I was 27 in 2016, and there was a public reckoning happening with women’s bodies, but also a reckoning I was grappling with personally. I was dimly aware that there was another, stronger me somewhere, but I could barely see or remember her. But it also opened me to the experience of bridging the gap between powerlessness and power. In that light, the idea of feminine weakness comes across as no more than a scam, a purposeful downplaying of the power embedded within the historic (and current) concept of the hysterical woman, the terrifying woman, righteously angry. This is well documented, even in a world where measuring pain is nebulous, necessarily contingent on personal levels of what is bearable.

Source: New York Times May 22, 2019 10:01 UTC