Recognizing Lorena as more than a joke would also require that we acknowledge the reality that rational women can and will do violence to men. We punish such women not because they have crossed the mental border from sanity into madness but because they have crossed a gender barrier from being the object of violence to being the perpetrator of it. When men harm women’s bodies, we consider it an upsetting but inevitable result of the natural order. A thousand evolutionary psychologists doubling as apologists for violent men emerge from the woodwork to defend men’s actions. All that testosterone, et cetera. And when women like Bobbitt retaliate, even those women who are fluent in the language of male domination will say that violence is never the answer. But when a woman is raped repeatedly by a man, cutting off his penis is not so much an act of revenge as an act of self-defense. She eliminated the weapon to eliminate its potential to inflict more wounds.
The treatment to which Lopes may have been subjected at the hands of Andre Rison is similarly left as an aside to the story of her burning down his multimillion-dollar home in Atlanta. One story persists that she was angry because he did not buy her a pair of sneakers when he went shopping for himself, while another claims that she burned a bathtub full of teddy bears. The story that Lopes eventually told Sister 2 Sister magazine maintains that while both of these details make an appearance, the fire was hardly a case of calculated, petty arson. According to her version of events, the night of the fire was the culmination of years of Rison’s possessiveness over Lopes despite being unfaithful and Lopes’s finally reacting to his hypocrisy. Rison went so far as to demand that she never go barefoot in her own home if there was company around and that she mostly stay home at night when she wasn’t on tour.4
Lopes said she decided to go out with girlfriends as a statement of independence, and Rison became enraged upon arriving home with several friends and seeing Lopes wearing a dress as opposed to her typical baggy clothes. Rison declared her “naked” and began ripping at her dress. “He never balled his fist up and socked me in the face. A lot of pushing, pulling, and knocking me down. He knocked me down a few times, where my head would hit the floor,” Lopes responded when asked how physical their altercation became.5
When two men began fighting, Lopes’s uncle pulled her away and she retreated to her bedroom, where she found twenty new pairs of sneakers, none of them in her size. She set several pairs on fire in the replacement bathtub that Rison had installed following a previous fight in which Lisa set several teddy bears ablaze after she caught him cheating. She said she did not realize that the new tub was plastic and unable to contain the flames, and the fire quickly spread through the rest of the house. “My vision was so blurry, I just remember: ‘You crazy bitch, you! Fuck you! Blah, blah, blah. You’re crazy,’” Lisa recalled Rison’s brother saying as they evacuated the house. Rison’s friends then immediately went about smashing Lisa’s car windows with pipes. She replied in kind by smashing the windows of his Mercedes-Benz and his truck.6 Yet, even with the enormousness of her talent as a member of TLC and the fraught dynamic of her relationship with Rison, Lisa is still best remembered as an arsonist.
Two decades later, I wondered if the finale of Taylor Swift’s music video for the 2014 hit “Blank Space,” in which she sets her lover’s mansion ablaze in a jealous rage, was a nod to Lopes. “Got a long list of ex-lovers / They’ll tell you I’m insane,” she lilts in what would become the second-most-viewed video of all time on YouTube. The song and video are satirical takes on the media’s treatment of Taylor as the model of the embittered, crazy ex-girlfriend and is largely responsible for 2014’s being declared “The Year of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” by Pitchfork.7 But it was a slow climb to that reclamation.
“Taylor Swift is a nutcase,” Harvey Levin said of Swift’s alleged propensity to buy property near her lovers in Vanity Fair in 2013.8 “Her career depends on her getting laid and having her heart broken. That’s what 99% of her songs are about. If we don’t know who she’s sleeping with, what else is there to really know about her? It’s practically her job to always be in love with someone,” wrote Ryan O’Connell on Thought Catalog in 2012.9 Such statements litter the media coverage of Swift in her first few years as a pop singer, prompting first the question “Who the fuck are those dudes?” followed quickly by “What the fuck else do people write songs about if not who they’re banging and having break their hearts?” Men certainly write on similar themes without being identified as insane.
Musician John Mayer owes much of his career to singing about heartbreak and famously wrote “Your Body Is a Wonderland” about onetime lover Jennifer Love Hewitt long before Taylor Swift was a household name. But Mayer told Rolling Stone in 2012 that he was “humiliated” by the song “Dear John” that Taylor wrote about him, which includes such damning lyrics as “Don’t you think nineteen’s too young to be played by your dark twisted games?” in reference to her age when they dated. “I will say as a songwriter that I think it’s kind of cheap songwriting,” he told the magazine two years after “Dear John” was released.10 He would turn around and release the least thinly veiled response track, “Paper Doll,” the following year. To date, however, he has not addressed whether or not nineteen is indeed too young to be played by his twisted games. Mayer is not the only ex who has let Taylor’s success as a professional ex-girlfriend get under his skin. After nearly three years apart, even Taylor’s fairly private ex Harry Styles of One Direction penned the lyrics, “If you’re looking for someone to write your breakup songs about, then baby I’m perfect,” on the 2015 single “Perfect.”