For the past two weeks, I’ve had crazy girls on the brain. In telling the story of my unfortunate friend Dan and his stalker, I’ve spent a lot of time annoyed with one simple fact: if Dan’s stalker had been hot, he may not have been so freaked out (at first). Dan’s stalker was a heavyset, awkward girl in patent leather pink pumps and distractingly over-applied make-up. She loved him from afar and he thought she was crazy (admittedly, she was extremely crazy), but I have to wonder how things would have panned out if she had instead been conventionally lovely.
Maybe a lot of hot-crazy-girls don’t become stalkers because in order to be a stalker the person you’re stalking has to resist you. Maybe a lot of hot-crazy-girls become hot crazy flings or even hot crazy girlfriends. They never really end up settling into the stalker phase of their relationships because the men they’d like to stalk are willing. Or, maybe, and this is what I’d guess, hot-crazy-girls are just really appealing.
Let’s start by defining out terms. By “hot-crazy-girls,” we do not mean the legitimately mentally ill, the institutionalized, the depressed, the stricken and, only occasionally, the bipolar. By hot-crazy-girls, we mean a variation on that kind we’ve all encountered: starved for attention, terminally capricious, without consequence evaluation, eager to manipulate (consciously or otherwise), smart but unaccomplished, with little to no understanding of what is morally acceptable, or just plain no regard for morality. Unsurprisingly, these tormented undisciplined loose canons are often super beautiful and skinny, whether from disordered eating or their boundless nervous energy. They all seem to like literature (F. Scott! Nabokov!), hate television, look good in floral sundresses, resent their absentee Dads and (obviously) come from privilege. They also love drinking and are mythically awesome in the sack, spontaneous crying mid-coitus or otherwise.
I’m willing to bet that if you have encountered the hot-crazy-girl you have also encountered the many lovesick suckers who can’t tear themselves away. Be they discarded boyfriends or classmates/coworkers in unrequited love (coworkers are less likely as hot-crazy-girls seldom need—or can keep—jobs), the hot-crazy-girl leaves in her wake dozens of bleary eyed musicians and aspiring writers who find her elusive sadness and pert shiny bangs irresistible.
The hot-crazy-girl rarely becomes a stalker because men fall for her too quickly. I don’t mean to say that 1) I’m making light of mental illness or 2) all stalkers are uggos. What I’m trying to say is that I think the hot girls who have a touch of the crazy and may be so inclined to stalk are found by men to be exciting, mysterious creatures. And, having met enough of these hot-crazy-girls and their victims, I’ve begun to recognize that some men find craziness in hot girls to be super alluring (though perhaps the short response is men find anything in hot girls to be super alluring).
Then again, maybe there are fewer stories about babely, beautiful stalkers not because men find hot-crazy-girls compelling but because people in general are just more permissive when it comes to the bad behavior of good looking people. It should come as no surprise that the sane plain Jane who gets trashed and makes out with girls for male attention is a trainwreck, while the hot-crazy-girls who do the same are the lifeblood of every good party.
Because of this permissiveness, hot-crazy-girls get away with just about anything. I had a friend in college, Tom, who was desperately in love with his gorgeous, gamine, crazy-as-the-day-is-long classmate, Alexandra. Alexandra had a pixie cut and lush, flawless skin, she drank through her trust fund and chain smoked American Spirits. Tom told me a story about how a road trip with her and a few friends turned sour when the entire bunch—having drove all night—were so exhausted they were willing to eat just about anywhere. On a lonely stretch of highway, a diner maybe every few miles, Alexandra kept insisting that they press on because each diner that appeared didn’t look like it had “good vegetarian food.” They ended up driving two hours off course so Alexandra could get a bowl of brown rice and steamed veggies. Alexandra was unyielding, high-maintenance, and pathologically inconsiderate, and Tom was crazy about her.
Here at the Misanthropologist, we like to think of ourselves as amateur scientists (soft scientists) (drunks). Over many hours of extremely serious research, we’ve assembled a list of the three major reasons why men fall hopelessly in love with girls who would get a clit piercing on a whim. So, why are hot-crazy-girls so enchanting?
1. The Sex.
You can just tell they’re good at it: hot-crazy-girls are hungrily passionate and care primarily about satisfying each moment’s foremost appetitive desires. They might also ask you to choke them while you’re fucking!
2. Feeling Alive.
If your whole life has been spent reading Marquez and wondering when you’ll find a girl who really appreciates you, then a night out on the town with a HCG aggressively interested in making bad decisions will cause your heart to grind back to life. Then she will break your heart and leave you to break the heart of some richer, more successful bro and your yearning will augment accordingly.
3. Everybody Else Seems Dull.
Other girls all look like frumpy accountants after hot-crazy-girl gets loaded, leads you seductively to a bedroom (to watch Godard movies, doye) and “make love.” The whole time she’ll remind you that it doesn’t mean anything to her and you will totally love her for it.
But no matter how much men love them in those fleeting, wildly intimate moments, the truth of the matter is that the hot-crazy-girl is unsustainable. Perhaps more than any of the three entries on the numbered list above, men fall in reckless love with them because of just how ephemeral their time together is: you cannot settle down with a hot-crazy-girl or you destroy the very thing that makes her interesting in the first place.
Conclusion? Men love butterflies. Maybe.
Also, let’s just be practical: running through alleys in the pouring rain and slinking into shops to try on masks and stare longingly at each other seems pretty awesome in the moment… but after a few months of this, the spark dims a bit and hot-crazy-girl proves to be just another spoiled sociopath with a Facebook page for her cat.
