Sun-bleached, rose-tinted stories on how to be a woman are entirely false.
We are no longer good girls.
We are no longer quiet girls.
We are no longer here to fulfil someone else’s narrative.
The truth – perhaps most inconveniently for some – is that to be a woman: to truly revel in one’s feminine energy, is to get comfortable existing in the perpetual, simmering embers of anger. To truly feel the extent of female rage – most often dismissed as the hysterical, melodramatic outbursts of the unhinged – is to feel the slow burn that courses through our veins, to be at one with the constant presence in the undertow of our being.
It’s to be fucking angry, just to be clear; intimately so.
Yes, we are feminine; we are the shelter from the storm, but rest assured: we are also the fucking storm. We are the gathering clouds, exhausted from years of quiet observations, comments, patronising, subtle, persistent moments of being undervalued; the patriarchal pronouncements, the dismissals, the undercurrent of doubt that threatens to shroud us in perpetual shade.
We are done with murmurs; baritones of choruses proclaiming what girls and women should and shouldn’t do. Sick of countless editorials and headlines yelling vitriol about our age, our marital status, our careers, our wombs. It’s this that fuels the embers of female rage. It collects, builds, grows with each patronising explanation, each backhanded compliment… Each time our voices are talked over, ideas dismissed, talent and potential overlooked.
How can we not be really fucking angry?
Oh, silly me… To be angry is to become a hysterical, crazy shrew. A caricature. A banshee. Naturally.
A convenient way, of course, to dismiss the depth and legitimacy of our collective fury.
True female rage isn’t a performance. It’s a reckoning. It’s the quiet clench of fists around years of suppressed frustration. It’s the stark realisation that we’ve been playing a rigged game for too long.
To be truly feminine is to be perpetually angry; to be a simmering rage, exhausted by constant disappointment; to be truly furious and impatient for change. Rest assured, dear reader, that within this quiet fire lies a potent force – and this is what they’re scared of; this is why they insist on dismissing us. It’s this fuel that propels us forward; the engine that drives us to rewrite the narrative, to scream into the abyss, to reclaim our space.
Be under no illusion: it’s female rage that will be the catalyst for building a new world. A world where our voices not only rise, but become architects that reshape the very foundations on which we currently stand.
In essence, true female rage is not a fleeting outburst, but an unwavering force that exists to dismantle outdated structures that thrive on our silence, and fuels the construction of a future to become instruments of change. For us. For our daughters. For our daughter’s daughters. Who, if the mother in Mary Poppins is anything to go by, will adore us for it.
Be fucking furious. I dare you.