Dear English-Speaking World:
Pursuant to previous letter, please immediately cease all use of the word "emotional" wherein its application is intended to be synonymous with hysterical, irrational, overwrought, or some other word traditionally used to dismiss women who are rightfully angry about, upset by, or contemptuous of misogynistic behavior.
Using "emotional" as a dog-whistle to marginalize women's concerns—or the concerns of any other non-privileged group, for that matter—doesn't make you better than overt misogynists who call women hysterics, and you're really not fooling anybody.
Implicitly juxtaposing "emotion" against "reason/rationality" treats the two as mutually exclusive processes, which they are not. The human response to many things is both emotional and rational/reasoned.
The damnable lie that reason without emotion is the only reasoning worth shit is one of the most pernicious myths of the Patriarchy, inextricably tied to the woman- and man-hating presumption that women are emotional and men are reasonable (and thus is reason superior to emotion).
Men are emotional creatures as much as are women.
And every man I've ever heard deny that truth has spent no small amount of his life living and dying by the fortunes of his favorite Ballsport Team.
The exhortation to extricate emotion from reason, commonly wielded against women to dismiss their rightful ire at the manifestations of their oppression, is as unrealistic and dishonest as it is a contemptible pile of fetid, stinking rubbish.
Knock it the fuck off already.
Love,
Liss
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