Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

by Anna Marie Tendler

Everything I explain to him feels vague, like it could be something, but it could also be nothing. Is any of it abuse? Is it kids simply exploring sexual boundaries they don’t understand? Is it adult men simply exploring sexual boundaries they are conditioned to disregard? I feel stupid recounting these experiences in all their un-concreteness. I do not know what they mean. Maybe they don’t mean anything.

The way antidepressants changed my life so fast was comical.

Suicidal thinking as an adult felt so much different than it had as a teenager. As a teen, it was about revenge. I wanted people to be sad I was dead. As an adult, I was not worried about anyone else. I just wanted an exit.

After I hit puberty, my dad disconnected from my life significantly. It wasn’t that our relationship was adversarial, we were just strangers to each other.

Conversely, the older I became, the more my mom treated me like a friend. She and I spent so much more time together that I believe my dad came to see me as an extension of her. In pulling away from her, my dad also pulled away from me.

YEAH

Instead, I cemented my role in relationships as a pleaser, a convincer, a girl who, well into adulthood, would contort and conform to the desires of a man, overlooking his easy dismissal, and dampening her self-worth, all to be loved.

From my view, the field of psychology was developed by white men using white men as the baseline standard for behavior and sanity. Centuries of conditioning has taught them, and us as a society, that when a woman expresses anger, paranoia, fear, anxiety, depression, or even intuition, they might be crazy. Years of my own experiences with men have taught me they struggle to see women as autonomous creatures with complicated, interesting, rich inner lives. Usually, they see us only in relation to themselves. How can a person with such limited scope of another objectively analyze them?

I hate men. I hate them so much. Men are the cause of all my problems. Men are the cause of everyone’s problems. They are stupid and they are arrogant. They think everything they say is true and right. I hate them so fucking much

Plenty of nice and kind men have deeply misogynistic points of view. And that’s exactly the problem. You think just being nice and kind solves the problem of gender inequality? It isn’t a matter of thinking for yourself. We live in a world steeped in misogyny. It’s pervasive.