Following up on a little G+ kerfuffle: I love my nerdy, geeky hobbies. I love waxing enthusiastic about them. I love having good things to say about people. When I read someone else’s thoughts, I go in hoping I’ll find something good, something to agree with even if in the past we’ve disagreed. If I have a choice between posting something cheerful and something critical, I almost always pick the cheerful option.
When I do post something negative, it’s usually pretty mild by most standards, and I will not be silenced. Even—no, especially—when it’s about something trivial. If I let people bully me into compliance when they have nothing much on the line, how will I stand up to them when I get closer to the real issues? I’m sick and tired of the notion that any anger displayed by a woman is always too much. Even other women enforce this policing, and I won’t have it.
Incidentally, if you want to see quite literally an illustration of this prohibition on women’s negative feelings, try doing a Creative Commons search for “angry+woman”, then compare it to the results for “angry+man”. The search engines that return numbers of hits will systematically give you two or three times more “angry+man” results. In addition, you’ll soon discover that a significant proportion of the results for “angry+woman” actually show angry men with a woman present in the scene, often as the victim of threats. How fitting.
The Reef 