We need to talk about difficult women.
Difficult, when it comes to women, is usually used as a pejorative. It's used as a stand in for aggressive, for loud, and for women who don't seem to value making it easier for those around them.
It's rarely seen as a good thing. After all, women are supposed to be sugar and spice and everything nice and being difficult is a little ... salty.
But difficult women are important.
In the NWT, Tishna Marlowe, whose fashion show recently drew attention to murdered and missing Indigenous girls and women who are still murdered and missing, is difficult.
And everyone who is gong to gather on Dec. 6 to mark the 28th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre and speak out against violence against women are difficult -- after all, they refuse to keep quiet and insist on reminding us that bad things still happen.
There's an angry tide bubbling up from the US of 1970s-style feminist rage, fueled by sexual harassment and assault allegations against the great and the creepy. Another round of high-profile firings last week proved that perhaps, the times they are a 'changing. It's becoming increasingly clear that there is no 'acceptable' level of creepy behaviour, no such thing as banal misogyny.
Difficult women get things done.
You don't usually hear men described as difficult. Difficult is code for emotional, the entire swath of female frustration and confusion and rage wrapped up in one emotional bow tied directly to that time of the month. The painters are in, Aunt Flo is visiting, we have fallen to the communists -- otherwise, we would never be asking these questions that make things so difficult for you.
It's not that female anger is oh-so-terrifying, although if I had a dollar (or rather, 78 cents) for every time someone has told me to calm down ... I probably wouldn't need to be so concerned about the wage gap.
What it is is that female anger, full stop, is taboo.
Women aren't supposed to get mad; we're supposed to care about others' feelings, make sure people are comfortable, compromise and end things with a smile. Maybe phrase things as a question. Even just not doing that and getting straight to the point can be seen as A Problem. So an actual angry woman? Time to clutch my pearls and pumps, I feel faint.
If I'm feeling smashed against a glass ceiling, women of colour, Indigenous women, queer women and transwomen have been holding tight to the windshield of misogyny, trying to survive another gust of wind or sploosh of wiper fluid long before I climbed aboard. They've been humming along to a song titled, “how you say it is more important than what you say and why do you have to make me feel bad to make your point?” for a while now.
But once we accept female anger, it gets a whole lot harder to pretend women are to blame when bad things happen to them.
The only way to change this isn't waiting for some patriarch to declare that now, now, it's alright for a woman to be angry without people grabbing pitchforks. It's going to start with those of us who can afford to stick our necks out and say, 'Yes I'm difficult. And so?” It's going to start with us not feeling like we need to smile lest someone think we're upset -- no, this is just how my face looks, thanks. It's going to take knowing what you're worth and demanding it. And it's going to take making direct eye contact and, in declarative statements without an upswing in site, reclaiming our time one mansplaining interruption at a time. It's going to feel rude. It's going to feel wrong. But those of us who can? Need to do it for those who can't.
So I'm done seeing difficult as a negative. I'm over thinking of bossy as a bad thing or aggressive as a character flaw. Well behaved women rarely change history and anyway who put such a high premium on being well behaved?
I'd rather be difficult.