One of her most famous openers details how in the middle of a women’s rights march she popped into a shop to use the bathroom and got so distracted trying on creams and fragrances the march walked past her and she got left behind. The show starts with, “I’m a feminist, but…” This is usually followed by a guilty admission of something supposedly unfeminist that most of us could relate to. One of my favourite iterations of this is the Guilty Feminist, a podcast by Deborah Frances-White, where she explores our noble 21st century goals as feminists and the hypocrisies and insecurities that undermine them. It appears the most popular modern feminism, most likely to gain any traction, is less rigid, more forgiving. I wonder if these new appropriations of the term are due to ignorance, reclamation, irony or protest? Check out #LadyBoss on Instagram to see what I mean. Lady is used to police, but also to celebrate. Her moniker means lady street hoodlum, two starkly contrasted concepts, something that is seen in her work again and again, dichotomies and duality. Ladies and Angry Feminists are often seen as binary in nature, but feminists like Lady Skollie walk the spectrum, muddying both. So, when we use terms like the Angry Feminist, we are immediately disregarding that person and their views as irrational, over-emotional and unacceptable, making the Angry Feminist the furthest thing from socially-accepted femininity, which is being a lady.
Vocal feminists are often termed Angry Feminists and thus rejected. This can be seen in tropes like Angry Black Woman or A Woman Scorned. Angry women are seen as dramatic, over-emotional and not to be taken seriously. I am an Angry Feminist a lot of the time but even when I am not angry, just being vocal and passionate about feminism means I am labelled as an Angry Feminist because society does not really understand feminism without anger – a convenient assumption because when we align feminism with anger, we can dismiss it.įeminine anger is largely rejected by society. Roxane Gay again explains this best: “There’s no such thing as a feminazi … the point of it is to try and encourage women to not stand up for themselves … and that if you dare to believe you’re equal to men somehow ‘oh my god’ you’re so radical that you’re almost as bad as a nazi.” (Q&A, 2019) They say they don’t want to be labelled as feminists because they equate feminism with hating men.Īlmost everyone who does not identify as a feminist has a shared delusion of the man-hating Angry Feminist. Even women in my own family won’t identify as feminists, side-stepping the word with ‘egalitarianism’ or ‘equality’. On the other hand, in my experience, society still sees feminist as a dirty word. These examples speak to an all-new meaning and understanding, no longer interpreting lady as pejorative or policing. What about Lady Gaga, Lady Skollie, All The Single Ladies? Pop icon. It’s a less-than-subtle instruction for how women should behave. In the same breath, we compensate domestic workers for low-income work and poor conditions with an archaic title that historically infers higher status, but today really means a lower rank: The Cleaning Lady.Įven though society and our vocabulary have both evolved, the term lady still proposes a specific form of gendered behaviour.
“Welcome ladies and gentlemen!” or “Ladies first.” Then it’s also used as a modifier like lady doctor, insinuating that women practising medicine are outliers and that they’re just a little less good at their jobs. This would have you believe that ladies need protection, discipline and a rigid set of instructions. “Sit like a lady,” “Talk like a lady,” “Not in front of the ladies!”. Usually, lady is used as a term to police feminine behaviour. Whereas Angry Feminists are “hairy, angry, man-hating, sex-hating women - as if those are bad things” to quote Roxane Gay. Ladies are demure and gentle mother-figures prototypical female figures. Take, for example, the labels lady and Angry Feminist.Īt first glance, they’re polar opposites of one another. Have you ever thought about how even though feminism is trying to dismantle the ‘rules’ about being a woman, we still end up being judged against them? I do.