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Emotions are high as fans await the arrival of Harry Styles at Adelaide Airport during One Direction’s 2013 Australian tour. Are they hysterical or just as passionate as a football fan?
As the women’s football world cup reaches its finale, it’s interesting to reflect on the curious double standard in play when it comes to describing fan behaviour.
While the predominantly female fans of the Beatles, Backstreet Boys, or Justin Bieber are often described as hysterical, the predominantly male fans of rugby or pro wrestling are just passionately devoted – maybe a little crazy – but rarely “hysterical”.
This probably has to do with the origins of the word hysteria.
In Ancient Greece, women were believed to be susceptible to madness and erratic behaviour because of their hystera (womb).
It was the womb that caused an enigmatic disorder (later called hysteria), exclusively afflicting women, and with diverse symptoms ranging from emotional disturbances to physical distress.
More bizarrely, ancient physicians believed that the uterus was an autonomous organ with a mind of its own that could travel around inside a woman’s body, thereby wreaking havoc on her physical and mental health.
Plato actually describes the uterus as “an animal eager for conception which whenever it remains barren for a long time, becomes angry and miserable, and wanders everywhere around the body, blocking the outlets for air, and preventing respiration, causing extreme helplessness and bringing on all sorts of other diseases”.
He implied that the women most susceptible to womb displacement were the unmarried and widowed, reinforcing the ancient stereotypes of women being enslaved to their biology and being dependent on men, even for their physical and mental health.
Treatments aiming to “reposition” the uterus involved fumigation, massages, and aromatherapy. But the best way to coax the feisty uterus back to its proper position was for the woman to become pregnant.
This reflected the patriarchal view that a woman’s value and health were closely linked to her social role as a wife and mother.
In the Middle Ages, the concept of the “wandering womb” began to fade, but hysteria became connected to the idea of witchcraft, meaning any emotional outburst or unconventional behaviour by a woman could be interpreted as possession by evil spirits.
This belief again disadvantaged women, with many of them facing unjust accusations and tragic fates.
By the 19th century, the connection to the womb was broken, and a psychological cause was posited. However, along with this break came a perhaps even more radical change in how hysteria was viewed, with the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot diagnosing hysterical symptoms in men for the first time.
No longer connecting hysteria to the presence of a womb, Charcot’s pupil, Sigmund Freud,
theorised that hysteria was caused by repressed sexual memories that could only be treated through psychoanalysis resolving subconscious conflicts between sexual desires and internal prohibitions.
And while the sexual character of hysterical conditions is no longer evident in medical definitions, the term was still used until recently to describe conditions in which physical symptoms have psychological rather than physical origins – which, ironically, is the exact opposite of its diagnosis over 2000 years ago.
The Odyssey of English is a regular series looking at the Greek and Latin origin of words, and is part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of Massey University’s Classical Studies programme.
Gina Salapata is an associate professor and the co-ordinator of the classical studies programme at Massey University. Oliver Ballance is a linguistics lecturer at Massey University.
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