The “Difficult” Woman

There is no shortage of examples of the “difficult” woman in history. Better known as “crazy.” For when a woman is deemed too difficult, the crazy label always comes in quite handily for those looking to silence her “psychotic” nature. Few ever stopping to consider that “psychotic” behavior is pretty much anything that doesn’t fit into the limiting box put forth by patriarchal society. And that limitation is very much by design. Hence, the rate at which far more women are diagnosed with “mental problems” than men. Because, shit, they straight-up invent mental disorders specifically for women (see: hysteria, Angry Woman Syndrome, Post-Abortion [Stress] Syndrome)—all created to hem in very natural reactions that would not be seen as “problematic” in men.

People have continued to fool themselves into believing that “we’ve come so far” and that a level playing field has been formed. One on which women can thrive and “have it all.” That odious phrase that would never need to be applied to men because they’ve always had everything, no questions asked. Looking back on the women who have been branded with the “cuckoo” mark, it’s plain to see they were set up to fail. Frances Farmer, Zelda Fitzgerald (who was somehow viewed as “crazier” than F. Scott), Sylvia Plath, Princess Diana and, perhaps most illustriously of all, Britney Spears. Frances and Zelda were both relegated to mental institutions; Plath suffered her “madness” while only able to cast some of it out of her through her poetry and The Bell Jar; Diana was painted as the irrational, paranoid woman, whose paranoia was then preyed upon by the likes of Martin Bashir for profit.

Britney, however, might have suffered the worst “consequence” of all: being betrayed by her own family. Who used the perception of her “insanity” (a.k.a. a normal reaction to living in a fishbowl and having every move she made interpreted as another sign of her incompetence) to their benefit. Specifically, Jamie and Lynne Spears colluding with Tri Star Sports & Entertainment’s Lou Taylor to entrap Britney in a conservatorship. Truly, the stuff of Hollywood horror story legend.

As many remember, it was Britney snapping one night on February 16, 2007 (thus, the mocking t-shirt that reads: “I Feel Like 2007 Britney”) by shaving her head at a Tarzana salon that provided all the cannon fodder anyone needed to call her “crazy.” Frances Farmer endured a similar phenomenon on October 19, 1942, spurred from the instant she was stopped by a police officer for being parked on the side of the road with her high-beams on in a blackout zone (this being a wartime practice meant to prevent enemy aircrafts from detecting a target). Talking back to the officer (including telling him, “You bore me”), she was accused of being drunk (without any test actually given) and thrown into the clink for the night before she paid her bail.

Other “drunk and disorderly” accusations were lobbied at Farmer in subsequent months that year as well. Namely, while in Mexico to shoot a movie version of John Steinbeck’s Murder at Laudice. Upon arriving, she found that the shooting script wasn’t even completed, so what the fuck else was she to do but entertain herself while she waited? Something any man in her position would have done as well—without the curse of being called “drunk and disorderly.” It was Mexico in the 1940s, what did anyone expect? Especially since the movie never even started filming.

This led, soon enough, to “too much free time” on Farmer’s hands as she was additionally accused of disturbing the peace. She then endured something akin to the Spears family’s treatment of their star member upon trying to return to her Santa Monica abode after the botched film shoot, only to find that it had been cleared of all her possessions and another family was living in it. Farmer stated that her mother and sister-in-law were responsible for this abrupt ousting, after which she ended up staying at a room in the Knickerbocker Hotel. Of this bizarre turn of events, Farmer would later remark, “I suppose it seems peculiar that I never asked questions, or received an accounting, but I didn’t give a damn. At the time I neither knew nor cared.”

Just before her “forced transference” to the Knickerbocker, studios were continuing to pass her around during this period. Mainly because Frances was declared to be a “difficult woman” for actually “deigning” to make suggestions about the character she was playing. Per Patrick Agan’s The Decline and Fall of the Love Goddesses, “She incurred studio wrath by demanding they rewrite the glamor out of [her] character [Calamity Jane in Badlands of Dakota] and give her back her original grittiness. Again she lost the battle and another mark was chalked up against her on Hollywood’s list of troublemakers.” That word “troublemaker” being reserved for any woman who doesn’t do as she’s told without “making a fuss” about it. The same went for women like Plath, Fitzgerald and Princess Diana, who were viewed as “problematic” and “threatening” because of their unwillingness to suffer in total silence. Plath spoke out in her venomous writing, and so did Zelda and Diana, for that matter (with the latter doing so secretly through biographer Andrew Morton).

All these examples, of which there are so many more, prove solely that the “difficult” woman is often not so difficult at all. She merely expressed herself “out of nowhere” (as though she hadn’t been saying the same thing for some time while being ignored) when a man in the oppressor position expected her to go along as usual (e.g., Britney saying no to “one dance move” and then being admitted to a psychiatric facility by her father in 2019). And the same cycle of gaslighting a woman into thinking she’s “crazy” continues (for if she wasn’t to begin with, she certainly would be if forced to endure enough repetition of mantras like “you’re crazy,” “you’re imagining things,” et cetera).

Just look at Britney being accused of insanity every day on her Instagram now that she’s free. For, no matter how many monuments or “holidays” we seem to generate (e.g., Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day) to tell us that women are important and deserve to be heard without the risk of seeming “difficult,” the actions of the world daily persist in emphasizing the contrary.