Hysterical Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Elissa Bassist

  Cover design by Amanda Kain

  Cover illustration © Marza / Shutterstock

  Cover texture © jessicahyde / Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2022 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Hachette Books

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  HachetteBooks.com

  Twitter.com/HachetteBooks

  Instagram.com/HachetteBooks

  First Edition: September 2022

  Published by Hachette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Hachette Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-0-306-82737-2 (hardcover), 978-0-306-82739-6 (ebook)

  E3-20220812-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. Medical History

  2. Hysterical Woman

  3. Crazy Psycho Bitch

  4. Who Gets to Speak and Why

  5. Girls Versus Boys in Conversation

  6. Why I Didn’t Say No

  7. Emperors Without Clothes

  8. Must-See Dead-Girl TV

  9. STFU

  10. Silence and Noise

  11. Hysteria Reboot

  12. Speak Again

  13. Reclaiming Women’s Voices

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Notes

  For my mom,

  for Thea,

  and for every other crazy psycho bitch

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  INTRODUCTION

  You don’t have a brain tumor,” the first neurologist said.

  “You need new lenses,” the first ophthalmologist said.

  “You may have a sinus infection,” the owner of the bagel shop said, along with my physician.

  It was late February, three months after the 2016 election, and my vision had blurred.

  This would accelerate into a wire-hanger-in-the-brain headache, and the headache would segue into a relentless sore throat, which would segue again, into a persistent stomachache, and then again, into a herniated disc, among other symptoms—so many that it got embarrassing. For the next two years I wouldn’t have a life; I’d have appointments: with a psychologist or a psychiatrist or ophthalmologists or general practitioners or neurologists or a psychopharmacologist or a radiologist or an allergist or an ear, nose, and throat specialist or a gastroenterologist or a nephrologist or an orthopedic hand surgeon or an occupational therapist or a rehabilitation spine specialist or a physical therapist or a massage therapist or an acupuncturist or an herbalist or an obsessive-compulsive disorder specialist.

  Each week I’d average two to three appointments and would take myself to each one alone, weighing a little less than I weighed before, and with a little less hair.

  The diagnosis I’d receive over and over, second to no diagnosis, was Nothing Is Wrong with You.

  I had what millions of American women had: pain that didn’t make sense to doctors, a body that didn’t make sense to science, a psyche that didn’t make sense to mankind in general.

  To make sense of it, to not die from it, to recover, I had to reach the origins of these undiagnosed ailments—and how they (and I) (and women) are misunderstood and mishandled. I had to backtrack to birth, to mine and to Eve’s.

  What I figured out is best expressed by my mom, who within ten minutes into any conversation says in her Southern accent, “It’s a man’s world.”

  The author and activist Caroline Criado Perez backs up my mom in Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men:

  Starting with the theory of Man the Hunter, the chroniclers of the past have left little space for women’s role in the evolution of humanity, whether cultural or biological. Instead, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence. And these silences are everywhere. Films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics. The stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future. They are all marked—disfigured—by a female-shaped “absent presence.”

  These silences are everywhere. Many I experienced, but many I didn’t notice. Sitting in cars, I suspected the seatbelt wasn’t designed by a person with boobs. As a pedestrian, I noted that US traffic signs showed men walking (women were, obviously, at home, in triangle dresses, nursing their children or husbands). As I spent time in exam rooms as a sick woman, I stared at the medical wall art where female bodies were absent and male bodies—depicted as the human body, the universal body—were everywhere. When I scored a free trip to Israel and visited the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, I faced what women have faced for centuries: far less of the Wall than men (the Wall splits women from men, and the men’s spot is two-thirds of the Wall, so women squish together to talk to G-d as the men roam). In El Salvador, which bans abortion, seventeen women known as Las 17 have been imprisoned and sentenced to thirty years minimum for having miscarriages or stillbirths. In March 2019 history was not made when NASA called off its first-ever all-female spacewalk due to wardrobe malfunction: there weren’t two spacesuits in smaller sizes (even in outer space there’s a gender gap). Dogs are elected mayors (in Minnesota, in California, in Colorado, in Kentucky), while a quarter of human mayors in 2021 were women. “Woman” is defined in the New Oxford American Dictionary, Apple’s default dictionary:

  (1) a woman got out of the car: lady, girl, female; matron; Scottish lass, lassie; informal chick, girlie, sister, dame, broad, gal; grrrl; literary maid, maiden, damsel; archaic wench, gentlewoman; (women) womenfolk.

  (2) he found himself a new woman: girlfriend, sweetheart, partner, significant other, inamorata, lover, mistress; fiancée; wife, spouse; informal missus, better half, (main) squeeze, babe, baby; dated lady friend, ladylove.

  “Man” is defined:

  (1) a handsome man: male, adult male, gentleman; informal guy, fellow, fella, joe, geezer, gent, bloke, chap, dude, hombre; (men) menfolk.

  (2) all men are mortal: human being, human, person, mortal, individual, personage, soul.

  (3) the evolution of man: the human race, the human species, Homo sapiens, humankind, humanity, human beings, humans, people, mankind.

  (4) the men voted to go on strike: worker, workman, laborer, hand, blue-collar worker; staff.

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was spoken by some guy, and the Word was “wench.” Because men wrote the Bible and the five love languages1 and the dictionary and the thesaurus,2 forging the American lexicon, and as women “exit cars” and are romantic placeholders for other women, men vote and men strike; men are born good-looking and men are alive and men have souls and men are advancing. Men are the norm, and men are the ideal. Anyone who doesn’t fit is invisible or irrelevant and may be ignored or mocked or scorned or s
ilenced or erased or defiled or killed. Or a combination, which is how a wench or lady or chick or girlfriend or wife or spouse or ladylove can die from silence.

  In Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (2018), author Maya Dusenbery makes the connection: women are “at least twice as likely to have chronic pain conditions that affect 100 million American adults,” and these conditions are “woefully undertreated and under-researched.” Then there are “medically unexplained symptoms,” the “latest label to be applied to allegedly hysterical symptoms,” writes Dusenbery. She cites studies that show “up to a third of patients in primary care” and “up to two-thirds… in specialty clinics” have them. And “approximately 70 percent of [patients with medically unexplained symptoms] are women.” Dusenbery also clarifies that some medically unexplained symptoms just “haven’t been explained yet.” This is because “many millions” of American women “experience long delays and see multiple health care providers before getting correctly diagnosed,” and can wait up to ten years to be diagnosed with endometriosis. (Endometriosis “is thought to affect one in ten women,” writes Perez in Invisible Women, yet “it took until 2017 for England’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to release its first ever guidance to doctors for dealing with it,” in which the “main recommendation” is “‘Listen to women.’”)

  “I want you to understand this,” warns author Alyson J. McGregor in Sex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Women’s Health and What We Can Do About It. “If you are a woman, you are at greater risk of misdiagnosis, improper treatment, and complications in common medical situations.”

  If you’re a woman, you’re also at greater risk of mental illness. Depression is 70 percent more prevalent in women than in men. “About one in five women in the United States take a psychotropic medication, compared to one in eight men,” Dusenbery writes. American adult women report a suicide attempt 1.6 times as often as men, and between 2007 and 2015, suicide rates among girls in their teens doubled. (2015 is the same year teenagers gorged on nine hours of media—sexist, misogynistic, violent media—daily.)

  These statistics come out of a culture where men speak and women shut up.

  As an only child of divorced parents who remarried other people, I called TV my fifth parent, and I was part of the first “always connected” generation of now geriatric millennials, so I know that men talk the most in films, TV, and streaming shows, and when women do speak, usually it’s about men.3 Men also report most of the news, even news that concerns women, like reproductive issues, gender-based violence, and harassment. And men founded and run our echo chambers (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat) while pervading all levels of industry and government. Meanwhile, women’s voices are squashed, attacked, and interrupted—sometimes with a woman’s cooperation. During the 2020 vice presidential debate, not only did then senator Kamala Harris repeat (have to repeat), “I’m speaking,” but also moderator Susan Page let Mike Pence speak longer, interject more, ignore her, and moderate the debate himself by asking his own questions.

  Throughout history women like Harris have been rebuked or medicated for using their voices “inappropriately” by expressing sadness or anger or joy in ways that perturb others. My coming-of-age story took place in a culture that can’t seem to handle women and their many, many feelings, where if a man doesn’t take no for an answer, then he’s just a man, but if a woman doesn’t take no for an answer, then she’s “psychotic.” Also where a man on a dating app can get away with being unable to spell, but if a woman uses too many exclamation points, she’s demented, or if she doesn’t use enough exclamation points, she’s a bitch. And where a man’s silence means he’s “uninterested,” while a woman’s silence is a matter of decorum. But if a woman is going to talk, if she has to, then what’s most important is the desire she inspires, not what she has to say, and not what she takes issue with.

  Thus, a woman’s voice is her cage, inside of which she must work the sound panel of her voice to be heard, and if I were a man, I could get away with that mixed metaphor.

  What woman hasn’t asked herself, in relationships as well as in the workplace, What does it take to be heard when people don’t want to listen to you? And why do words sound biblical out of men’s mouths but naggy out of women’s? In relationships women are more likely than men to apologize and are less likely to say no. At work women are more likely than men to apologize and are less likely to say no.4 And the unspoken rule for women in love is the same for women at work: less is more.

  Society itself is basically a patriarchal livestream that blasts the same rule and other messages to girls and women: Speak softer. Moan louder. Be pure. Don’t be shy. Don’t talk back. Don’t tell. Don’t say this (or that). Don’t draw attention. Don’t be difficult. Be pleasant. Be who everyone needs you to be.

  My self-esteem absorbed these messages that are subliminal until they are atomic, until I’d transmuted them solid and supreme and started saying them to myself and accepting them as my own. These messages became my filter, my philosophy and my personality, my every thought and basis for interaction (social, political, romantic, ideological, superficial), my pattern for behavior and inspiration to pick a voice so small and so nice and so normal that it’s a medical wonder I could breathe—

  I’d entered a feedback loop.

  And what happens when the patriarchal livestream also blasts dead girls and ravaged women ad nauseam? “The single best predictor of rape,” writes prolific author and professor of communication studies Julia T. Wood, citing a 1989 study, “is the circulation of… materials that glorify sexual force and exploitation,” materials that declare their love to girls and women by degrading them.

  Despite the rumors, it isn’t so easy to just speak up. Since women are trained to disappear while being looked at constantly, we become our first and greatest critics and censors—so, speaking up for ourselves is not how we learn English. Instead, we’re fluent in Giggle, in Question Mark, in Self-Deprecation, in Asking for It, in Miscommunication, in Bowing Down. These are all really different silences—we speak, but exclusively in compliments (“Your sexism is so well said”) and in apologies and in all ways right. A typical conversation between women sounds like:

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry!”

  “Don’t be sorry! I am the one who is sorry.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Please, the apology is all mine.”

  Since we barely exist, we must continue apologizing for existing, for our reason to be and feel human. Which can make sharing or even forming an opinion unthinkable.

  Especially amid straightforward silencing. In the backlash to #MeToo, some people are questioning who deserves a voice, and arguing that since women have more of a voice than ever—

  and since women comprised 26.7 percent of Congress in 2021 instead of 23.6 percent in 2019—

  and since groups with 23.6 percent of women appear standard while 26.7 percent seems exceptional—

  and since Wonder Woman (the first film) wasn’t bad—

  then we should shut up already. Or else.

  Or else we’re hysterical.

  In 2017, former presidential aide Jason Miller called then senator Kamala Harris “hysterical” during a hearing over Jeff Sessions’s collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. “I mean, she was asking some tough questions,” Miller offered as proof, and all Republican men became erect from a man telling it like it is.

  “Hysterical” means that a woman asked some tough questions. The centuries-old term can describe and discredit and dismiss anything a woman feels, thinks, says, or does. She’s not sick; she’s hysterical. Does she hurt? She’s hysterical. Is she sensitive? She’s hysterical. In love? She’s hysterical. Is she direct? She’s hysterical. Opinionated? She’s hysterical. Hemorrhaging? She’s hysterical. Did she do her job? She’s hysterical. Disag
ree? She’s hysterical. The label sticks—he’s rubber and she’s glue—such that a labeled woman and those around her will think one thought only: Hysterical. Hysterical. Hysterical.

  Are we sick of the imbalance yet? I can say that at least literally we are.

  And not to sound hysterical, but I almost died—from silence, from illness, from the Nothing Is Wrong with You diagnoses. From having a high-pitched voice that dogs can hear but doctors can’t. From preferring to die rather than aggravate anyone or be a “crazy psycho bitch.”

  I’m a feminist (thank you) with a degree in women and gender studies and an “ERASE THE PATRIARCHY” eraser on my desk, and still. Still, I apologize to inanimate objects. Still, I smile while being insulted. Still, I tip cab drivers extra for not assaulting me. STILL, I wonder why my ex won’t text me back. (Is it because I said something wrong or texted too much?) Still, I’m compelled to talk the “correct” amount, to verbalize my thoughts “sweetly,” to regurgitate niceties that don’t reflect my beliefs, to say “I’m fine” when I’m bleeding.

  Still, it’s not so simple to erase the patriarchy because not only do we live in one, it lives in us. Weeks before the 2016 election I saw bell hooks and Joey Soloway in conversation at the New School, where Soloway predicted the end of the patriarchy, and hooks laughed; there would be no end of the patriarchy. In part because patriarchy is our mother tongue and preexisting condition. Even now I flinch mentioning “patriarchy” for fear of being dubbed a “feminazi.”

  But my silence hurt me more than anything I could ever say. And it wasn’t only that I thought I was going to die when I was sick (I was pretty sure I was going to die), but that I thought I was going to die with so much unsaid.

  My illness, my hysteria, begged me to review how shrinking and muting myself threatened my body/mind/vagina/soul/life. To get better I’d have to break my own silences and get back the voice that was mine before the world intervened, and then use it again without regret.