In Defense of Not Being a “Moody Bitch”

“Are Drugs Stifling Women?”

That question has pervaded my Facebook feed since author Julie Holland wrote an opinion piece for CNN about women’s tendency to turn towards self-medication rather than self-expression. The article was a plug for her book, “Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, the Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having, and What’s Really Making You Crazy.” In it, Holland points to women’s “natural moodiness,” but instead of labeling it as a defect, she argues the benefits of reactive hormones.

“There is a biological advantage to this sensitivity,” Holland writes. “We need to know what our nonverbal babies need, what our mates are thinking and to sense danger in our surroundings.” According to Holland, our female-specific mood swings help us be more compassionate, intuitive, and alert, but women are shamed by society into hiding their feelings or stifling them with anti-anxiety medication or anti-depressants. She suggests we cry openly and feel deeply, both in our personal lives and in the workplace.

I should easily be the target audience for this book. Not only can I generate an abnormal amount of tears without any prompt, but I also went to an all-female university where I was surrounded by like-minded women who encouraged and validated one another and most importantly, made each other feel like everything we said, felt or thought mattered.

There’s just one problem — I graduated. I live in the real world now. That means I have way less time for feelings, literally. Post-college, you can’t kick back on your extra-long twin bed, listen to Band Of Horses and weep for hours. Your swirling emotions have to sit back burner to your 9 to 5, and this means they can crop up at strange, inopportune times.

During my first job in LA, I burst into tears when my new boss showed me pictures of his family dog. His living, completely healthy dog. It was awkward and tied to PMS, plus I was homesick for my own family across the country. It had nothing to do with how I felt about my job. It taught neither one of us about anything, except that maybe I was not a safe person with whom to share family memories.

I could share thousands more examples like this — times when I’ve fought with loved ones as an outlet for my dissatisfaction at work, or yelled at my roommate because of outside stress. Yet through all of that, rarely was there a moment when I wiped the snot off of my face and thought: this is my strength.

Mostly, my emotional outbursts just messed with my personal and professional relationships.

So I disagree with Holland: succumbing to waves of emotion doesn’t work in adulthood. I don’t think abusing Xanax or repressing your feelings work either — we all saw Gone Girl, we know how that ends. Rather, I suggest a self-enforced degree of reflection. A policing of your inner “moody bitch,” which Tony Schwartz describes in his New York Times opinion piece, “The Importance of Naming Your Emotions.”

Schwartz suggests we practice simply naming our emotions and unpack what’s driving us crazy. I am mad. I am frustrated. “By naming [your feelings] out loud,” he writes, “we are effectively taking responsibility for them, making it less likely that they will spill out at the expense of others over the course of a day.”

While I’d love to believe that my biology has made me prone to smart, female superpowers the world has been misunderstanding for years, I don’t. People, men or women, fall victim to spurts of extreme emotion. Evolution has given us the tools to mediate between our egos and our ids so we can have those feelings and get on with our lives, or in Schwartz’s words “simply notice my emotions without feeling compelled to act on them.” Now that sounds like a superpower I can aspire to.

But what do you think?

We used “The B-Word” in this article and we’ve Round Tabled it before. Click here to join the discussion. If you’re into this article, you may also be interested in How to Spot a Feminist.

Image via Antidote Magazine