(. . . and neither does your annoying sister-in-law.)
Dear sisters,
We are taught to pathologize women’s reasonable responses to abuse and oppression early in life.
Do you remember the evil stepmothers in the fairytales you heard as a child? They were angry and ugly and emotionally vacant. They loved to terrorize their stepchildren—especially the little girls. The lesson we were meant to take away from these stories is that a woman who can’t nurture children and embrace a life of domesticity is a sick, twisted, loathsome example of womanhood.
It’s no mistake that the plots of these stories never bothered to explore how a woman who is forced to give up her own dreams and aspirations to raise the children of a man who is perpetually off hunting with his buddies while she is trapped in an isolated cottage without running water might harbor some understandable anger and resentment about her situation in life. In the real world, women like this are often diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
Many of us discover the Greek myths later in childhood. In the myth of Medusa, we learn that after Poseidon rapes her, Medusa is transformed into an enraged monster who is doomed to suffer from perpetual bad hair days and is unable to form healthy relationships because her gaze turns would-be lovers to stone.
Might we have been taught to see this transformation as an understandable, protective—even wise—response to sexual assault? Unlikely. If Medusa went to a modern therapist to talk about her experience, she’d be diagnosed as a non-compliant patient with histrionic personality disorder. Some therapists might refuse to work with her and call her “untreatable.”
(By the way, Poseidon is never punished for the rape.)
Personality disorders (PDs) are a cluster of mental health diagnoses that share a group of symptoms that revolve around a person’s lack of ability to regulate their emotions and behaviors. Individuals with these diagnoses often have difficulty sustaining healthy relationships, experience severe moods, and may engage in impulsive and extreme behaviors that can cause harm to themselves and others.
In the view of mental health professionals who believe in the legitimacy of these diagnoses, people with PDs have an internal deficit of coping abilities and interpersonal skills. These folks are thought to benefit from intensive training in how to be healthier, more reasonable individuals who can control their emotions and behave appropriately. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is the treatment of choice for teaching these skills and may be accompanied by medications such as antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and, occasionally, antipsychotics.
Today, a woman is more than three times as likely to be diagnosed with a personality disorder than a man.
Let’s review a few facts about American culture:
• Men commit 80 percent of violent crimes
• Men commit 97 percent of rapes
• Men are the aggressor in 72 percent of domestic abuse cases
• Men commit 98 percent of mass shootings
Now, let’s revisit the fact that women are three times more likely to receive a diagnosis of a disorder that is characterized by impulsiveness, emotional dysregulation, poor coping skills, and harm to self and others when men are over seven times more likely to commit murder.
Women are three times more likely to be sent to DBT treatment to learn to control their impulsive behavior while men are 100 times more likely to sexually assault their date.
(Interesting note: The percentage of cis-women that make up PD diagnoses is falling. Is that because more men are receiving the diagnosis? No, it’s because more gender nonconforming folks are. If you needed more convincing that PDs are a tool of male supremacy culture, there it is.)
In the world of personality disorder diagnosis:
• A woman having multiple sex partners counts as a symptom but a man committing multiple rapes does not.
• A woman instigating frequent arguments with her boyfriend counts as a symptom but a man routinely beating his girlfriend does not.
• A woman accumulating credit-card debt and spending beyond her means counts as a symptom but a man murdering a room full of children with an automatic weapon does not.
• A women facing difficulty feeling safe in relationships after experiencing childhood sex abuse counts as a symptom but a man starting an actual war because his father was authoritarian does not.
Clearly, women who can’t control their emotions and behaviors are the real problem in our society and pose a serious threat to our collective safety. We must pathologize their behaviors and demand they learn skills to limit the immense damage they do to others. We must shame them, dehumanize them, and permanently stigmatize them with labels and diagnoses.
But we must never, ever ask what happened to them.
If we were to ask the evil stepmother in the fairytale what happened to her, I suspect we’d hear the story of a girl with severely limited life choices. She could either live a life of destitution and social ostracization or she could marry the man chosen for her by her family; perform the highly skilled, backbreaking, unpaid labor of caring for his children and household; submit to his sexual advances without question; and endure beatings and deprivation until she died never having experienced a moment of personal autonomy.
Medusa, if she could find the words, might tell us what it felt like to suffer a violent sexual assault for which her perpetrator received no punishment. Instead, she was cursed to spend eternity as a monster, physically repulsive and isolated from all of humanity.
If we asked what happened rather than rushing to diagnose these women’s behaviors as dysfunctional, we’d discover who actually deserves the labels of “evil” and “monster.” And that would upset the apportioning of blame and shame in our deeply misogynistic culture. Rather than being pathologized, women might begin to demand justice and reparations. Rather than maintaining the patriarchal status quo, those who benefit from it might have to give up some of their immense privilege and power.
I wonder what your annoying sister-in-law’s story is.
Are women capable of having unpleasant personalities? Of course they are. Are some women difficult to like? You bet. Do many women, often as a result of abuse, assault, and/or lifelong oppression, find it difficult or scary to maintain healthy, stable relationships? Absolutely.
And yet, do you believe that these women deserve a diagnosis of severe mental illness? Should they be stigmatized and dehumanized because they don’t conform to the people-pleasing, self-effacing, selflessly nurturing standards of modern American womanhood that are dictated and enforced by a deeply sexist culture?
And, most importantly, should mental health professionals be complicit in upholding this blatant form of gender-based oppression?
Listen, sisters, you don’t have to like your annoying sister-in-law. I get it—she’s difficult to warm up to. But let’s try our best to not fall into the trap of labeling women like her with a sexist, stigmatizing mental health diagnosis that exists for the express purpose of punishing women for the crimes inflicted on them by patriarchy.
Warmly,
Sheryl
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