People try to blame women’s bad moods on their hormones, or the moon, or that they didn’t get enough sleep, or exercise, or healthy food. They never do this to men. It is that they are saying women can’t be anything other than happy and content and placid all the time. If they are upset or angry it is the result of something they did or didn’t do.
It never is the result of being talked down to, being belittled, being ignored, or overlooked.
Women are treated like children. We are treated as if we are incapable of making decisions, running households, running our own lives.
A female scientist is seen as an anomaly, a showpiece. She isn’t taken seriously. She is a woman first, a scientist second. Trade the word scientist for engineer, diplomat, doctor. It is all the same. Her gender is more important than her ability. Her hairstyle and clothing choices are questioned more than her skills.
How much of women’s anger comes from being treated as women, and not as people? How much from not being allowed to be who we want to be, but instead forced to fit into a socially acceptable mold?
A lot of anger comes from pain, and a lot of pain comes from being repressed, suppressed, oppressed.
I dare any man to go a month shaving half his body hair off every day, wearing hose that always bunches up in the wrong places, and shoes that destroy your feet and make it impossible to walk confidently.
And that is just taking care of the physical pain.
We need a “Black like Me” but for women. If men understood what it was like to be women, they’d get it. They’d stop blaming our moods on stupid things.
How much of women’s anger comes from dealing with men who treat them as less than OK? Who treat them as sexual objects? Who treat them as things?
Sure, we are in bad moods sometimes. It has little to do with what we have done, but what has been done to us.
betsybeadhead 