Sadness is just anger that we don’t feel able to express. Apparently. I read that somewhere (which means I saw it on Tiktok), and it made sense to me. Sadness in women is welcomed in a way that anger isn’t, but of course it has to be the right kind of sadness; a kind of wistfulness preferably. A quiet misty sorrow. Not crying unless its very un-puffy and definitely no banshee-esque wailing, and if you’re going to share hard things then keep them nice and don’t expect any follow up conversations (dont get me started on RUOK Day. Actually do get me started; I’ll write about that next).
Hey ho, being angry isn’t the done thing, and we have to be just the right flavour of sad. I can only speak for middle aged women mind you. I feel like being a younger woman in the 2020s is, while hard of course because of all the ‘existing in society’ malarky, better in a lot of ways that it was for us Gen Xers. Theoretically we were told that we could be things other than a nurse or a teacher (which I didn’t by the way) but we weren’t really able to, I think. We weren’t encouraged to. I remember going to a newspaper at high school, for a ‘girls development for gifted kids’ thing or some such, to see whether we might like to be journalists. We were told by the man who was showing us around that absolutely women can give it a go, but it’s vital that we keep our femininity. Don’t lose that, he said. All the women he knows who have become journalists have lost theirs, and it was quite clear that this was utterly the worse fate that could ever befall us.
The only other excursion I remember going on was to a police station where we were shown photos of dead bodies. Not sure why. Not a lot of context as I remember it but there were photos of someone who drowned and then they locked one kid in the cells who then had a panic attack…
God I miss the 80s.
Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that we are angry and there are a lot of things I want to punch in the face and I think I’ll start telling you about them.
Eva Leppard 
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