Recently, Jessica Valenti wrote a piece for The Nation, "The Upside of Ugly." The article is about a young girl (14 I believe) who had plastic surgery to alter her ears (which stuck out), her nose and chin. Valenti discusses America's obsession with beauty and looking good, and she discusses the idea of "self-esteem" as a "cure-all for girls." Though she never really defines it, she seems to equate self-esteem with feeling good and proud of the way one looks; she doesn't really talk about being proud of your work ethic, intelligence, etc., something that some commenters noticed and were bothered by. But her point is clear: the problem is not just that our culture expects us to be beautiful, it's that "we never seem to question the idea that feeling beautiful is a worthy goal in the first place." And then she gets to the real point of her article:
Girls don't need more self-esteem or feel-good mantras about loving themselves—what they need is a serious dose of righteous anger. But instead of teaching young women to recognize and utilize their very justifiable rage, we tell them to smile and love themselves.
In the comments section, one person's notes stuck out specifically to me. He (I think this commenter was a man) wrote: "Yeah that's all we need is a bunch of fists walking around this 'fucked-up country.'...There might be a third way: authentic, optimistic femininity that acknowledges the role women have always had in raising the standard of a culture without spitting in its face."
What? Because women are "naturally" nurturing and sweet, we should expect them to rise above that base and male emotion of anger?! Really?
I don't understand why people are so bothered by the idea of women being angry. And, news flash, we are angry, folks. We may not all write about it and force it on our Facebook friends, like I do, but we are angry. We may not always acknowledge it to ourselves, and we may not all be angry about "big" things such as public policy or media representation, but women are constantly angry with the way the world treats them. Some women are angry when their husbands assume that they are going to watch the kids over the weekend while they go play golf with their guy friends. Some women are angry when their bosses treat them differently than their male colleagues. Some women are angry when a strange man whistles or catcalls at them on the street.
I'm angry. I'm angry that so many of this country's politicians want to cut funding for women's organizations like Planned Parenthood. I'm angry that, despite his best efforts to ignore what he's been taught, my boyfriend still sometimes thinks that I just have too many emotions. I'm angry when someone (male or female) asks me when my boyfriend and I are going to get married, but never ask me when I'm going to start that magazine I've talked about, or when I'm going to start submitting pieces to magazines. I'm angry when someone says, "Just wait until you're pregnant..." because they assume I will someday have children. I'm angry when I hear about men who think it's ok to "paternalistically" kiss employees on the top of the head. I'm angry when women get blamed for being raped.
And there's nothing wrong with anger. Anger led women to fight for the right to vote. Anger led women like Gloria Steinem to put their voices out into the world and let everyone know that women are people and do expected to be treated accordingly. Anger led me to start writing about and fighting against the personhood amendment in Mississippi, and we defeated it.
So I think Jessica Valenti got it exactly right. We need a little anger.
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