Aaliyah is blessedly not remembered as much for her romantic relationships as for her music, but a now infamous marriage certificate for her nuptials to producer and R & B artist R. Kelly remains a thorn in the side of the predatory performer. The document reveals that Kelly married a then fifteen-year-old Aaliyah, a damning piece of physical evidence that he is a sexual predator targeting young women—more than even in the single incident featured in a tape recording of him sexually assaulting a teen. Whether she meant him any ill or not is unknown, but Aaliyah’s beautiful and quiet ghost undoubtedly hovers over Kelly’s reputation in the ink reporting the lie that Aaliyah was eighteen rather than fifteen at the time of the marriage. That she thrived even in the aftermath of that entanglement was its own kind of revenge. Aaliyah’s steely-eyed success and courage were not as pronounced as the intentional vengeance of Diana, and Lisa’s and Diana’s “baby girl” credibility is less sturdy than Aaliyah’s, but there is a connective tissue among the three. They are bonded by an attitude that said, “I am not the kind of bitch you can sleep on.”
“Bitches be crazy” has become modern shorthand for “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” This line itself is a paraphrase of “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.” Like its predecessors, it is a statement that seemed to be reclaimed ironically by women at almost the exact moment that it entered the vernacular as a way to disparage them. This line is repeated more often by a sage and mercenary woman, both in fiction and in reality, than it is by a man trying to insult one. It is a wink, an exaggerated shrug of the shoulders that women communicate preemptively, a shield against the accusation that their behavior is inherently irrational compared to that of men. The sentiment is ancient, of course. The Furies of Greek mythology who enact often merciless vengeance are all female. Herodias had her daughter Salome demand the head of John the Baptist for a slight against her marriage. Shakespeare’s Beatrice goes straight to suggestions of assassination when a man questions the chastity of her dear friend.
I was subjected to several stories of crazy ex-girlfriends and wives long before I became one. With what I would later realize was pathological patience, I listened to tedious and obvious revisions of relationship histories time and again from strip club customers or men who rebounded with me. In several ill-advised instances, they were a combination of both. I would reply with gentle but neutral responses like, “Well, it is for the best, then, that you two are not together,” or “I bet you’re happy that she’s not your girlfriend anymore.” When cushioned by a woman’s smile and touch, these vacant replies sounded like sympathy. More than once I’ve been asked what I would say to the many wives and girlfriends whose men I had stripped for if I were faced with them. And though I reject the notion that I owe them any explanation or penance, if I wanted them to know something it would be this: I was taking his money and your side every time.
As a late bloomer in long-term relationships, I did not have the pleasure of being identified as a crazy ex-girlfriend until I was twenty-nine years old. By then I had already cultivated a worldview that elevated such women to hero status the moment the words escaped the lips of a man. I decided that being called “crazy” by a man was not an insult but a challenge. It gives the woman an opportunity to say, “Crazy? Oh, I’ll show you fucking crazy.” I was raised on a hearty media diet of women “going crazy” on the men in their lives and found it brimming with inspiration. It is in witnessing such women enacting revenge that I’ve come to see “Bitches be crazy” as less a statement by men that women are crazy or even a reappropriated statement by women defending their own madness. Instead, I see the phrase and imagine a colon after “bitches,” rendering it a command to other women, a battle cry. It is a way of saying, “We took back ‘bitch’ already. And now we have come for ‘crazy.’”
In the thick catalog of women who have been dismissed as crazy exes, there are a few standouts whose actions and subsequent treatment by media and in the public memory merit particular attention. Lorena Bobbitt was a private citizen until she cut off her husband John’s penis and threw it out a car window in 1993. Her name remains shorthand for the cruelest and most truly deranged revenge. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes allegedly burned down Rison’s mansion after he failed to buy her a pair of sneakers on his own shopping spree. Taylor Swift shamelessly built an empire out of snitching on ex-boyfriends like Harry Styles and John Mayer, and she is hardly the first.
A knife-wielding nag. A greedy arsonist. A jealous trophy wife losing her shine. A childish, petty country girl. The public consciousness has effectively trapped these women inside their breaking points. These moments are told as the beginning, middle, and end of the stories we tell about them: isolated incidents in an otherwise serene, rational world. We like to define them with a single, larger-than-life anecdote rather than within the context of a relationship story. We like our ex-girlfriends and ex-wives one-dimensional. We like them to act alone. It is a function of both misogyny and fear to erase the men at the receiving end of these actions. In this, they become standins for every man who might fall victim to the dormant madness that lies just beneath the surface of even the most collected of women.
If we began the story of Lorena Bobbitt during the years in which she endured physical, verbal, and sexual abuse at John’s hands, it would be far less fun to reduce her to the trope of the nagging wife gone mad or to an artless dick joke. But before Lorena Bobbitt was a national punch line, she was the twenty-four-year-old immigrant wife of a man named John Bobbitt, who she claimed raped and beat her constantly. In court, he could not have kept his story together if he’d had a stick of glue for the pieces, which helped Lorena avoid conviction. Though John was never convicted of raping Lorena, he would later be convicted of domestic violence and be divorced three times in under twenty years.3