Yes, Women Are Angry, and That’s Not Going Away Anytime Soon

Rhonda argues that every day should be International Women's Day.

This weekend, my friend and I were so angry about so many things, personal and political, that we scared ourselves. Our first instinct was to go out and get roaringly shitfaced, but as we’d already got ragingly drunk and all fist-wavy a few days before, we decided to swap out a night on the tiles with an afternoon mates' date to a local art gallery followed by a wholesome and calming cup of reishi chai.

So far so demure, so mindful. Only we went to an exhibition about, drumroll, women’s anger. Or, to be specific, an exhibition about Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, recently opened at Manchester's marvellous, madly beautiful Whitworth.

It's a great exhibition, not so much artistically as as a historical record and testimony of the women's liberation movement in this country during a period that overlaps with parts of second- and third-wave feminism. And really as a testimony to the sheer wastage of so many women's lives and their loneliness, isolation and depression due to the social structures that have conspired against us for so long.

What struck us most was that what we have asked for so many decades, and which is so self-evidently natural, fair, sensible and beneficial to ALL, is STILL out of our reach. One poster for an women's demonstration demanding 'Equal pay now, equal education and job opportunities, free 24-hour nurseries, and free contraception and abortion on demand' referred to an event that took place in 1971 but that could have easily on some levels applied to now. Not only have things not improved enough or at all, but they are in some places going backwards.

Do we really have to keep being angry for so long? Man, this is exhausting.

We left the exhibition even angrier than when we went in. It was a wonder we didn't go on a bender after all.

As I posted on LinkedIn when prompted to name a woman who has inspired my career, we need an International Women's day every day, until there is parity between genders on all levels, and until women are no longer controlled through weaponised incompetence, coercion, aggression and violence.

But an annual IWD does serve a purpose if it encourages women to reflect on their own and others women's experiences, to share their own and other women's stories, and to express their anger and draw attention to issues in a public arena, whether it's the bare-breasted anti-fascist demo by French-based Ukrainian radical feminist activist group FEMEN in Paris and other cities and the lighting up of the Eiffel Tower with a message of solidarity for Afghan women, to protests in cities around Turkey demanding protection from domestic violence.

As fascism rises, as prominent paedophiles are protected and the toxic Tate brothers and their manosphere cronies continue to peddle their sexist claptrap about male dominance to impressionable young males around the world, it's time to remember that men need women more than we need them on every single level, and this is precisely what they are afraid of.

If it takes constructive anger to remind them of that, again and again, then so be it. We're in for the long haul.