It’s So My Mom.

It wasn’t until I shacked up with my boyfriend about a year ago that I started to become that derogatory “C” word ubiquitously used to describe women. Crazy.

I admit having used the word to modify my mother many, many times in the past. And yet, the last time I visited home, she took the words right out of my mouth: “If women are crazy, men must do something to make us this way.” (Amazingly: I couldn’t agree more at this juncture in my life. Amazingly, because my mother and her pro-life friends dismiss feminism as the work of Satan. I think it did more good than harm, though I’m no left-wing feminist nutjob.)

My boyfriend sings this little song neither of us could have imagined describing me a year ago, before I left my life of independence for one of requisite football watching, questionable boys’ weekends and dealing with the “grumpy troll” I’ve turned him into: “Oooooh! You’re a crazy chap.”

Am I a little crazy in that lovable Shakespeare shrewish tradition?

Sure.

I can admit it.

But nobody else can say that about me. If they do, they must know me, and it’s an inside joke.

If they do and don’t know me, that’s just bitchy. It’s just–well, see the “C” word I use below. The other “C” word.

Fast forward …

I’ve been quite taken with Culture 11.com the past month or so. It’s like the moderate-right version of Salon or Slate.com.

Most of the female bloggers that comprise the varied voice of “Ladyblog,” then, are Conservative with a capital “C.” It follows suit that many (not all of them) espouse the idea that feminism is hateful and passé, and they demean it overtly and subversively often. This is ironic at best. These women, with their national platforms and careers, are insulting the movement that established them as rational enough to own their own businesses, choose not to have children, or dabble in the political arena. The argument is unintentionally ironic, at best.

Case in point: This article called “She’s Crazy, Get Rid of Her” by Ladyblogger Fausta Wertz. She counsels any man dating a “crazy woman” to let her go. I guess she believes she’s supporting this (not) earth-shattering tenant by citing “evidence” that’s only tenuously linked to the ground she has covered thus far: there are more “crazy” personal blogs penned by women than men out there, she says.

If you’re wondering how Wertz defines crazy:

“Women who write erotica about men who ignore them; women who believe themselves to be engaged to men who do not want their identity disclosed; women who glorify self abasement and humiliation; women addicted to plastic surgery; women addicted to drama and emotional upheaval; women whose favorite artist is the ever-narcissistic Frida Kahlo. I can go on and on.”

Obviously these topics have more applicable explanations than the too-simple, dismissive “crazy.” More importantly, I can rattle off myriad self-indulgent and silly blogs penned by men, and finally come to the conclusion that women should not date the crazy ones. A reader brought this to the attention of the author, and she promptly plugged the opposite sex into a similarly themed post.

But choosing to open the strand taking aim at women is telling: “Crazy,” the author feels, is clearly a brand cornered primarily by the fair persuasion.

Resurrecting the lambasted irrational female in this non-empathetic light is not making any new or compelling arguments–say, why people should make other people’s crazy significant others their business, or why classicly Conservative tenants like marrying a good man for money jive with the true nature of feminism (empowerment to start your own business!).

There is a fine art to lobbing the “C” word. Admitting that you’re a liberated but sometimes crazy and hormonal woman is cool. It gives other women the opportunity to relate and chime in as they see fit. But one empowered woman branding a vague mass of others as poisonously crazy? That’s just the useless, holier-than-thou cattiness of my mom’s—and even some of my—“Good Christian Bitches.”

Let’s cover some new ground and lob some grenades into the other camp. I’ve got a new “C” word. It’s Coulterish. Add it to the Urban Dictionary.

Image by apostolia4 via Flickr

I created this blog in the midst of a sea of them to document a particularly pressing social phenomenon: Modern women turning into the mothers they swore they’d be “smarter,” “cooler” and “more laid back” than. How does this happen?

Case in point: I come from a long line of man-haters. My grandmother’s tagline for everything was “Es tu PAPA” (It’s your FATHER) for everything that had gone wrong in the house. On one memorable occasion, my adult mother fessed culpability for a strange scent emanating from the microwave, but my grandmother reverted to her mantra as if in wifely duty. “Es tu Papa,” she corrected. He made that micro stink, dammit. She had nothing if not conviction.

My grandmother is senile now, but my mother carries on her torch. “Your FATHER … ” starts her explanation for everything less-than-praiseworthy in the world. She also likes light less and less, another latently inherited trait from my grandmother.

I grew up siding with my father for all sorts of things. My mother didn’t really work much outside the house after I was born, so she was the eternal money drain. I, being a daddy’s girl and product of a college prep, all-girl and all-overachieving high school, invested a lot of time sympathizing with my father’s criticisms of my mother’s housewife status, and vowing I’d never tread the same path. (Note: My mom didn’t spend her days eating Bon Bons … but our mother-daughter time did consist of watching late-night “Married with Children” episodes while eating Doritos for a while.)

I’d stayed true to all the dating implications a self-sufficient life approach entailed. I had always been perfectly ready to pay for a first date if my compatriot saw fit. It would be a death knell to subsequent outings, of course, but I would pick up that tab if they fell for the bait. (I don’t think this every actually happened, though.)

It took a while, but I now refuse to pay for outings with my boyfriend. My domain is buying groceries and cooking. My call.

To be fair, my mom doesn’t cook. But get this. Now my daily discourse at the coffee shop at which I work goes something like this:

“Hi Jenny.” (William the coffee shop owner.) “How’s the husband?” (Gay code for ‘boyfriend.’)

“Hey Willy.” (Me.) “I made him take me out last night—it’s about time that boy spent some time and money on ME.” My boyfriend, by the way, is a really great guy. (He is a little obsessed with golf and Apple [and I hope that’s all].)

My mother, mind you, is OCD to the point of running to the bathroom to corroborate a first-hand report that you (I) didn’t use her show soap, leave a ring of water in the bottom of the bathtub or rest a heated hair styling tool directly on the bathroom counter.

I’m not that bad … yet. When I do clean, I fight the urge to yell at my boyfriend for the perfectly normal practice of shaving in the sink or showering in the bathtub. Goddammit, though, if I didn’t just remove 1,000 strands and stubs of hair from them.

And I already send text rants when my boyfriend takes significantly longer than me to answer a text.

Whoa. How did I get here? Is it laid out in my gene plan?

Or is it feminism’s backlash? See this article from Alice Walker’s (”The Color Purple”) daughter, wherein Rebecca Walker (yep, she kept the last name) second-guesses her mother’s neglectful, cold feminism.

We pay for the sins of our mothers, it seems. By swinging the other way … or becoming them.