You’re being so angsty! That movie was way too angsty! Stop being so angsty.
I’ve heard these things far too often. So much so, that the word angst has started to lose meaning for me. My friends have started to tease me with the word to the point that I have lost track of it almost completely. But one thing I know for sure, we need to stop attributing this word to so many things. Particularly, we need to stop relating traditionally feminine things to the idea of being angsty.
Angst, according to a quick Google search, originated as a word in English in the 1920s. It comes from the German word angst which means fear. According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, the official definition is “feeling, showing, or expressing anxiety, apprehension, or insecurity,” but today, it is often the word we choose to use to describe things like the Twilight franchise or Riverdale or nights spent drinking wine and eating chocolate ice cream. The issue with this? Every single one of these things is associated with women.
There has come to be a major conflation between being a woman, enjoying traditionally feminine things, and thinking that these things make the woman prone to angst. Sure, I will not deny that many of the aforementioned examples do display their fair share of anxiety, apprehension, and insecurity, but the issue that is happening with the conflation is that things targeted towards a female audience are now always presumed to hold these characteristics and are thus written off, or worse, women who enjoy these things are presumed to hold these characteristics and are written off.
The same cannot be said to be true about many traits of masculine media and entertainment. Although many men enjoy overtly violent entertainment (wrestling each other, watching football, watching action movies), I have seen far fewer women write off traditionally masculine media or write off individual men for associating with these forms of entertainment and thus coming off as overly violent. However, I have woken up after a night of eating chocolate and watching The Bachelor to find that any slight whininess that came off in my voice was deemed angsty by my male friends and even sometimes my female friends. And it’s downright annoying if not detrimental.
We need to stop being so quick to deem things with this term. The conflation is becoming all too real and the connotations are becoming all too negative.