Girls Rule, Boys Drool

I’m over armchair philosophers and their memes.

I am especially over these memes that *seem* like feminist memes, but are really women apologizing.

Like this one:

Silly me. I forgot about the explosion of passion that rendered me unable to dress myself this morning, causing dozens of firey (small, because my passion is also conscientious and tidy and ladylike) explosions to go off all over the bedroom, destroying our new comforter and at least three laundry baskets worth of dirty laundry, which I had failed to wash because I was very, very busy weeping at the holiday Kleenex ads.

My partner then had to put out the fires and dress me. The whole time, he was rubbing my back, smoothing down my hair, letting me blubber into his shirt, and telling me how very, very worth all of this I am. He is a saint.

I’m so sorry my intensity does not jive with the prevailing, normalized concept of femininity.

I’m so sorry men only feel like men if they’re rescuing a lady.

Can we please stop apologizing?

I do it all the time. I feel like doing it right now. I won’t, though.

What about this gem:

I’m sorry I’m so emotional. It is DEFINITELY because I am a woman. I’m going to do my best not to show my feelings so that you are not annoyed or vexed by them!

Fuck that.Why is strength a virtue, anyway? 

My favorite people, men and women, lead messy, big, emotional lives in which they are sometimes weak.

There is real power in weakness. Weakness is the gate to self-awareness, self-improvement, and self-love.

We live in a culture where men are so emotionally repressed in the name of seeming strong that police officers shoot children because they are ill equipped to deal with their own fear, and suburban white dudes shoot up schools, movie theaters, planned parenthood clinics, and churches as an expression of their rage and brokenness, their racism and misogyny. 

What if all emotions and verbal/glandular expressions thereof were available to and welcome from all different kinds of people?

Why are women who are powerful and assertive said to have balls? Testicles are incredibly fragile. Vaginas, on the other hand, deliver ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS into this world. My vagina is hella stronger than any balls I’ve ever met. 

What’s that meme that’s frequently attributed to Betty White?  Oh yeah!

Why are characteristics such as self-motivation, intelligence, assertiveness, and pride deemed to be masculine? 

How can we not see that nobody wins when these things are ONLY masculine qualities. I have never had a romantic relationship in which my man friend did not, directly or in coded language, tell me I was emasculating him for being smart or good at things, or for knowing how machines work sometimes.

We will not talk about the ways in which my “masculine”, erm, behavior patterns have been trouble at work.

We have all screwed ourselves out of really great relationships by hyper-adherence to the gender binary…

Sorry for having a job, a car, and a bank account. I know I’m supposed to need to be taken care of.

I know it makes straight men feel manly to meet women’s material needs. I’m sorry for making them question their very senses of self just by taking care of me.

Why doesn’t it make men happy to be wanted, to be chosen? Why must we *need* them?

Ladies, this holiday season, we are dealing with a lotta pressure and expectations. Let’s be kind to ourselves and stop apologizing for being human, ok?

Whether or not our version of being human fucks with somebody else’s idea of how people of our gender should behave.