I am allowed to exist, feel and be successful at the same time
As women, we have been stereotyped as emotional, unable to separate our emotions from our jobs and unable to perform as well as men can since the beginning of the human race. These ideas have stemmed from sexist, religious and capitalistic ideals that, even as the feminist movement progresses, have not been appropriately addressed. We, as a Western society, are still pushing away women who show emotion from positions of power and still haven’t elected a female president because voters think a woman will “start a war” because she is “too emotional.” I’m tired of this narrative, I’m tired of reading about it, I’m tired of seeing women pinned against other women.
My friends will tell you I am easily frustrated, which I am not doubting. I know I get frustrated by others easily. Lately, I’m getting frustrated by people simply for cutting me off when walking down the street. However, one of the issues I experience often is others calling me out on being too outwardly angry. Being told to “chill out” or “calm down” is quite a constant with my peers. I’m not blaming them for creating this environment, but we get into passionate arguments a lot, and for some reason, I am the one who gets told to calm down.
These arguments are good fun, but I’ve been noticing this trend and thinking about it a lot, overthinking it even. Am I too angry? Too loud? None of my male friends are told to calm down when we argue about which Hunger Games film is the best of the series.
Take the Super Bowl as an example; football fans are passionate. No one bats an eye at a man wearing his sports jersey and yelling at the screen when his team fumbles the ball. But a woman gets excited about a Taylor Swift concert, dresses up and talks about it as much as she wants and she’s an “insane fan” – she is crazy.
She loves hockey, watches Minnesota Wild games and gets questioned about her knowledge of the sport. “What does icing mean?” as if she hadn’t been playing the sport her entire life, as if she had something to prove.
We are not allowed to be angry, not allowed to be passionate. I am tired of not being able to be in a bad mood when I’ve had a bad day and feel like my world is crumbling. I want to be excited and scream at baseball games without someone questioning my knowledge of the player in right field.
My anger and my excitement is always justified. Your anger at the government and the world for bombing innocent people and the physics homework you can’t seem to complete is justified. We need angry women; we need passionate women.
The world wouldn’t be the same without angry, passionate women showing up at the picket lines, writing poetry, studying medicine and exposing hypocritical society. We are allowed to be angry, we are allowed to be mad, we are allowed to exist.