I’m a reasonably happy person. In fact, I’m sure there are people out there that think I’m ridiculously happy, almost drugged with satisfaction, and usually these people wear much more eyeliner than I do.
And from my saccharine-soaked platform of jubilance, I rarely get really angry. I mean, I experience negative emotions. I get upset about being ten minutes late to a movie, I get frantic with worry about the tiniest things, I get practically frenzied about What The Fuck I’m Going To Do With My Life, and I get annoyed when there is too much cutlery stuffed into the drying rack.
But look elsewhere for sugar right now. I am a woman and I am angry. For almost two weeks, I’ve been trying to temper my stifling rage at the Melissa Summers/Today Show situation. A promient and witty female blogger goes onto national television, no, is invited onto a national morning show to talk about her moderate and sensible point of view that women, as mothers, shouldn’t feel badly or castigate themselves for having a glass of wine during a playdate with their children and other mothers. Summers is articulate, temperate, and RIGHT.
And she’s basically set up by the Today Show to be labeled as the opposite of “healthy”. She’s not sitting up there having a rational discussion about what it means to have a moderate glass of wine. She’s part of a segment where three other women, having one glass of wine at their playdate, are filmed through the glassy alcoholic necks of wine bottles, where they show the same wine-pouring shot three times. She’s ambushed with idiotic questions and not allowed to say what she means. She’s set against a robotic talking-head psychologist that doesn’t answer either of her points, and she’s confronted by Meredith Viera who basically equates her capable full-time mothering to a babysitter.
Not a single element of this entire charade is about men. We are not watching men having a beer while their kids play in the yard. We are not talking about the pressures of fatherhood. We are not even talking about whether a husband and wife can relax with a drink whilst watching their children.
THIS IS ALL ABOUT WOMEN, and only women are subjected to this ridiculous debate.
Because they are WOMEN.
I cannot stress enough the way my throat closes over when I think this through. My brain gets very messy, and very loud. I can only equate it to a room full of filing cabinets, half of them flying violently open by an unseen hand, papers and folders and documents all being flung into a snowstorm of information by some Carrie-like wrathful angel of feminism.
File folders marked with angry red letters about the glass ceiling for motherhood in the corporate world, about the inherently unfair standards dropped on the shoulders of working mothers. Post-its that ask, if there was an equally body-specific and private decision like abortion available to men, would there even been a national platform for outrage over their choice to do it? Whole cabinets full of pissed-off notes about being objectified, being forced to swallow lies about what Men Want and What Gets Them To Marry You. An entire drawer on the issue of weight and curves and aging and sexiness.
I am angry that segments about women like the Today Show segment even exist, because they are not complex and thoughtful evaluations of modern motherhood, they are idiotic and prejudiced stones of judgement that are all too easy to hurl at this society’s favorite punching bag. It’s like some horrific national itch that no one will collectively face and eradicate because it’s too fucking enjoyable to drag it out into the harsh light of day and watch it scab over again.
The anger is like a blowdryer dropped into a series of interconnecting estuaries and canals – pretty much the whole body of water is vibrating with electric current. I want to scream, I want to rail, because I am so tired of the millions of subtle little papercuts that women are still enduring. How inequal can we possibly stay whilst having all the shallow pinnings of equality? What will change people’s MINDS?
I am not an angry person. But I am angry because all this means that we still suffer under a Madonna/Whore complex in every aspect of our public AND OUR PRIVATE LIVES. Women cannot have a glass of wine when their children are in the house, but men can have a beer at a barbeque? Are women less capable? Is that it? Or is this because only the mothers are really expected to be responsible for their children where fathers are expected play a secondary support role? Men are still, what, the point person for hunting and gathering, so the role of motherhood is the only thing women should be capable of doing? Motherhood, a beautiful and powerful force, is used as a confining straitjacket by people who still want women to do it to the exclusion of anything else?
Aren’t we tired of cavepeople, of Venus and Mars, of Ozzie and Harriet?
Are we women, or are we solitary martyrs? Are we people, entitled to all the tiny triumphs and flaws and choices and mistakes, or are we templates and objects and standards and platforms? Are women allowed to be human, or must we constantly be either angel or demon?
I am angry about this. I am sick of this. I am sick of women being type-cast, stereotyped, generalized, judged, and ultimately penned in to societal expectations and mass castigation when they act out of form. Summers made a joke about sometimes rolling her eyes when her kids cry. This doesn’t make her a bad mother. It makes her a normal human being.
I am sick of women judging each other, like directors that gladly named names at the McCarthy hearings only to get the heat off themselves. I am sick of the Mommy Wars and the glass ceilings and the choice/life battle and all the little injustices that men don’t ever have to squeeze their eyes shut to avoid, just to have a day free of anger.
I want to see women turning this judgemental unfairness and inequality away at the doorstep, never allowing into their lives, and getting angry together at the slights and slanders against us. I want to see one giant feminist Care Bear Stare of rejection for these norms, these wicked compartmentalizations, these absurd expectations and inevitable failures of being a woman.
I am going to leave the burner on for this. I am going to stay just angry enough to keep the blood pumping and the adrenaline-fueled awareness on high. I suggest you do, too.

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