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.

…Like me.

Mmkay, short post today, ’cause I have lots of junk to do before going home to Texas and indulging in meatballs.

But two short newsy items.

This just in: The io9 team just put up a post about females having babies later in life and thusly prolonging their life spans (at least according to studies on fly genes, of course, which are really reliable sources). The comments are better than the story. The consensus? Bitch and moan, we don’t want to live longer. Wahhh. Shut the hell up.

Sorry, I’m PMS. Big time. (Mom tie-in: From the first time mom used this shorthand to justify a particularly rotten temperment, the little linguist in me was perplexed: “You’re Premenstrual Syndrome?” This, of course, is not the question to put to the woman who is PMS.)

Other: I’m reviewing a new release from first-time author and fabulous Dallasite/single mom Kim Gatlin. Her new book Good Christian Bitches is such a guilty pleasure (the cleavage-heavy book cover caught the attention of every male within a mile of “my” coffee shop), and terribly familiar territory if you’re used to SMU sorority girls that never quite make it past that stage of life. Or if you were raised Catholic like me, where after services let out, people tried to run over each other in the parking lot.

How you say, C’est la vie in Latin?