed at ladies as a means of separating them
00:14from idealized constructions of femininity.
00:17So how did this unfair connection between women and irrationality begin?
00:23In the fourth century BC,
00:25Hippocrates, aka the father of Western medicine,
00:28believed that a woman's womb was capable of wandering around in her body
00:32like an errant squirrel, causing any number of problems
00:35from fatigue to headaches to outright insanity.
00:39Insanity.
00:41But not like actual mental illness.
00:45So, how are your parents doing?
00:48Whoa!
00:51The malady of the wandering womb became known as hysteria,
00:55a catch-all diagnosis leveled at women to explain a variety of disorders.
01:00And the trope of the hysterical woman persisted for millennia.
01:04In the 19th century, countless women were committed to insane asylums
01:08for so-called hysterical symptoms.
01:12Of course, we could just shrug off the whole business of wandering wombs
01:15and hysterical women as a retro, even laughable part of history.
01:20The only problem is that we're still using outdated patriarchal expressions
01:24to describe women, young girls, female-identified people.
01:29Cough for me?
01:32Hyster is actually the Latin word for womb,
01:35and so when you tell someone they're being hysterical,
01:37you're literally saying that they have a problem with their uterus.
01:41Gendered insults are pretty sneaky,
01:43but it's nothing a little self-awareness can eradicate.
01:46Whoa!
01:47In the 1944 movie Gaslight,
01:49Ingrid Bergman plays a newlywed tricked into believing she's losing her mind.
01:54Silly woman.
01:55The man behind the scheme is her husband,
01:57a guy who hides knick-knacks and lies about noises
02:00to convince her she's going insane.
02:02When she asks questions about what's happening,
02:04her husband dismisses her, telling her she's ill and imagining things.
02:08After a while, she starts to believe him.
02:11As a result of the film's commercial success,
02:13gaslighting entered the popular vernacular.
02:17Shhh.
02:18Psychologists now recognize gaslighting as a form of mental abuse,
02:23a means of confusing someone until they doubt their own grip on reality.
02:28What?
02:29Shhh.
02:30This kind of manipulation isn't only damaging psychologically.
02:34Credibility is a basic survival tool.
02:36And giving legal standing to crimes like rape,
02:39domestic abuse, and sexual harassment,
02:42hinges upon taking people seriously with regard to their own well-being.
02:48Shhh.
02:49Whoa.
02:52Men get called crazy too, but it's usually after they've bragged about seeing Bigfoot
02:57or, you know, after they've written an anti-government manifesto in the woods.
03:02Yeah, women get called crazy for significantly less.
03:05Like failing to adequately bury their emotions.
03:08Or asking questions people would prefer not to answer.
03:13There you go, little fella.
03:17Calling someone crazy is a means to delegitimize them and destroy their credibility.
03:22It's the oldest, sneakiest, not to mention most transparent trick in the book.
03:28Which is probably what makes it so infuriating.
03:34So what can we do to make things better?
03:37Well, for starters, let's acknowledge that emotions do not equal insanity.
03:41You have a right to your emotions.
03:43You have a right to express them.
03:45It's one of the really cool things about being human.
03:49And calling someone crazy is an attempt to silence them.
03:52It strips them of their legitimacy.
03:54And when you throw around crazy all loosey-goosey,
03:57you pathologize emotion and further marginalize those among us
04:02who are dealing with legitimate mental illness.
04:05And that's just not cool.
04:07It's founded in a raced, classed, patriarchal system that privileges some behaviors over others for no reason at all.
04:14And if someone you know is being a real
04:17I'm sure you can come up with a respectful way to tell them to tone it down.
04:22Language is powerful.
04:24And you're not crazy.
04:26At all.
04:30Jack, you're so good at recapping.
04:32Can you just...
04:35Come on, don't be crazy!
04:36You're good at it!
04:38I'm not crazy.
04:41And neither are you, YouTube viewers.
04:43And if you're really not crazy, you might want to watch our video that we made last week
04:47about trash and consumerism.
04:49It's right there.
04:52And if you loved that, you can continue to watch us by subscribing.
04:57Right there!
04:58Get your...
04:59Get your...
04:59Right there!
05:01Subscribe!
05:02We need to talk about this.
05:04Okay, sorry.
