Too Emotional?!?
They whispered to her, "You can't withstand the storm." She whispered back, "I am the storm."
After she died, Queen Elizabeth was celebrated as being a woman who never said what she was thinking. The New Yorker reported that “the only time she misbehaved in public was at her christening. She cried throughout, and had to be dosed with dill water.” There are no reports if the Queen ever cried again.
There are billions of examples of unemotional and voiceless women as the ideal woman, from Queen Elizabeth to The Little Mermaid — about a fish-princess who was a hoarder but signed away her best-in-the-world voice for a conventionally attractive nepo baby boyfriend.
The opposite — emotional (which always becomes “too emotional”) and vocal (which always becomes “outspoken”) — is bad and labeled crazy, psycho, bitch, hysterical, and infinite metaphors.
In the eighth season of Bachelor in Paradise there was “Hurricane Lace.” Lace is a woman who felt hurt when her man went on a date with another woman. She cried over this man who didn’t cry over her. She catalogued her feelings: anxious, afraid, miserable, nervous, insane. Then she crashed a party to let the man know how she felt about him and to ask if he felt the same way. Her behavior was wrong, psychotic, demonic, ugly, and unlovable. She was called a hurricane, and she was dumped.
Hurricanes, women, hurt feelings: We’re supposed to fear them, ridicule them, prepare for them, and survive them. We hope to remain untouched by them; otherwise, they’ll swallow us up or whatever.
Who cares that emotions are reasonable reactions to being hurt or scorned or alive! Who cares about denying women their reactions or their hurt or their reality that pain was inflicted and that someone else inflicted it.
I get it — people want to believe that their actions don’t cause the pain they cause; then they can keep inflicting pain and not look like the bad guy. The bad guy, instead, is the hurricane that came out of nowhere.
I am Lace. But I’ve gotten good at pretending I’m not.
Patriarchal culture’s “chief tactic” to shutting women up “is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder, and death,” writes Anne Carson in her perfect essay “The Gender of Sound.” The ideological association lives in me and in every other hurricane and in the men who try to date us.
The ideological association drives girls and women from our emotions, our voice, and our body.
As a teenager, I wanted to be “chill” when I grew up. The quiet, unemotional woman was the woman who all girls should aspire to be and the only woman all men would date. I feared my emotions because other people feared my emotions. I feared myself for the safety of others.
Fact-check: Men have committed 98% of mass shootings.
And yet women are emotionally unstable? Women are emotionally scary? Women?
“. . . the worst act a woman can commit is to say ‘no’ (rude, unexpected) or to weep (manipulative, emotional terrorism), while the worst act a man can commit is mass murder, in which violence is his only means of expression.” —Hysterical
Since emotion meant ostracism, which meant annihilation, I grew up to be a woman who could make herself the smallest person in the room.
I played it cool and kept it breezy and masked —
which was impossible for a reason. Look at this infographic I found on TikTok:
Men are on a 24-hour hormonal cycle, while women are on a 28-day hormonal cycle. This means that men’s emotional peaks and valleys are teeny-tiny and women’s are literally dramatic.
A woman’s biological fate is to be the drama.
Copy and paste the paragraph below, and send it to exes:
Being the drama is backed by science and Brené Brown as healthy. The Department of Health and Human Services called Emotional Awareness and Expression Theory (EAET) — where you identify and voice the feelings you’ve masked or escaped or blocked — a “best practice.”
Usually, watching reality’s sad, mad women, I’d experience second-hand embarrassment. But after writing Hysterical and researching sexism, I’m impressed. And inspired.
These tempest women know how to feel, and to feel intensely, and they know how to unbottle their feelings so the feelings don’t get stuck and warp their thoughts, personality, and organs. These crazy psycho bitches know that emotion is the body’s GPS and that behind every emotion is a reason and a need and a desire for something to change or stop or happen. These hysterical ex-girlfriends welcome and entertain every emotion, like in the poem “The Guest House” by Rumi:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
These drama queens may be hurricanes, but they’re also guest houses being cleared out for some new delight.
Recently I rewatched every episode of Girls (thank you), and this scene in season 2, episode 5, “One Man’s Trash,” is giving Rumi’s poem:
Hannah: “You think I’m a crazy girl?”
Man: “No, I don’t think you’re crazy at all. I wasn’t thinking that.”
Hannah: “If anything, I think I’m just too smart and too sensitive and too, like, not crazy. . . . It’s like . . . Okay, I read this article about Fiona Apple in New York magazine where she said, ‘Oh, everybody acts like I’m nuts. I’m not nuts; I just want to feel it all.’ It’s like that’s what I’m like. I just want to feel it all. You know?”
“Oh, everybody acts like I’m nuts. I’m not nuts; I just want to feel it all.” —Fiona Apple, as quoted by Lena Dunham’s character on Girls
Are you too emotional? Are you a crazy girl? No. You’re just too smart and too sensitive and too not crazy. You’re being cleared out for some new delight.
The single reality stars on Bachelor in Paradise called a woman a hurricane like it’s a bad, unsexy thing to be a force of nature. What if we rebranded and what we had called “self-sabotage” is now a “better way of being”?
I have a pair of hand-crafted earrings with a saying on them that changed everything for me. The saying is, “They whispered to her, ‘You can’t withstand the storm.’ She whispered back, ‘I am the storm.’”
Be the storm. Be the drama. Be emotional. And to quote Instagram:
Stop playing cool, just be passionate and intense and insane and whoever sticks around is meant for you is the energy/mental illness I’m bringing into 2024.
Because our emotions won’t kill anyone — except us, if we keep them to ourselves.
Do you watch Bachelor in Paradise?
ICYMI: I’m Elissa Bassist, and I teach short conceptual humor/satire writing, funny personal essays, tragicomic memoir, emotional emails, and that’s it. I edit the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus, and I wrote the award-deserving book Hysterical.
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I watch BIP! Ashley Iaconetti before Lace was another very emotional contestant, and I always admired how she made it very clear how she felt.