Why Pop Culture Cannot Stop Calling Women Crazy
The phrase "mad woman" has been doing heavy lifting in our collective imagination for centuries. Long before social media turned every emotional outburst into content, writers and film-makers had sketched out a recognisable figure: the woman who feels too much, wants too much, or refuses to be soothed.
She resurfaces in prestige dramas, true-crime podcasts, and pop lyrics. She shifts shape by decade — witch, hysteric, femme fatale, manic pixie disaster, unhinged ex — but the scaffolding underneath rarely does.
In Australia, where tabloid headlines have long traded on female "madness" — think of Schapelle Corby's every facial expression becoming front-page fodder — the trope has a recognisable shape that local audiences are trained to spot, even when they cannot name it.
The long history of the hysterical woman
The word "hysteria" comes from the Greek for womb, which tells you most of what you need to know about who was historically allowed to be called mad. In the Victorian era, women who expressed grief, desire, or political conviction were routinely committed to asylums, often at their husbands' request. Bedlam became a tourist attraction where Londoners paid a penny to gawk at inmates, many of whom had what we now recognise as postpartum depression, epilepsy, or simply opinions.
That history did not stay in the past. It slid into cinema via Norma Bates and the nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and into music via blues singers whose pain was repackaged as spectacle. By the time we reach glossy 2010s thrillers, the template feels familiar: a woman breaks, lies, burns the house down, and the camera lingers as if her unravelling were a warning.
The template also lingers in everyday language. To call a woman "hysterical" is still the quickest way to dismiss her, and "crazy" remains a shortcut for "I do not want to listen." Some of the clearest writing on this lineage lives in the facts collected on this site, which trace the trope from medieval witch trials to modern tabloid covers.
How film and television keep the trope on life support
Look at any prestige drama of the last decade and you will find a "mad woman" hiding in plain sight. Sharp Objects built its mystery around a journalist whose self-harm was treated as both aesthetic and evidence. Black Swan turned ambition into psychosis so convincingly some viewers left the cinema genuinely uncertain whether ambition itself was the disorder.
Australian viewers have their own version of this fascination. Big Little Lies, which used the cliffs of Byron Bay as a stand-in for Californian money, turned domestic violence into communal hysteria — five women screaming at a trivia night while their lives collapsed. Wentworth, the Melbourne-set reimagining of Prisoner, leaned hard into mental institutionalisation as both backdrop and metaphor, blurring the line between political resistance and psychological breakdown.
Even local soaps slip the trope in. A woman expressing legitimate anger in Neighbours is rarely just angry; she is "having a moment." A character on Home and Away who pushes back against her family is almost always framed as unravelling. Small choices, but they accumulate, teaching viewers that female emotion is something to be managed, diagnosed, or contained.
Pop music and the anger we are allowed to hear
Music has always been one of the easiest places to find the "mad woman" trope in commercial form. In the 1990s, Alanis Morissette was marketed as a torch-bearing mess of hormones; by the late 2000s, Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears became tabloid shorthand for what happens when a woman cannot cope with fame. Each was treated less like a working artist and more like a weather event.
Contemporary artists have pushed back. Taylor Swift's "Mad Woman" was an explicit rebuttal, reframing the label as something imposed rather than earned. Billie Eilish built an early persona around hushed creepiness, then turned it inside out. Even Olivia Rodrigo's "Drivers License" — mocked because teenage girls took it seriously — sits inside this long argument about whose feelings count as legitimate.
In Australia, Triple J has long given airtime to artists who complicate the script, from Sarah Blasko to Baker Boy.
Songs and moments that push back on the script:
- Florence Welch performing "Shake It Out" like a sermon against her own shadow.
- Sia's "Chandelier" turning party-girl chaos into a slow-motion cry for help.
- Halsey's "Without Me" refusing to be either victim or villain.
- Camp Cope's "Lost: Season One" giving a microphone to women who have simply had enough.
Reality television and the rise of the edit
If scripted dramas build the myth, reality television weaponises it. Producers know the quickest way to make a contestant memorable is to attach a single emotional adjective to her name: "the unhinged one," "the meltdown," "the moment she lost it." Once that adjective sticks, the editing does the rest. Reaction shots are repeated, eye rolls are replayed, and a single raised voice becomes the entire story of a person.
Australian reality formats have exported this logic worldwide. Married at First Sight Australia builds seasons around brides and grooms introduced as "intense" or "too much." The Bachelorette Australia routinely turns women who ask reasonable questions into villains, with audiences encouraged to laugh at the contestant who finally snaps under fluorescent lighting.
The damage is not abstract. Women on these formats report receiving threats, losing jobs, and having their families pulled into the drama. The "mad woman" label here is not a literary device. It is a production tool, and it travels further than the broadcast itself.
Social media and the new hysteria
The internet has not killed the trope. It has industrialised it. On TikTok, women who share stories of abuse, illness, or grief meet comment sections full of armchair diagnoses: BPD, bipolar, hysteria, attention-seeking. The "crazy ex" is a meme, a haircut, a genre of true-crime content.
Australian creators have pushed back. The #MeToo movement, which had deep local resonance through cases involving Craig McLachlan, showed how social media could weaponise women's anger for justice rather than against them. Indigenous women have used Instagram and TikTok to challenge the colonial roots of being called "mad" — the Blackfulla Bookclub reframes so-called hysteria as a sane response to insane circumstances.
Still, the algorithmic pressure remains. Outrage performs well. Sob stories perform well. Women performing distress performs especially well, which means the same stories get amplified, monetised, and stripped of context until the people inside them become characters.
Who gets to be labelled crazy
The "mad woman" trope is not equally available to all women. White, cisgender, middle-class women are often coded as "anxious" or "high-strung," which still allows them the dignity of a treatable condition. Women of colour, especially Black women, are more often coded as "angry" or "untrustworthy," which carries criminal rather than medical consequences. Trans women face a third path entirely, where any emotional expression is read as evidence of deception.
Disability sits inside this too. Women with chronic illness, ADHD, or autism are routinely told they are "too much" or "making it up," often after years of misdiagnosis. The trope flattens real difference into a single insult, landing hardest on those who already struggle to be believed. The friends who show up for these women do essential labour — a question explored further in the astrology of friendship allies, which reads star signs through who actually turns up when things go pear-shaped.
This is why intersectional reading matters. A single film or song can be feminist in one register and regressive in another. Without naming the differences, pop culture's "mad woman" remains a very specific kind of white, straight, cis woman — and everyone else is left to make do with even cruder labels.
Spotting the script and rewriting it
The good news is that audiences are getting better at spotting the device. The bad news is that spotting it is not the same as dismantling it. A few habits help:
- Watch who gets the diagnostic label. Notice when a man is "passionate" and a woman is "unhinged," or when a Black woman is "difficult" while a white woman in the same scene is "anxious."
- Separate the character from the diagnosis. In shows like Sharp Objects or Yellowjackets, ask whether the framing treats mental illness as plot device or as lived reality.
- Check your own shorthand. Do you describe a female friend as "crazy" when you mean "she hurt me"? The word does work you may not want done.
- Support work that complicates the script. Read essays by women whose lives have been flattened by the label. The guide on asking for help without shame speaks directly to anyone who has internalised the "too much" story.
Pop culture will keep producing mad women for as long as audiences keep rewarding them. The job is not to refuse every flawed female character — those can be the most interesting ones on screen. The job is to stop letting "crazy" do the work "complicated" was invented for.
A practical takeaway: next time you reach for that word about a public figure, a friend, or yourself, pause and ask what you would say instead if the person were a man. The answer tells you everything you need to know about the script still running.
