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People expect women to be authentically soft-hearted and kind but we as a society don't grok that being authentically soft-hearted and kind is actually really fucking hard while faking niceness is easy as shit.
Eastern religions teach that compassion is a discipline while in the West, we're so emotionally braindead that we take niceness for granted and assume it's just natural and David Lynch made his career demonstrating how fucking terrifying that assumption actually is in practice.
There's such a cultural illness to still expecting women to be nice when they're treated like shit. Intellectually, we all know women are suffering with abuse coming in at them from every direction. But emotionally and so unconsciously, men still expect us to be chill about it.
Men get tons of credit for softening themselves and opening their hearts to others because so few men will do the work to become kinder, to become still enough to care about others.
Women don't get credit for this discipline because it's taken for granted as natural, inherent.
Women don't get credit for this discipline because it's taken for granted as natural, inherent.
While everyone can make space for a man to express his righteous anger at obvious injustice, there is still an unconscious expectation among many that women will soften their tone and make their expression amenable and so more appealing to men. An angry woman cannot lead.
Kamala Harris is a great example of a woman who is capable of demonstrating anger but as soon as she became the VP nominee, she softened her voice, she spoke more quietly, she was paying a lot more attention to her cadence when she spoke.
All of this is what's expected of women.
All of this is what's expected of women.
I've actually seen Elizabeth Warren angry and it's breathtaking but you would never see it on the campaign trail. Never.
