Yashar Ali: A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not "Crazy" You're so sensitive.
You're so emotional. You're defensive. You're overreacting. Calm down. Relax. Sound familiar? If you're a woman, it probably does. Do you ever hear any of these comments from your spouse, partner, boss, friends, colleagues, or relatives after you have expressed frustration, sadness, or anger about something they have done or said? When someone says these things to you, it's not an example of inconsiderate behavior.
And this is the sort of emotional manipulation that feeds an epidemic in our country, an epidemic that defines women as crazy, irrational, overly sensitive, unhinged. I think it's time to separate inconsiderate behavior from emotional manipulation, and we need to use a word not found in our normal vocabulary. I want to introduce a helpful term to identify these reactions: gaslighting. The term comes from the 1944 MGM film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. And the act of gaslighting does not simply affect women who are not quite sure of themselves. Why? An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry. When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of.
He wore one himself--for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India. Right now, 88% of women in India resort to using dirty rags, newspapers, dried leaves, and even ashes during their periods, because they just can’t afford sanitary napkins, according to "Sanitation protection: Every Women’s Health Right," a study by AC Nielsen. He first tried to get his wife and sisters to test his hand-crafted napkins, but they refused. Is Hysteria Real? Brain Images Say Yes. On Dissent and Intellectual Honesty » Tammi Tasting Terroir.
You say a thing.
I disagree with the thing you said and I tell you so. You say:Everybody is entitled to their opinion.Why are you so difficult? Nothing, and look surly or distraught. The first example is a ‘non-answer’, designed to stifle discussion and debate. I may have information you don’t have about the topic. Academics are trained to research a topic until they know it inside and out. Newspapers are not authoritative. What you read in The Australian about climate change is not authoritative.
The second response (that I am being difficult) is also a non-answer, but a more aggressive one in which I am positioned as an unreasonable person who won’t let a person speak freely. You’re not racist/sexist/nationalist – I’m just difficult. I’ll admit it. I will tell you I disagree with you when you say things that maintain hegemonic structures such as white privilege. But wait, you meant no harm? You say a thing.
I am then a lesser person for my intellectual dishonesty. BBC Radio 4 Programmes - In Our Time, Hysteria.