I.
There are many kinds of power that a woman can have. She can first of all be fictional, historical, outside of existence in one way or another. She can girlbossgaslightgatekeep, earn male respect by adopting masculinity, financial literacy, and a navy blazer. This can look like a Margaret Thatcher, or at the other end of the spectrum, a Miranda Hobbes. She can be white, weild that historically grounded power possessed by the plantation wives and the Amy Coopers. She can, if pop culture is to be believed, have the power that comes from being a Sex Goddess: a master of twerking, and of using men with irreverence.
Trying to claim one or more of these forms of power is understandable. It’s easier to think that life is a matter of circumventing powerlessness, rather than accepting it as your point of departure. You can pull yourself up by your emotional bootstraps. If you are financially independent, you don’t have to be financially reliant; if you are cold and stoic in your blazer you are not hot and hysteric in your petticoat; if you pursue meaningless sex with conviction you will never the woman waiting by the phone. At all costs you want to avoid being the hysterical woman, because once you are, there is no going back.
II.
There are many things that you can do to activate the fall-gates that drop you into the space of the hysterical woman. This is especially true if you are woman who dates men, men who are taught many versions of the hysterical woman narrative: that women are sick parasites, emotional liabilities, financial drains, energy sink holes, open bear traps, dark clown sewers, villains who want to ensnare you into loving them. It is hard to see a male commitment to the “fun” and the “casual” as anything other than a commitment to these myths. After all, there is nothing less fun and casual, and more serious and involved, than the hysterical woman.
Anyway, there are many things you can do to find yourself in this space. You can ask someone, in the early days of the pandemic, not to wander around your hometown without a mask. You can critique someone for making a rape joke at a party. But most of the ways are much more mundane—you can activate suspicions of hysteria by doing something as simple as sending a double text. Or worse, leaving a voicemail, the 2021 equivalent of speaking in tongues. Although admittedly, speaking in tongues would be preferable to the Man Who Fears the Hysterical Woman, because it would be another way to avoid hearing you. This always seems to be the ultimate goal.
Shockingly, sometimes your own friends drop you into the sphere of the hysteric. They tell you that you are doing too much when you ask an uncommunicative man if something is wrong. You feel deeply embarrassed that your own friends see you in this way, and only later recognize that their assessment of the situation is misogyny disguised as advice to “just play the game.” When tears spring into your eyes, you walk it off—the last thing you want is to fall deeper into the trap.
III.
The narrative of female power that is the most irritating is that of the Sex Goddess. It is supposedly a more accessible form than the previous ones—you can be Black, and poor, and in existence, and powerful still—which is probably why it is sold so heavily to the public as “sexual liberation.” The myth is irresponsible precisely because of how commercialized it is, and readily accepted as truth by the average (oppressed) female consumer. In pop culture, this form of power is exemplified by the music video trope in which a sexy woman kills a man after sexually seducing them, in what is supposed to be a plot twist.
In the last few seconds of the Need to Know music video, the lights of the male protagonist’s eyes go out, and it is quite obvious that Doja Cat had something to do with it. (In this video she has multiple fake forms of power—the fictional, because she is an alien creature, and the girl boss, because she is Doja Cat, and the Sex Goddess, because naturally.) There are so many examples of this music video trope that a quick internet search reveals the following roundup from 2018: Slay Queens: 12 Beautiful Music Videos About Women Murdering Men.
To me, the sexually empowered, occasionally violent Sex Goddess is an extension of American militarism. It’s an extension of a culture that idealizes the Charlize Thereons and the Gal Gadots, that constantly sells violence abroad with a side of ass. It’s a symptom of a system in where IDF soldiers can literally post thirst traps as valid military tactic. The power that I am much more interested in thinking through is Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic.
IV.
Fantasies of violence, especially highly curated, high-budget fantasies in which the woman is still primarily a sex object, do not actually constitute power. Surely if they did, the white men that direct and produce these videos and movies would not endanger themselves by selling this idea to us so consistently. However, as a woman stuck, I see the appeal of resorting to violence in attempt to balance the scales. I especially see this appeal because the hysterical woman trope has itself long been associated with violence.
Fatal Attraction, the 1987 movie that in many ways is the textbook example of the hysterical woman, is very violent. In an ABC News interview about the 30th anniversary of Fatal Attraction a few years ago, Glenn Close’s co-star Michael Douglass says that what made the film so scary was that the situation "could happen to anybody." Any man could find himself, at any moment, the victim of a hysterical woman; this is why it is so important to resist.
In the same interview, Close regrets the fact that her character has become a villain. She talks about the ending, in which her character, the hysterical woman in question, is shot by another female character, her lover’s wife. Although she resisted the ending at first—“it was going to make a character I loved into a murdering psychopath”—she ultimately agreed to shoot the scene:
“My friend William Hurt said, 'You've fought your battle, now be a team player.' So I shot it. And I learned something. It's what the Greeks do. There's order in the family, then some element creates chaos, then order has to be restored. It's restored in tragedies through bloodshed. My blood was shed for order to be restored. It was cathartic for the audience.”
V.
The space of the hysterical woman looks like a 20th century dumbwaiter. The sides may be smooth, or grated, or rusted over completely. The dumbwaiter can be built into a school, or a restaurant, or a mansion. It doesn’t matter where it is, what it is made of. Every move you make threatens a deeper plummet, so it is best if you stay still. Once you’re in the space of the hysterical woman, anything you do is hysterical—including and especially any attempts to escape. Engaging with men in general, and dating them specifically, is an endless cycle of Choose Your Own Hysteria.
Romantically speaking, if you make that phone call, you are hysterical. If you ask for an answer or an explanation or a conversation of any kind, you are hysterical. If you type that long text saying exactly what you think, you are hysterical. If you resist your mistreatment in any way, you are hysterical. If you have a tendency to resist things in general (such as the spreading of the corona virus, or of rape jokes at parties), you are hysterical. If you accuse a man of being part of a structure of oppression, you are hysterical. If you project past negative experiences with men onto future negative experiences with men, you are hysterical. If you insist that you are not hysterical, well, somebody should get you that straightjacket already.
The elevator shaft falls into darkness.
You don’t like being in the dumbwaiter. You would prefer to rest on a couch, or a park bench, even; but then again, you’re not the one who stored yourself away as decidedly excess weight. You try to remember why he put you there, what you did this time. Was it the text, the call, the having of a backbone and a will? If it was anything at the Glenn Close level, you would remember, or at least you think you—right? This is what you think before you fall asleep in the metal box.
VI.
Reclaiming sex is not the same as reclaiming the erotic, or female power. Divesting sex from emotion—get that bread, get that head, then leave—doesn’t really seem like the win that the culture makes it out to be. I deeply believe that women should make the sexual choices that they want to make, including having casual sex whenever. I do not resist the idea of having casual sex but rather the idea that doing so is part of a subversive or radical framework of “power.” Similarly, while I think twerking in music videos is fun, and a nice departure from white beauty standards of flat-assery, I don’t think that it’s empowering. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t roll my eyes when I heard Meg Thee Stallion’s latest.1
You cannot convince me that the Sex Goddess myth serves any other interest but that of capital. Any form of “power” that doubles as a highly profitable aesthetic, and that lines the pockets of white executives and the conglomerates they own, is surely anything but. The race of the video vixens can change, and that can be analyzed as a net positive or negative, as a small “representative” win or a sinister incursion of capitalism, but it’s clearly all the same shit. Honestly, I don’t really care whether the woman gyrating in a dimly lit club near a stripper pole is Britney Spears or Meg Thee Stallion.
To me, the recent Britney Spears testimony only highlights the way that Sex Godesses are ultimately tools of the master. Looking at Britney’s Instagram is a sad experience. In theory she has all the forms of power—the power of the fictional icon, the power of the white woman, the power of the girlboss—but in practice all she can do is look out from her balcony, or her living room, or another gilded space of entrapment. (In a big house, there are many dumbwaiters.) Her main identity, not only personally but legally, is still that of the hysterical woman.
VII.
Being in the space of the hysterical woman is emotionally traumatizing but also physically uncomfortable. It’s been hours, and days, and years, and there’s not a lot of air in there. Dumbwaiters were designed for perishable items, not women, although once inside you do feel like a perishable item. The space would be ok for a dead body, admittedly, especially if it were chopped into pieces. But you are not a dead body yet, only one that cannot be seen or heard or rescued. If you’ve been in the dumbwaiter long, you’re familiar by now with the smell of iron, the cold seeping under your seat. You are familiar with the inability to breathe, especially when you realize that you will not soon be let out.2
One Tip
Like my writing? Think I am not a Sexual but rather an Erotic Goddess? Want to help me pay the dumbwaiter repair man? Feel free to tip me through my Ko-fi account.
One Update
I am now balancing two part-time jobs, to say nothing of the full-time occupation of Being Hysterical. This is just a heads up that these newsletters will be a little more sporadic this summer (you may have noticed that this is gracing your inbox on a Monday and not a Friday.) The goal is still to upload every other Friday, but please forgive me if I fail in that. I love you for reading.
One Recommendation
Ungodly Hour, Chloe x Halle (…an example of erotic power!)
Before you come for me, I’m not saying that Meg should have the sole responsibility of changing the narrative blah blah blah, or that I don’t listen to her catchy music. Please go elsewhere with your over-reverence of wealthy pop celebrities!
This essay is dedicated to M, a fellow hysteric in life and in love