I'm just angry all the time, anyone else?

Yes, recently I have moved from distressed to angry. This week was particularly bad what with living in Scotland & watching the Hate Crime Bill go through, Sarah Everard’s murder and my DD’s school continuing to fuck us about to the point where I’ve had to ask DH to temporarily take over as the primary point of contact.

It feels like for every step forward, for every bit of light and another person understanding, there’s a massive backwards step.

WhyZed

Strewth, anger is always there, simmering just under the surface. Arabella has some good suggestions but I would add the boxing idea too. I need a vigorous physical release from time to time as well as the balancing of breathing & slow yoga. At the moment I'm digging manure into a veg bed and the excess anger is very useful. In the quiet moments I 'm trying to make art that deals with feminist issues. Some days my pen hand shakes with rage and I can't draw. That's when I know it's time to go shovel horse shit!

Do whatever you can to protect yourself, take strength from the fabulous women here. If you need to go away & heal for a while that's fine. Like Arabella said we will be here when you want to come back.💐

Yup OP. Our collective anger is increasing On the flip side, the fury of women (and many men) after those awful Brighton hospital demands to rename maternity services, talk about chest feeding etc was magnificent to behold.

In addition to the great suggestions on here, I do try to stay away from most of the "this prat said this on twitter" threads - they're too wearing. I focus on things I know about and can influence - education, child safety, parenting, the NHS treatment of women and children.

Just seconding boxercise, which I find really helps, even if you're punching air.

OP it’s relentless and particularly hard to get any IRL support at this time.

Not to mention the right to protest about women’s issues even in distanced groups of women is not legally available either, even for those women who are able to get out to a place to protest of an evening:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56384758 (this isn’t the main article describing legal objections that have been made but it gives the gist)

I liked Arabella’s ideas.

@AdHominemNonSequitur...

Very much so WhyZed. I had to stop a programme I was watching with my DH last night (NCIS!) to have a rant - the young girls kidnapped and put up for sale in it (and yes I know it's fiction but it happens) couldn't identify out of their sex. Their kidnappers knew which sex of child to sell.

Also reading about politicians joining in the talk about making places safe for women - while ATTHE SAME TIME - taking steps to remove single sex places..... My blood is boiling. It is exhausting.

Me too! I am seething at what I read and see going on while most people seem blind to it. So often concerns are batted away as it being only a few people who hold these views or worst it is presented as people being unkind.

It is like being in an upside down world. Have no friends in the real world who have shown an interest who share the same views and too cautious to speak to others about it.

Here is the only place I have found some sanctuary.

Yes me too.
I have to step back from MN, Twitter and the media every so often as it's not good for my blood pressure.

The BBC really pisses me off as it has always been my normal news channel, but now it is so woke that it seems every single story that possibly can be is about gender or race politics.

Given the % of LGBTQ+ in the population, this perspective is way over-represented in the media and I think it's beginning to become counter-productive as everyone outside that group is just sick of it dominating the airwaves.

I look at all the things which are now promoted as being for only under-represented groups, and I think, yup, that's me, a 50+ woman!

I feel the same.

*I'll add quickly to that: I'm talking about what I feel responsible to do and what I worry about, and definitely not what I see as being the responsibility of any other woman.

As Arabella says above, and as the main message of GC women really is: no one should be telling another woman how to feel, what to do, what is and is not ok and where her boundaries should be. No one knows what a woman's experiences and needs are, and her choice should be respected.

Sorry, I could have put that a lot better.

Our anger can and will change things. It is exhausting and dispiriting and we can’t pretend the shit is not happening. It helps to do whatever we can fundraising, being aware of other women on the streets, calling out male behaviour where we can ,writing letters, changing minds, standing up for each other and our daughters. Women. All over the world are speaking out. We can do it.

Yes, very angry. And frustrated that my personal circumstances means I can't do much more than rant

But these rants have opened my brother's eyes to what's happening as well as my mum, my dad and my in laws. I might not be able to attend meetings or march, or even go to boxing to help release the anger but once I can, I will and I'm looking forward to it! In the mean time, I will speak up and hope that our voices are heard.

At the furious stage right now. Read yesterday about a female author getting death and rape threats (including against her children) because she liked a tweet about - not by, about! - another female author guilty of wrong think.

And third female author weighs in with its terrible but... and essentially justifies it.

Rape & death threats are never, ever justified. Threatening someone's children is never, ever justified. I can't believe that even needs saying.

Yes. Very much so. I often check the headlines and the current situation first thing in the morning and start the day angry, outraged at the injustice and the bitterness of women repeatedly being told and shown they don't matter, their needs, their identity, their problems, their intersectionalities, their words, their lived experience are of no worth. Shut up and serve or else.

I keep seeing the phrase 'the hostility of the UK' at this time to LGTB+ people used to seek more political leverage against women. The hostility of the UK and politics towards women is never mentioned or considered a problem.

I do. I consider it a massive problem. And I too urgently want to stop reading and having to think about all this for my own mental health because this country is feeling a pretty hostile, anti-woman place right now. But I can't. Because I can't leave this to other women to do on my behalf. I can't hope another woman will write the letter or read the article or raise awareness of women's needs so I don't have to.

Remember your self care, above all.

Take a deep breath.

Take breaks. You can't and won't solve it all by breaking yourself.

Get out for a walk.

Connect with family, friends, other feminists.

Eat well, check your vits.

Try meditation, mindfulness (not for everyone, but can be very helpful)

Look into counselling and/or therapy.

This is not a battle that is likely to be won any time soon, I'm afraid. It's been ongoing since before recorded history. Woman-hate is too deeply embedded to somehow find a switch or button or law that 'fixes' it.

There will not be a day that it's all magically solved. It's a process that will be long ongoing beyond our lifetimes.

We can hope to make many small, tiny differences, and that in itself is good enough. We can build good, strong networks, we can raise our children to be kind, empathetic, brave and resilient and practise their critical thinking. We can help out some women. We can support some women. We can do enough.

We live in an imperfectible world; to learn to accept it in all its flawed difficulty, and infinite complexity is a life's work. We learn to see it for how it is, to accept the good and the bad, to see where we can make a difference and to step up when we can and need to. Choose your battles. Count your blessings. This long, long war is won by love, not by anger.

'Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule'. - Buddha

Take a deep breath.

Come back when you're ready, we'll be here.

God yes. I frequently go from raging and full of energy to lethargic and whats the fekkin point

Rage all the time. I just can't believe what is happening.

Entirely understandable. Sublimate it. Concentrate it into steely determination and action. Don't give up and withdraw. Resist. This has light now. There is hope and bad as it is, it's not like ideologies haven't tried to get power by stealth before. Admittedly this one is unusually pernicious but there are defenses in place they haven't yet managed to get around.

I went through a big phase of anger about 2 years after being fully aware of all this shit; about 2-3 years ago.

I had a bit of a break recently and can now compartmentalise it; however it's an anger that brings me back each time.

Being actively involved in "action" via a feminist group helped a lot; knowing I can meet and talk to local people who feel the same etc.

Me too OP and it's only when I come on here that I realise I'm not the only one

Me too . Angry and tearful and just so , so sad .
Nowhere is safe for us or our children .

You're not alone. I feel full of rage.

The guardian front page yesterday of pictures of dead women, topped by Eddie Izzard's 'promotion to woman' can just fuck right off.

I don't get how all these lib fem women don't understand that no-one asked these dead women their pronouns before killing them. They couldn't identify as men/non-binary to avoid being killed. Sex matters. I'm furious that people are trying to pretend it doesn't and to dismiss it all as 'transphobic hate speech'.

The eye opener for me was how much said people think MN is a radicalisation portal/hot-bed of transphobia, whereas not a word about other sites where you can say actually transphobic things. Women talking is the real problem. It's turbo-charged misogyny.

Absolutely. So angry, all the time. So much so, I want to turn my back on this. I want to unlearn what I've learned and unsee what I've seen because I feel so bound, so silenced, so cowed by this ideology. I just want to scream right now and push people to make the link that women not being safe, not ever feeling safe, will only continue to get worse. But I can't.