The face of a guy who has definitely said some less-than-ideal things about women before 2022. Photo by Tinseltown on Shutterstock.

There was a time in my life — there was a time in everyone’s life, wasn’t there? — when I really loved Kanye West. I loved how his mind worked, the aggressive confidence he displayed in the face of a world that wanted to humble him, the way his work charted a soaring and agonizing arc between “I am a god” grandiosity and eight-minute-long epics of self-hatred.

I just loved Kanye West, and when female friends of mine would point out that Kanye West did not love women, I dismissed them. Lots of male musicians didn’t like women, and some did worse than dislike them; there was a reason that Kanye was a culture villain and John Lennon or Steven Tyler were beloved. For me, Kanye fit an established archetype, the Difficult Genius, the guy who may have rough edges and deep flaws, but who is nonetheless able to mine gold from his imperfections in ways that more “likable” artists never could.

It’s the year 2022, and Kanye West, now named Ye, is terrorizing his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, in public. The harassment includes, but is not limited to, publishing all her private communications, sending a full truck of roses to her front door, and instructing his fans to confront her new boyfriend, Pete Davidson, in person, until Kardashian reportedly worried for his safety. This fits a pretty clear pattern of domestic abuse.

Yet instead of looking back at Ye’s long, long track record of concerning statements about women — or acknowledging the women who took the trouble to point them out — critics and defenders alike are choosing to pin the whole thing on Ye’s “bipolar disorder.” In so doing, they’re not only demonizing mentally ill people, they’re letting abusers, including Ye, off the hook.

Ye has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. That’s public knowledge. His behavior has been erratic for a long time. There was the MAGA turn, the Candace Owens connection, the Presidential run; there was the public disclosure that he doesn’t always take medication; there was his failing creative output, as one of the most talented men of his generation waded through a string of albums that were scrapped or delayed or rethought or which turned out, upon release, to be just plain bad.

There was a lot of stuff, and Ye’s post-divorce campaign of terror against Kardashian is messy and theatrical and weird in a way that we instinctively want to associate with “crazy Ye,” rather than genius Kanye. We want to segment out the madness from the man, to frame bipolar disorder as some supernatural demon that possesses his body and makes him do bad things.

The thing is, though, Ye was publicly terrible to women before his health unraveled. Before it was Kim, it was his ex-girlfriend Amber Rose; West nurtured a very long and very public fixation on her after their breakup, which included repeatedly calling her a whore, saying that he needed to take “30 showers” to be clean enough for another woman, and angrily Tweeting at the father of Rose’s child, Wiz Khalifa, that “you let a stripper trap you.”

There’s a name for the urge to punish and denigrate a woman for daring to leave a relationship, and it ain’t “bipolar.” There’s a name for expressing your dislike of a (different) woman by paying someone to make a photorealistic sculpture of her naked body. There’s a name for “Bill Cosby innocent,” for getting into Trump after the “grab them by the pussy” tape came out, for becoming a bigger fan of Marilyn Manson after his abuse and sexual assault allegations surfaced. There’s a name for obsessively praising your mother as a paradigmatic, saintly example of female purity and goodness, while casting all other women as repulsively seductive and corrupt.

None of that is “crazy.” It’s just misogyny, of the sort espoused by a lot of men with absolutely no mental health issues. The belief that women are scheming monsters who try to “trap” men by getting pregnant isn’t a manic delusion; it is the subject of Kanye West’s first big hit, released in 2005, and back then, a whole lot of perfectly sane people were singing along.

Maybe that’s why we’re so eager to blame Ye’s bad behavior on mental illness: Doing so allows us to distance ourselves from him, to claim that his harmful actions are inexplicable or strange or rare, rather than being the logical outcome of the patriarchal values we are all brought up with, and which most of us share. I shared those values, or was willing to overlook them, when I loved Kanye West. It hurts to admit that, but I would rather suffer the sting of self-awareness than shame innocent people for having an illness that is not their fault.

Bipolar disorder is not a punishment; good people and bad people alike get it. Ye just happens to be one of the bad ones. Mentally ill people are (and I cannot believe I still have to type this sentence in every single article on the subject, but they are) more likely to be victims of abuse than perpetrators; in fact, as the very recent case of Britney Spears shows, mental illness diagnoses are often weaponized by abusers, in order to impugn the victim’s credibility and take away her control over her own life. When we assume that mental illness automatically makes people abusive, we are demonizing the very people who need our help.

We are also aiding abusers, who often claim that their violence was “out of control” when it was anything but. Coercive control and violence are willful, repeated acts, which take conscious thought and planning. Ye’s planning may look slapdash, but it’s happening; if it weren’t, he wouldn’t be saying and doing the same things to several different women over the span of a decade. Framing abuse as “crazy” provides a ready-made excuse for those who want to claim they weren’t responsible for their own actions.

Ye is not an extraordinary monster. He’s not outside the range of human comprehension, not unprecedented. Ye is just a sexist dude who is taking his frustrations out on his ex-wife. It’s our own willingness to indulge and reward those guys, to overlook their misogyny until they finally go too far, that is the problem. Misogyny isn’t a mental illness, and complicity isn’t, either. Ye got this far because people like me made excuses for him. Who knows what he’ll do if we look away?