Why HYSTERICAL?
I’m not done talking about the book I wrote. Hysterical was published, and sexism didn’t end. Abortion…well, everything actually got worse?
What’s hysteria?
“Hysteria” originated with the early Egyptians and ancient Greeks, and it’s been reincarnated every century, often every decade, all over the world, to describe and imprison women, sometimes with our permission. Only as late as 1980 did the American Psychiatric Association remove “hysteria” from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Hysteria has been a diagnosis, a label, an insult, a misnomer, and a metaphor to contain anything and everything that people can’t tolerate or explain in women. Although literally ancient, hysteria follows women into every interaction, to every appointment, on every date, to the office, and everywhere else.
HYSTERICAL will track how hysteria still affects women in all ways obvious and insidious and diabolic.
What’s HYSTERICAL?
It’s every definition of the word. It’s about:
unexplained physical symptoms
uncontrolled extreme emotion
labeling women derogatory terms to pathologize their feelings and to silence them
the myths and medical misunderstandings of female bodies that just won’t die
the mindbody connection, which echoes part of the OG hysteria diagnosis but without the sexism: that the mind transcribes repressed emotions on the body
And it’s funny.
HYSTERICAL isn’t a newsletter about how men should self-castrate for equality. But it isn’t not a newsletter about that.
Who am I?
I’m a mash-up of Joan Didion with a migraine and Liz Lemon. I’m Miranda Hobbs on the streets and the cartoon Daria in the sheets. I’m between Felicity following her crush to college and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (this is a joke).
I graduated from a liberal arts college with a degree in Women and Murder Studies, but I’m also an enculturated feminist who apologizes to other people for their mistakes.
Sound familiar?
Why subscribe?
This newsletter will have it all:
unsolicited advice on gaslighting (medical, general, and self)
receipts on just how sexist the world is
a needed differentiation between mental illness and “crazy ex-girlfriend psycho bitches”
a scathing indictment of The Little Mermaid
answers to the question “Why do we hate women’s voices?”
alternative models to a media landscape OBSESSED with raped women and dead girls
some science on how emotional pain becomes physical
literally all the reasons why women don’t say what they’re thinking
a bunch of talking cures for those who have been silenced
and more insights from the award-deserving book Hysterical
Join the coven
Be part of a community of people who have been called crazy psycho bitches for expressing an opinion or for experiencing emotion or illness.
The vibe of this coven
Bonkers. Shrill. Emotional. Melodramatic. Medicated. Opinionated. Mouthy. Messy. Shameless. Every popular sexist slur in the book. Britney Spears in 2007. Britney Spears now.
Substack says, “You are inviting people to subscribe to your thinking,” which is an invitation all my ex-boyfriends have declined. Subscribe to my feelings. Subscribe to my feminism. Unsubscribe from your physical pain.
Will this be another feminist rant?
If all goes well!
What will you call critics who will call this a feminist rant?
Patriarchal propagandists. Labels like “feminist rant” are designed to dismiss women and what we have to say so that other people can continue to ignore us and exclude us as authorities and experts of the human condition or whatever. Labels and name-calling are both meaningless nonsense and effective silencing techniques designed to embarrass us into shutting up. But once you know that, then you can dismiss critics and their criticism from your mind. <3
