feminine rage

Written by Mia Solimine

Art by @maeeziii

I am a feminist. I believe that women are born with centuries and decades of physical and mental pain built in. We live in a world where women’s sufferings are silenced, locked up, and passed down from generation to generation. In identifying as a woman, I am inviting everyone around me to call me a b*tch if I reject a man’s request for a date, call me a sl*t if I give up my virginity before society decides I should, and call me a prude if I refuse to do such. In this world, my body is not my own, and my clothes are just as equal to verbal consent. Ironically, the one way I can use the word equal when talking about women is when it pertains to assault and violations of my physical self. I have years and years of anger and rage inside of me—rage that my mother felt when she was told that she could not be a dance teacher because her ex-husband wanted dinner to be ready when he came home from work, rage that my grandmother felt when she could not travel to Paris and sell perfumes because she needed to get married and have children at the age of 20—I even feel rage over the thought of not being completely in control of my body, that what makes me a woman sits in the palms of the government. Women’s suffrage has existed for centuries, and of course, there has been progress, but how much progress can be made when we take two steps back for every one step forward? I feel like I am grasping onto the remaining parts of my identity as a woman because of the control that the patriarchy has over me. It is like trying to complete a puzzle, but multiple pieces have disappeared—pieces that represent the women who came before me lost to society's control over femininity. I am a feminist because of these women, these women that I love and hold so dearly to my heart, who have bottled up this pain to give me the girlhood and womanhood that they could not have. I am a feminist because I can feel the pain that my ancestors kept to themselves— I am a feminist because I choose to destroy the walls that the patriarchy has built around my centuries of feminine rage.