Let’s talk about feelings! Not the fun, warm, fun, fuzzy feelings. The dreaded uncomfortable ones. Ones that make you squirm, warm your cheeks in horrified embarrassment. The ones that are considered taboo to express in public. The guy on the sidewalk rage-crying and clearly mentally unstable, that you cross the street to avoid. The woman you judge at Target for screaming red-faced at her heathen children sprinting up the aisles.
I wanna chat about sadness, depression, anxiety, rage, anger, and fear. And periods.
NOT EVEN THE SAME HUMAN WHILE BIOLOGY DOES ITS MONTHLY THING ON MAH BOD
We’re a pathological society. We love to diagnose, prescribe and therapize everything. Foucault could (would still??) go on for days about the function of confession in modern society, and our need (my need!!) to express my deepest, darkest sins/emotions/traumas/feelings/thoughts to the rest of humanity. The function of absolution that it serves. The power it produces. When you take a moment to step back and think about the perceived social need for memoirs and autobiographies it is actually kind of funny. It seems almost ridiculous that you’d bother to be interested in another person’s life that has absolutely nothing to do with yours. Not anyone you’ve ever met, or even seen in real life. That you want to know Hillary Clinton’s first period story, and find out about how she and Bill fell in luuurve. Or maybe you don’t (I do and this is my blog, damn it). Somehow some power is gained, truth is produced. It feels good to know these secret things, and to express these things.
As a member of our glittering white-toothed, baseball, apple-pie, American society, I’ve noticed a few things about our emotional confessions/expressions. I am not the first to notice these things. I will not be the last. And unfortunately as a budding law student who is stupid amounts of busy, I offer no plausible answers. Just thoughts. And the google image results from searching: “crazy bitch” “raging bitch” and “can you not.”
In my experience, certain emotions have been generally relegated to certain genders.
aww yea, that old-school sexist misogyny.
Men are to be stoic, happy at their best, angry at their worst. Sad when their father or dog dies. They cannot show fear, they cannot show anxiety. They are the saviors, leaping through burning buildings, fighting our wars. Their physical strength and emotional superiority are embodied by these emotional traits. They sublimate those “negative” emotions: sadness, fear, anxiety, to a place deep inside. Or buried outside of them, far, far away.
Because no one wants to be labeled a pussy-ass, emotional bitch-man.
Women are to be pleasant. Happy at their best. Hysterical at their worst. Sad at TV commercials, the Notebook, the last piece of chocolate (LADIESAMIRITELOLOL??), Frozen, Tangled, and ?? literally all the other things in the universe, including spilt milk. Women are expected to show fear and anxiety. To cower in fear, waiting for their rescuer, who is ironically smiling in the face of imminent physical danger, to save them. But never to feel anger or show rage. They sublimate those “negative” emotions: anger and rage, to a place deep inside. Or buried outside of them far, far away.
Because no one wants to be labeled an angry, crazy bitch. Who is also on her period. Because all periods do is make our poor lady-brains emotional, hysterical, uncontrollable. Because it makes us, somehow, “not us.”
I think it’d be safe to assume that most societies favor emotional regulation, and emotional repression. Freud goes on and on about how society would not be able to function WITHOUT sublimation of sexual urges, anger, violence, and other inherent human traits (For real, go read Civilization and its Discontents, it’s spectacular). And maybe this is why society fears periods, and judge women for them. We are less able, biologically, to hold our emotions in.
“Calm yourself woman, hysterics are like suppressed orgasms, or whatever.” – Freud
Something to consider though, is whether our highly developed, complicated, consumer-centric society, has gone too far with that sublimation and judgment. And of course to considered the gendered-ness (the “omg you’re on your period, calm down, stop”-ness) of that sublimation.
Which leads me back again to the pathological nature of our society, and mental illness.
Any friend of mine will tell you that I am one of the angriest women that they know. That I am intimidating, blunt and pointed. I don’t shy away from expressing my opinion, whether you wanted to hear it in the first place or not.
I have been called a lunatic, a feminazi, a crazy bitch, a mean-hearted cunt (re-appropriate the word cunt please ladies, everyone say it, all the time, for no reason at all. Please), among other things. Some of those are valid judgments, and some are not. And I haven’t always been this way. I used to just be a bubbly ball of sunshine. Radiating magical fake smiles at everyone (I concede I still do that, but now I do actually assert my anger, et al. in a healthy way).
I confessed earlier in this blog that I suffered from an eating disorder, and obviously tied up in that disorder are a myriad of other disorders including depression and anxiety. What I found through therapy though, really astounded me.
I couldn’t believe how god-damn angry I was. Pissed. Raging. At myself, at family members, at friends, at my freaking therapist. At the universe. At the dude that was in front of me in line at Walgreens. At my cat. At literally everything.
And the fact that I had never told anyone about my anger and my rage before therapy. I couldn’t find an appropriate platform. No one cared. Women aren’t supposed to be angry. Not unless it’s the week that they are on their period. The next week we are expected to return and apologize. (FOR EMOTING OUR EMOTIONS?) Your period quickly becomes an excuse for anger, impulsive decisions, and mean-name calling. It doesn’t matter if it was really there or not. Just pretend. No one knows, and no one is going to check.
It’s not that we’re not supposed to be apathetic or emotionless (like men are supposed to be), we are actually supposed to care more (hence emotional tears streaming down lady-faces worldwide, everyday). And when we do emote anger and rage, it typically comes out in the form of tears. Those tears somehow discredits us, and removes the power that our anger holds. It shows a loss of control, the very control our society values. (Tears, also to many men, signifies period time, lol why else are you crying lady? Do you miss your released, unfertilized ova??)
Anger is an emotion that signifies to the brain (the animal, primitive, first-formed layer of the brain) that someone/thing in our vicinity has over-stepped a boundary that we have set. It’s a defensive emotion that served our paleo-dieting, hairy, cavelady ancestors well. The emotion still functions today though in a different way. We’re not trying to scare and chase birds away from our gathered berries or whatever. We’re trying to assert ourselves and our place in the world.
My therapist drilled it into me: you cannot control your emotions, only how you react to them. You can’t help it if anger rises up in you because a man on the street cat-calls you. You can help it if you confront him immediately and ask him to stop. Or, if you decide to ignore it, stare at the ground, hurriedly walk past, go home, and spill it out in hysterical tears later to your boyfriend or roommate or Facebook.
Or, maybe not even spill it out. Just let it happen, over and over again, letting the emotion rise into rage until you can no longer take it and begin to find explanations for the cat-calling behavior that make no sense. You blame yourself, your clothes, the way you walk, your face, your smile, your hair. You start taking another route home and find yourself more exhausted at the end of the day because you take an extra 15 minutes walking home in order to avoid the scary man on the street.
Yeah, imma totes leap in your arms and go home with you, scary street man.
The emotion doesn’t go anywhere until you’ve dealt with it. It becomes internalized. Resting within you and raising its levels each time it is triggered (lol trigger warning).
For some of us that sublimation, that internalization, is a recipe for disaster. And not just the “I have to wear different clothes and walk home a different way” disaster. Like, “I am in a mental hospital because I am literally a crazy bitch” disaster.
For others, it’s a source of frustration. Where can you be a bitch? Where can you just scream your feels out, on the street, at creepy cat-callers, without fear of physical danger in retaliation? Where can you cry your rage tears, without your boyfriend/roommate/general universe making fun of you, or telling you to calm down, or asking if you’re on your period? What blogs on earth can you respond to, asking valid angry-lady-questions, without fear of being labeled a bitch, or crazy, or hysterical OR ON YOUR PERIOD??
(I am not on my period rn, nor am I PMS’ing. DEAL WITH IT)
And I know men often feel the same way. I died on the inside when my boyfriend related to me that he had probably cried twice in the past 5 or 6 six years. FIVE OR SIX YEARS? HOW EVEN?
(There are plenty of women who don’t cry, who hold sadness in as well. I can’t speak for them and say its because they see it as a sign of weakness. I have no clue if it is for them or not.)
Emotions that are considered negative, and weak, are heavily applied to women. We are the default of those emotions. To express them, in the eyes of many men, would be “womanly.” An absolutely horrifying trait that many men would like to (and actively) avoid, unless of course, it could somehow involve them having their own pair of tits to play with (AMIRITEGUYS LOLOL).
Men that express the negative emotions listed above are called pussies. Women have pussies. You get the point. We are the embodiment of loss of control when it comes to emotional expression.
I am an advocate of all people being able to freely express their emotions. Not in an absolute chaotic, bedlam, hysterical way. In such a way that endangers others and completely destroys all facets of human language and civilization. I just want to be able to let my boss know that he’s being a dick, without him wondering if I’m on my period and asking my co-workers about it. No boss, you’re just a dick (that totally happened IRL, btw).
We’re humans. We live in a highly developed society. A society that profits and benefits from us and other humans reigning in our desires, our instincts, our threatening emotions. However, our society also valorizes those emotions, genders those emotions, and pigeon-holes us (male and female alike) into those emotions – at the risk of developing actual psychosis. Time to stop.
Bitches, please rage in anger. Be cray. Say, “I’M NOT ON MY PERIOD, I JUST HATE YOU AND THE UNIVERSE, I CAN HATE THINGS WHEN I’M NOT ON MY PERIOD BECAUSE I AM A HUMAN AND MY EMOTIONS ARE VALID RESPONSES TO ENVIRONMENTAL STIMULI” or some variation of that sentence. Say it so loud that you drown out all of the “WHERE’S YER MIDOL? ARE YA ON THE RAG? BITCH SHUT UP, YOU UGLY ANYWAY” responses. Your emotions are NOT a pathological symptom. You are NOT hysterical. You are an amazing woman who should roar. At least like twice a month.
Dudes, please, please cry. Rage-cry. Let it out. Sit alone in your room and throw tears into that pillow. Dunno how to? Watch Lion King. Just kidding, I honestly don’t know what to do to help to empower men into feeling the emotions that they feel are invalid/stupid/womanly/etc. Any advice from readers would be greatly appreciated. I just want you to know, that one person out in the universe acknowledges that emotional sublimation sucks just as much for you, as it does for us. Also please stop asking if we’re on our period. It is irrelevant. Ask yourself if you’re being a jerk (or if someone else is) first.
Bitch Fit 
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