Velvet Verbosity

From one blog to another I discovered The Angry Black Woman, writings from a gender and race activist. I was a little surprised to see Gloria Steinem being raked over the coals so I had to go see what that was about. Turns out Steinem had made a faux pas in the way she said something, and managed to really piss some people off. I’ll get back to you on what side of this argument I fall on. I haven’t read everything in depth yet. At first glance though, it seems there might be somewhat of an overreaction. The tagline from this blog is “Why are black people angry all the time? Probably some dumb shit you did.”

This is why I never formally became a feminist. What I mean is, I didn’t want to go to meetings, I didn’t want to march in marches, I didn’t want to be involved because I didn’t want to live my life feeling angry. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t speak up about women’s rights, or expect and demand them for myself. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t sometimes feel incredibly outraged about some things. It’s just that I remember my first encounter with an open feminist, and it was brutal. My first year in college, I was invited to participate in a new leadership council for all the colleges in Vermont. There was this young woman there, and as soon as you were introduced she would immediately announce she was a feminist. She was on the defensive every second, just waiting to strike. During group workshops, no one could finish a complete sentence before she was standing up and calling someone a sexist pig or enlightening us about the evil patriarchy. If she had been right even half of the time, I might’ve been more sympathetic to the cause, but if a man was chosen to speak first she was on her feet. If a woman was called on to answer a certain question, she found evil intent behind it and railed. On and on it went all weekend without pause. If she wasn’t speaking, she was listening only so much as to hear anything that she could be angry about. She had what I like to call, “angry ears”.

This turned me off feminism for quite a while. Later, when I returned to college, I took a woman’s studies class. Oh lord, I thought I was going to hurl sometimes. About mid-semester, 9/10ths of my classmates were arguing for changing the language in all great historical literature, including the bible mind you, to be gender neutral. I was the only woman in the class arguing against this. It was a simple argument really. “Um, you can’t rewrite history. That would be bad.”

I spent the next four years at an all woman’s college where issues of gender and women’s issues were constantly at the forefront. You couldn’t escape it if you tried, and while I was still on board that women should get to vote, get to have a shot at leadership, be seen as equal, and so on, I sometimes felt tired at the endless discussion and anger.

The truth is, it’s hard to strike a balance as a woman. I spent most of my life not very angry about these issues. Mostly this was because I was raised to just believe that I had all the same rights, and to be treated as though I did. I was also blessed with many male friends who were incredibly respectful, intelligent, aware, and kind and there was very little “battle of the sexes” banter or joking that salts and peppers so many other conversations. For the most part, we were just “human” with each other, and respect was paid to our shared humanity. In other interactions, however, it was made clear (and became more clear with time) that most of humanity still engages in disrespect to other humans ranging from the subtle (seemingly innocuous) to the gross.

Earlier tonight, I believe due to having made myself ultra-sensitive through all of my recent reading, and a recent painful experience, I retaliated on a comment that “offended” me and my retaliation was sharp, quick, and cruel. I didn’t even think about it, it just flew out of my mouth, and I regretted it the second it came out. It came from a place of hurt and rage, and wanting someone else, someone from the other team, to feel what we women sometimes feel. So, while my conscience feels humbled and shamed for saying it, my intellect and my emotion feels vindicated. Typically, when women, or frankly anyone else who isn’t at the top of the heap, says, “Could you stop hurting me?”, they are told that they are just being too sensitive. So tonight I turned the tables. I didn’t plan to, I didn’t think it out, but there it came. Still, I wish I hadn’t said it.

I never really did believe that “an eye for an eye” was the best way to prove a point. I truly wish it wasn’t the only way that some people can hear your message. I had my “angry ears” on. Sometimes, it just gets so tiring to speak rationally, to spend exhaustive amounts of time and energy explaining just why some statements, some behaviors, some ways of thinking, at the very minimum support the relentless subtle disrespect of another’s humanity. Sometimes, when you’re hurt and angry enough, you simply dispense with the peace talks, and just push the red button to launch a verbal weapon of mass destruction (yes Bush and your lackies, I got me some of those VWMDs). If I had even stopped there, maybe I would have been justified. But no. The person was clearly stunned and hurt, and later when I wanted to apologize and I wasn’t allowed to talk about it, I said some more crap. In the end, I didn’t accomplish closing the gap, I managed to make it wider.

Tomorrow I endeavor to “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”, or to at least find the balance. I think that tagline, “Why are black people angry all the time? Probably some dumb shit you did.”, could be adjusted to any situation, only replacing the “some dumb shit you did” to “not being listened to, respected, and honored”. Yeah, when we don’t get that, anger sets in, and it fecking festers people. Even though I regret what I said, not only because it was cruel, it was unusual too, not to mention simply not true. But I was angry from all the times I had tried to rationally point out why some things are hurtful and had my feelings minimized or brushed off.

So here’s the lesson of the day. When you continually hurt and disrespect a woman, then tell her that her expressed wishes to be respected are invalid, overly sensitive, or some other poppycock, either through your words or actions, she is going to do one of two things. Tell you right where you can go, or she’s going to swallow her feelings and vomit them all over you, or someone else, later. This is the nature of repression. When the latter happens, it won’t necessarily be timely, correct, and it is sure to be stinky and unpleasant if not downright toxic.

Repression leads to oppression, and both make the repressed and oppressed angry. I wish I knew the antidote to this. I do actually. We need to treat all humans with respect and dignity in all of our thoughts, words, and actions. As I should have done. As someone else did with me tonight by apologizing for some jokes that, upon reflection, he thought I might have found offensive.