This post popped up in my reader from Feminist Philosophers about borderline personality disorder. At the very end of the post, the author mentions a book , Janet Wirth-Cauchon’s Women and Borderline Personality Disorder, and how Wirth-Cauchon thinks borderline personality disorder is the “new female malady”.

Being fairly familiar with BPD (Hi Mom- stop stalking me on the internet- it’s creepy and gross) and sadly familiar with domestic violence, I don’t think BDP is a particularly female problem. I think that men with BDP are seen as love sick, John Cusak with a boombox type romantics instead of potentially violent stalkers with a mental illness (an illness that is patriarchy approved, mind you). Now granted, I’m not a psychologist but I’ve spent enough time on a couch sorting through this shit to have a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about.

Life with my mom was excruciating. There was never enough I could do to prove that I loved her and was a good daughter. The more I sacrificed of myself, the more needy she became. And when my attention was focused elsewhere for even a minute, her rage was earthshaking. For people with BPD, you can never love them enough to make it ok. If they feel that you are “slipping away” then there are suicide threats, eating disorders, drug abuse, lies, manipulations, or some crisis is created where you have to come pay attention to them right now. Having friends or boyfriends or even other family members that love you is not ok. For my mom, there is only a limited amount of love in the world and any love that goes to someone else is love (re/ attention) that is not going to her. Loved ones of people with BDP can find themselves very isolated.

And this isn’t very different from domestic abuse patterns. If you listen to any DV victim, the same themes of needy partners and isolation come up. Unfounded jealousy, “crazy making” manipulations, violent episodes of rage for no rational reason are all pretty standard for both BDP and DV.

It makes sense to me, that after growing up in a house where love was this obsessive, needy, devouring beast that I ended up with the Kid’s dad when I did. It was familiar, unhealthy but familiar. At the end of my relationship with the Kid’s dad and at various points in my relationship with my mom I did what I could to become a blank slate around them. I tried to erase whatever it was about me that made them hurt. It was a futile exercise, because there wasn’t ever enough I could do to make it right and the more I tried to blank out the more I resented them, which made them more volatile, which made me more resentful, etc. But the thing that saved me from continuing both of those relationships was the same, the Kid. I could tolerate a whole lot of shit being thrown my way, but when that shit started heading towards the Kid the logical part of my brain, or perhaps what one shrink called my “survivor’s heart” kicked in and said enough.

Since the Kid’s dad, I have never been in another romantic relationship that was even slightly abusive. Sure, I’ve dated my fair share of jerks (and I’ve been a jerk a few times myself) but they weren’t abusive.

All of this is just a long way of saying that I don’t think BDP is a female malady. I think it may be a female manifestation of domestic abuse. But what does it say about female agency that men who act this way are criminals (as long as you have a police force, district attorney and judicial system with domestic violence training) while women who act this way are diseased? I think that is an interesting question, and one I don’t have a good answer for.