Agarwal marshals a range of evidence through history
and geography to home in on her central thesis. We are taken through the
Stoic tradition (“in Seneca’s view, women were more prone to grief than
men”), the culture of “conduct books” in 1700s England (“a backlash aimed
at keeping women from becoming too independent, and destabilizing the
social structures”) and the New England witch trials (“they were a warning
to women of what would happen if they acted in any way counter to their
roles as dutiful wives and mothers, widows and pious virgins”). She also
parses literature and politics to present her case.
Agarwal almost totally dismisses biology as a factor to explain
gendered behaviours, although there is substantial work that indicates that men
and women’s brains on average, tend to differ. However, in her reckoning,
society and culture are the fundamental arbiters of how and why we behave
the way we do.
The most compelling chapter is the final one: “Such a Doll
(Emotional Technologies)”, where Agarwal surveys how technology is
absorbing and replicating human biases. This is because in spaces like the
sex-tech industry, 70 per cent of sex-product companies are run by men, who
serve about a 90 per cent male clientele. Which is how we end up with
fembots that are docile, caring, and sexually available. “People rate
robots more positively if they show stereotypical gender attributes and
personalities,” Agarwal writes. “People also assign gender-typical roles
and emotions to robots.” The future then, looks a lot like the past.
*Do gendered constraints determine the way we think, act and
feel?* According
to this analysis, the answer is a resounding yes. *Hysterical *is ambitious
and comprehensive, drawing from a range of disciplines, locations and
studies across the decades. But that is perhaps its weakness, too. At 360
pages it feels bloated, even repetitive, packed with too many findings in
service of the same points. In contemporary discourse we have become so
accustomed to feminist analyses—terms like “emotional labour”, “difficult
women”, and “toxic masculinity” that the conclusions itself, though worth
repeating, do not feel path-breaking.
We are living in hysterical times – especially now, with ‘pandemic
hysteria.’ Whenever someone overreacts or there’s a lot of noise
surrounding a situation, it’s classed as ‘hysteria’ or ‘hysterical.’ But
the conflation of uproar and mass fear as ‘hysteria’ has made us lose sight
of its history. Today, we’d determine that hysteria means excitement or
emotion that is uncontrollable, yet the foundation of the term is rooted in
oppression and misogyny.
‘Hysteria’ comes from the Greek word ‘hysterikos,’ meaning
‘suffering of the womb.’ Greek thinkers like Hippocrates and Plato believed
that when a woman experienced delirium, excessive emotion, and lack of
self-control, this was because her uterus was moving freely throughout her
body and having tumultuous effects on her mental wellbeing. Plato believed
that when the womb was empty for too long after puberty, it became
distressed and disturbed and started to move around the body out of
irritation. Just the root of the word shows that the term has been
characterised as a woman’s emotional condition and illness from its
inception; an illness that required treatment. Fortunately, physicians
looked elsewhere for the cause of hysteria. In the 17th century, Charles
Lepois was one of the first to assert that “the seat of hysterical
pathology was neither the womb nor the soul but the head.” This type of
thinking started to shake the foundations of the prehistoric relationship
between a woman’s reproductive system and her physical wellness.
Over the course of several centuries, Western masculinity has
successfully established itself as the voice of reason, knowledge, and
sanity—the basis for patriarchal rule—in the face of massive testimony to
the contrary. Hysterical Men boldly challenges this triumphant vision of
the stable and secure male by examining the central role played by modern
science and medicine in constructing and sustaining it. Mark Micale reveals
the hidden side of this vision, that is, the innumerable cases of disturbed
and deranged men who passed under the eyes of male medical and scientific
elites from the seventeenth century onward. Since ancient times, physicians
and philosophers had closely observed and extravagantly theorized female
weakness, emotionality, and madness. What these male experts failed to
see—or saw but did not acknowledge—was masculine nervous and mental illness
among all classes and in diverse guises. While cultural and literary
intellectuals pioneered new languages of male emotional distress, European
science was invested in cultivating and protecting the image of male,
middle-class detachment, objectivity, and rationality despite rampant
counter-evidence in the clinic, in the laboratory, and on battlefields.
In modern medicine, "hysteria" is an outdated term. The symptoms
historically labeled this way are now understood to be Functional
Neurological Disorder (FND) or Dissociative Disorders. They are
involuntary, real responses to the brain attempting to process overwhelming
emotional distress or trauma.
The root causes of these physical and psychological symptoms include:
Unresolved Emotional Trauma: Severe past events, such as childhood abuse,
domestic violence, or significant loss, often act as the primary triggers.
Repressed Emotions: Deeply suppressed feelings of anger, grief, fear, or
guilt can overload the mind, causing the subconscious to translate
that distress
into physical symptoms (like seizures or paralysis).
Acute Stress and Anxiety: Intense, prolonged periods of stress or
sudden, paralyzing
panic attacks can precipitate these episodes.
Brain-Body Disconnection: Neurobiological factors play a role where the
brain's stress-response system becomes overly sensitive, interpreting
severe emotional distress as a physical ailment.
Understanding these symptoms as legitimate psychological and neurological
responses rather than theatrical behaviors is key to proper diagnosis and
treatment. If you or someone you know is struggling, reaching out to a
mental health professional for therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy
(CBT) or psychodynamic therapy is the recommended path forward
The reasons for suppressing male neurosis from the official discourses of
science and medicine as well as from popular view range from the personal
and psychological to the professional and the political. They make for a
history full of profound silences, omissions, and amnesias. Now, however,
under the greatly altered circumstances of today’s gender revolution,
Micale’s work allows this story to be heard.
K RAJARAM IRS 10626
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