Women: you have become sausage shaped. Stop Eating Now.

uh, didn't they use corsets and girdles alot back then? back then really big hips and breasts seemed rather common, with oddly tiny waists.

better sausages than toothpicks.

"You're young, you're crazy, you're in bed and you've got knives."
— Angelina Jolie, in a newspaper interview, explaining her scars.

A sensible man would be glad not to be involved with a woman who throws the words "bed" and "knives" into the same sentence. But then, there aren't a lot of sensible men. Many of them would say crazy equals sexy. That it can also lead to emotional ruin, bankruptcy and embarrassing scenes at parties is beside the point. At the time, it seems irresistible.

Why do men love crazy women?

No one ever asks that question. You hear a lot about all the bad men out there. A whole lamentation genre has grown up around smart women and their foolish choices, their misguided hunting and fishing for Mr. Right.

Lucinda Rosenfeld's recent first novel "What She Saw . . . " is a litany of exes, each chapter named for a different one. "Kevin McFeeley, or, 'The Romantic From Ronkonkoma,'" and so on. In "Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War," Deborah Copaken Kogan recounts her experiences as a photojournalist in Afghanistan, Romania, Zimbabwe. Again, each chapter is named after a man. What she saw in Pascal, Pierre, Julian . . . Both books treat men like case studies in dysfunction.

"Sex and the City" coined the term "toxic bachelor" to describe the many Mr. Wrongs bedded by the show's chronically single women. He is emotionally unavailable, unwilling to commit, unfaithful. But ask a man why a relationship has gone bad and he will very often cite just one reason. Twirling his index finger around his ear, he will lip-sync, if not actually come out and say, "She was crazy."

Crazy in the loose definition, that is. From just beyond garden-variety neurotic — a tantrum at a Burberry sample sale isn't quite nutty enough — to Zelda Fitzgerald. This is the mad, mad world of X-rated eye contact, flirtatious disclosures of kinky passions, mysterious disappearances in the middle of a party, searches for all-night pharmacies, rash proposals to move to Palestine, Tex.

Meet Ms. Wrong. These are the toxic bachelorettes and screwed-up sirens who have shipwrecked so many men on the shoals of their studio apartments. There is no self-help book called "Smart Men, Crazy Choices," because no man would be seen buying it. The phenomenon is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. But psychologists I spoke with, male and female, instantly recognized it. As did any man with some baggage in his overhead compartment.

"I've always been attracted to crazy women, but I didn't marry one," said Adam Platt, a restaurant critic for New York magazine, who when he was single used to write columns for The New York Observer about his dating escapades. "I would just chase them around and around," he said. "High-energy, brainy, self-destructive women who came from tortured family situations. New York is a hotbed for that kind of character, because if you weren't crazy before you got here, you're certainly crazy after you've been dating a couple of years here." Including himself, he said, but not his wife. "It's not like you're surrounded by pink-cheeked farm girls carrying buckets of milk around. You're surrounded by lunatics."

Like addicts confessing for the first time to a lifelong habit, men offer tale after tale of seduction and disaster. The moth to this flame is, as often as not, the stable nice guy who seems inexorably drawn to women who should send him running for his life. The Angelinas, the Calistas and the many Kims (Kim Cattrall, Lil' Kim, Kimmi from "Survivor," Part 2) — or at least the personae they project. A stable, nice-guy friend of mine was once told that he should have a sign on his forehead saying: "Crazy? Screwed-up? Why not go out with this guy?"

Maybe what men really need are case studies of the Ms. Wrongs in their lives. A "What He Saw" in . . .

The Covert Operative, or, "She was never boring." Dr. Herb Goldberg, a psychologist in Los Angeles, has written several books on male psychology: "The Hazards of Being Male," "The Inner Male" and "What Men Really Want." What they really want, in his view, is a "magic lady" who challenges their limited attention spans. "Achievement-oriented, aggressive, dominant, success-driven males have a very low tolerance for boredom and passivity," Dr. Goldberg said. "The crazy woman keeps them on their toes."

Even a simple dinner becomes a game of conversational chess, without all the pieces. Normal women tell you about their day. Crazy women spin fantastical tales or blurt out cryptic non sequiturs. "They're like a puzzle," said Howie Blaustein, a 36-year-old New York lawyer. "You're always trying to figure them out."

Some of their moves can leave even the smoothest talkers at a loss for words. A. J. Jacobs, an editor at Esquire, recalled a woman who said to him, over hummus at the Bell Cafe on Spring Street, "I miss you." It was their first date, but not their last.

My own "Check, please" moment should have come when an aspiring singer I'd been out with only twice before told me the C.I.A. was recruiting her as a courier. They hadn't communicated with her yet, but she was convinced they were going to. That was getting a little too interesting. Still — on this third date, our last — we ended up at my place listening to her demo tape, which had a soulful, pop-erotic, early-Madonna quality that I was sure a sensible woman could never have achieved.

The Actress/Journal Thief, or, "She emotes for two." Dr. William S. Pollack, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School and is the author of "Real Boys," maintains that men are trained early to purge so-called female emotions and behavior.

"In extremis, woman is pure feeling," Dr. Pollack said. "Very exciting, obsessionally involved, very willing to cry one moment and be funny the next. This is not only attractive to a man because he doesn't have it, but because it's a part of himself he's not allowed to express." The woman gives a man "vicarious fulfillment of his inability to express himself," he said.

"And not only that, but he can blame it on her."

Expressiveness is the hook. It reels you in, especially if you're not the emotive, artistic type yourself. As my friend John, a 39-year-old political columnist, said, "There's this notion that they have an ability to express feelings that connect to something deeper that you yourself don't have." Something Dr. Bonnie Jacobson, a New York psychologist, called "the wild woman inside him who's dying to get out."

The trade-off? The shallow man has to be prepared to hit new depths of drama. The crazy woman is not shy about making a scene. She will shout in a pharmacy, as one did to her date's mortification, "I need my Prozac now!"

Tad Low, 33, a television producer, was once involved with a woman he thinks was an actress. After a year together, he still wasn't sure. But he was drawn to her long red hair and mystical faith in the miniature Celtic runes she would draw from a bag for advice.

One day she made off with his private journal. To get it back, he resorted to dognapping her pit bull, to hold as ransom. That led to a scene in front of her East Village apartment involving police intervention and "public shaming," he said.

Nadja, or, "She was beautiful, but prone to medication." You can see her coming. "Big eyes," sometimes concealed behind heavy glasses, came up in an informal survey. "Long hair." "Red, red lipstick." Wan, pale, ethereal, she looks as if she needs to be taken care of. Mr. Blaustein recalled an "Audrey Hepburn-looking woman" at a Thanksgiving dinner who made outrageous claims, saying, for example, that she'd been a prostitute in South Africa. He was smitten.

The fragile look frequently matches a precarious constitution. Common symptoms include an allergy to sunlight requiring her to wear large hats at the beach. In "Nadja," André Breton's surreal novel about his obsession with a mad waif he meets on the streets of Paris, he writes of their first encounter: "She begins telling me about her health, which is extremely delicate."

The Tragic Heroine, or, "She seemed literary." You could make a claim that all the best literary heroines are crazy. Think of the Brontës, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Lady Brett Ashley, Sylvia Plath — alluring, but ultimately destructive of themselves and the men who made them their muse. Hemingway thought Zelda Fitzgerald did everything she could to keep her husband from his work. In "A Moveable Feast," he wrote, "Scott did not write anything more that was good until after he knew that she was insane."

The Casanova Coefficient, or, "She was the ultimate romantic." The mystery of the crazy woman's appeal may not be so mysterious. Behind the wild-eyed look and uninhibited behavior, men fantasize, must lie a crazy libido.

"She flirts with all humans in all situations," said a poet in his 30's who lives on the West Side. "She is on the rebound from a relationship with another toxic bachelorette."

Bruce Jay Friedman, whose fiction has tracked the craziness of the male psyche over 40 years, said of his attraction to the female version: "That was the first part of my life." In those days, the notion of a woman "in analysis" was still enticingly outré. "I just wanted to run off with anybody who was spending four days a week on the couch. What else could she be talking about other than sex?"

But can it just be that? Or is it that she is, perhaps even more devasatingly, a true romantic? Casanovalike, she has the ability to laser in on the object of her flirtation. A man reflected in her intense gaze becomes the most fascinating person in the world.

Another Casanovan trait: she is utterly elusive. Even more confounding than not being able to pin her down is not being able to get unpinned from her: she won't be broken up with, threatening to do something drastic (but not actually doing it), or calling you two weeks later to say: "Oh, hi. I'm engaged."

She will also, in my case, continue the relationship long after its official end with late-night calls delivering messages from Jim Morrison in a dream. She wants to keep the connection alive, but without commitment. As Mr. Platt said, "You like them because you don't have to settle down with them."

A scholar could date this pattern to Greek myth. In Plato's "Symposium," Aristophanes says that man and woman were a single hermaphroditic being until Zeus split them in two, resulting in an endless quest for the matching half.

Dr. John Gray, a latter-day mythologist of the sexes, put his own "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" spin on this conflict.

"Men tend to become judgmental and critical, and when they're not getting what they want, they think: 'She's nuts. She's crazy,'" he said.

It's all in our heads.