Meanwhile, conventional depictions of the covertly sensitive female badass prevail. On the long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, the heroic Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) inspires viewers with audacity, deadpan hilarity, and talent, but particularly in the earlier seasons, it’s always clear that what is softest inside of her must be concealed, even from some of those she calls her friends. Like so many black female characters, she is ever hoisting the burdens of others, whether professional or emotional. Perhaps our closest approximation to a character unwilling to suppress her sensitivity, no matter the context, is Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) of Parks and Recreation. But, one of the show’s running gags, Leslie’s otherworldly productivity, seems almost a corrective, a means of assuring us that her exuberance and vivid emotional life never detract from her performance. Indeed, it’s posited as one dimension of the relentless energy that enables her to carry her largely ineffectual employees.
On October 14, 2018, the New York Times addressed the matter of workplace expression directly with an interview entitled “Why You Shouldn’t Feel Bad About Crying at Work.” Conversing with Ask a Manager advice columnist Alison Green, Smarter Living newsletter editor Tim Herrera broached this knotted subject that, as Green candidly emphasized, cannot be so easily addressed. In fact, the headline is a touch misleading: crying at work, at least in the climate we have cultivated, is not something we can shrug off as incidental. “If you’re regularly crying at work, or you break down in sobs at a staff meeting, or you’re crying in response to mild feedback…yeah, it can hurt your reputation, for sure,” Green remarks. “But getting a little teary in a one-on-one meeting where you’re frustrated or stressed? An awful lot of people do that at some point during their careers, and while they tend to be mortified, it’s usually fine.”11 This response seems reasonable enough; after all, Green is responding to the cultures of extant workplace environments. Moreover, making space for too muchness does not mean we can fully disregard the needs of others, but it does demand more flexibility than we are currently afforded. If I were permitted, say, one workplace crying episode every ten years, I would be in something of a pickle. Unsurprisingly, Herrera and Green draw on our terminology—too much—to sketch out the parameters of crying in conventional office settings. Green tackles the question directly:
Let’s talk about the times when it’s too much! Full on, body wracking sobs are pretty much always out of place at work (excluding something like news of a death). And if you’re leading a team, you need to project confidence and authority, and getting teary can undermine that. Or if you routinely tear up in response to feedback about your work, your boss is likely to start worrying about your ability to take feedback (and may start giving you less of it out of discomfort with your reaction, and that’s not good).
And you generally want your crying to be as private as possible; tearing up in a one-on-one meeting or alone in a bathroom stall is one thing, but crying while you’re sitting around a conference table with a group of other people is likely to harm your credibility and make people much more uncomfortable. For better or worse, there’s a higher bar in that situation for controlling your emotions.12 (emphasis mine)
Green’s observations regarding the too muchness of workplace distress are apt. It’s quite true that in all manner of scenarios, tears detract from our credibility and cause our colleagues to squirm. The larger question is whether this should be the case and whether tearfulness is an index of someone’s ability to manage a project or a delicate situation. As someone who struggles with especially leaky tear ducts, but who also taught college literature and writing for the better part of a decade, I would say that this is not necessarily the case. Too Much women know, far better than others often suppose, what we need to do in order to fulfill our obligations. If I were in danger of flatlining on an operating table I wouldn’t be concerned that my surgeon was a crier unless her upset resulted in her fleeing from the OR rather than reviving me. My too muchness is without question a direct inheritance from my mother, and she was a trusted and beloved nurse.
But because we’ve nurtured a cultural fear of emotion, we’ve in turn perpetuated a pernicious lesson: that those of us who are more inclined to emote, and who would prefer not to suppress what we feel, reflexively shame ourselves for intense expressions of joy and distress. And when it comes to tears, Green explains, the anxiety is shaped by gender identity:
It may just be because women are socialized to be more comfortable with tears, who knows. But I hear far more women talk about having teared up at work than men, and then there’s also pressure on women not to seem too emotional in a professional context, so then they feel especially mortified. And the gender differences around this add an additional element of stress to it—for example, if you’re a woman who cries in front of a male boss, is your male boss going to be more freaked out by it than a female boss would be? Maybe, and that’s definitely something women worry about.13
It’s not within this book’s purview to discuss the vicious impact of toxic masculinity on male emotional expression, though, to be sure, their socialization has been deleteriously impacted. Still, American workplace culture was built by white heterosexual cisgender men, and throughout its development, they did not especially consider what people of other races and genders might require in order to matriculate effectively. Upon pushing past the gatekeepers, the rest of us were expected to assimilate without protest. And while Green’s observation that “women are socialized to be more comfortable with tears” seems accurate, that comfort as she acknowledges does not extend to conventional office environments, where we have learned to fear the telltale sting at the corners of our eyes or the constriction of the throat. Certainly we should not accept the enduring circumstances that crying in front of a man is without question our problem and our fault.
A gamut of vulnerable female expression meets with skepticism and disapproval thanks to centuries of reinforcement: over time, the naturalized response to too muchness has become one of reprimand, discomfort, and doubt—in the woman’s capacity to handle herself, or anything else. Meanwhile, white male tears are increasingly celebrated as the tabernacle of masculine emotional refinement. On the day after the 2016 presidential election, my husband Paul had to teach class, and he felt it would be disingenuous, not to mention impossible, to proceed as if we had not just experienced a terrifying historical juggernaut. As he spoke to his students, mostly left-leaning, but some conservative, he asked them to consider, whatever their politics, that many of their classmates, together with thousands of people living in America, were unspeakably frightened right now, and that we must support them and demonstrate empathy. In the process of addressing his students, he began tearing up—something he had not expected to do, and that caught him by surprise.
I was, and am, proud of him for saying what he did. What is curious to me, and to him, is the extent to which his students patted him on the back not merely for these remarks, but for becoming emotional while articulating them. One of his male students later told him that he appreciated Paul demonstrating a form of masculinity that did not preclude unfiltered expression. And yet, how different is the response to a white, heterosexual, cisgender man who cries before his students and the reactions to a woman who might do the same. Women are already stereotyped as excessively feeling creatures; in our case, tears are often interpreted as a tipping point, a superabundant overflow from a hearty wellspring of emotion. Paul, like most men who present as conventionally masculine, is assumed as even keel unless he demonstrates otherwise. In his case, choking up seemed to buttress the depth of his conviction, reassure the class of his sensitivity, and was even an index of his strength. This generosity afforded to male tears frustrates me, and, on a larger cultural register, it signifies problems of stigma and gender interpretation. But generally, male tears can be beneficial, in their way: in the case of Paul’s students, they seemed to learn in real-time what nontoxic masculinity can look like. However, the cliché of the sympathet
ic crying man can be handily exploited by those keen to manipulate. Brett Kavanaugh, the man appointed to the United States Supreme Court despite multiple accusations of sexual assault, knew precisely what he was doing when he began blubbering under oath.
Because they signify extremity, tears loom large in conversations about feminine emotional excess. Yet too muchness extends beyond crying to, among other traits, tone of voice and general exuberance, all qualities that women and femmes broadcast at the risk of censure. As I began my work on this chapter, I wanted to understand others’ experiences in this respect and circulated questionnaires to more than 130 cis and trans women and nonbinary persons who identified as feminine or female-presenting, asking them to share testimonials about their experiences in office environments—to what extent they felt at liberty to emote, and whether they had ever been shamed for speaking loudly or simply for reacting to news or conversation with excitement. As the responses accumulated, and I sifted through them, I experienced a peculiar sense of mourning for something that has yet to come to pass: public spaces in which feminine emotion, and feminine too muchness, are not held suspiciously at arm’s length, as if they are at best inconvenient and, at worst, dangerous.
For many who filled out my questionnaire, men’s reactions to their voices and demeanors generated contentious environments. Kirsten, a thirty-year-old white woman, wrote to me that her “speaking style is something men tend to find ‘bossy’ or ‘abrasive.’ This has created a lot of problems for me…I once had someone say I was ‘so abrasive it’s professionally limiting,’ and the genesis of that was apparently that I was too direct in expressing what I needed people who reported to me to do.” She surmised, semihumorously, that she has been told to lower her voice “something in the order of 10,000 times.” And as an “extremely” expressive and exuberant person, she has confronted a host of male persons who have sought to quiet her through tactics of humiliation. “I think people intend to make me feel bad when correcting my expression,” she wrote. “I think it’s mean-spirited and ill-intentioned. It used to embarrass me, but now I double down. Men in particular seem to want me to speak in a friendly tone, to accommodate them, and to express only positive emotions. They also don’t like it when I’m too excited. I have found that tells me what I need to know about them.”
Women of color confront the emotional strictures of an office environment without the leniencies so often granted to those of us who are white or white-presenting. From the same survey, Liz, a thirty-two-year-old black queer woman, described how the larger sexist and racist social arrangement has shaped her self-presentation. “I self-monitor all the time,” she wrote. “The balance between ego and self-advocacy is also a big one (impostor syndrome), especially as a black woman, so I engage in a lot of self-monitoring regarding my own perceived achievements as well.” And yet, even her rigorous efforts to take account of her behavior could not prevent certain inequities:
I recall being chastised about chatting with a fellow black coworker “too often” though we shared a work space and had very similar roles that often required collaboration. We seemed to be working under a microscope most of the time. Of course, we watched some of our white counterparts take long lunches and long breaks and [enjoy] the freedom to leave their desks more often and for longer periods of time…[They weren’t] subject…to the same level of scrutiny. I even had a supervisor tell me I was on my cell phone too often! Not that I was “talking” on the phone, just that my phone was in my hand too much.
For, as Liz notes, it’s not the tone of her voice that renders her “loud” in the eyes of supervisors; her presence, or the mere suggestion of a conversation—thus, the cell phone—has incited others to silence her. “The volume of my voice has rarely been an issue—the fact that I’m talking at all has more often been the target,” she delineated. “‘Be quiet’ was not ‘be quieter’; it was ‘stop talking, period.’” Paula, a forty-eight-year-old black woman, explained that even responses she intended to project “neutrality” were interpreted as too intense. “[I’ve been] called combative for entering into what I thought was a conversational exchange, only to be told [that] by answering back I’m combative,” she wrote. “Even if I’m addressing something in the most neutral voice, my confidence tends to make people uncomfortable.”
This “confidence” or self-assurance, particularly from women of color, is, it seems, loud. That is to say, the mere act of being comfortable with oneself resounds in certain ears, precisely because it is unsettling to those who would prefer the Victorian woman’s cheerful docility. Here is something we must understand about too muchness: it’s an accusation that would be lobbed at us in most any case, whether we attributed it to ourselves or not. Most women, at some moment, will be marked as a Too Much woman. So much the better: we can all of us embrace the term, fold it into ourselves, and embody it as we see fit.
After all, we often realize that we’re navigating a world distorted by gender- and race-based delusion. Lee, who is thirty-two, queer, and identifies as a nonbinary woman, recounted a particularly absurd office scrap. “Once, while engaged in a boisterous conversation with a male colleague (same tone and volume), I got taken aside and told to be quieter. He did not. I left the conversation and got chastised a second time for the noise, even though only men were still speaking.”
These testimonials were not singular among the ones I collected; most of those who responded to my queries described intense, often painful efforts to suppress their emotions, to monitor their expressions, tone of voice, and volume. They testified the ways in which they reacted to the world unfolding in front of them lest they be told yet again to “calm down” or lower their voices or to be quiet. “If I had a nickel for every time I was told to lower my voice, I’d be a female Elon Musk,” wrote V. Others’ experiences reminded me of the familiar, infantilizing mortification that accompanies being “shushed,” or the pricking sense that I was perceived as childlike for being excitable. Too many expressed a fear of laughing, particularly those who had been chastised for doing so in a way that was, for whatever wild or quibbling reason, received as unpleasant.
Extant conversations surrounding the gender and racial dynamics of office culture don’t merely stifle possibilities for women’s success, they preclude success according to individualized terms: a way of being without an emotional muzzle to stifle what would otherwise be sung. To forego strident self-moderation is a gamble for most women, and often an exercise in humiliation. When we live authentically, Too Much women risk the litany of assessments recounted to me, a liturgy of intended shame, although we strive to embrace it: loud, shrieky, shouty, shrill, intimidating, difficult, noisy, obnoxious, scary, strident, bitchy, bossy, pushy, not normal, intense, inappropriately lacking in deference, gobby, mouthy, unladylike, too friendly, too talkative, too emotional, too outspoken, too direct, too rash, too passionate, too much.
Chapter Eleven
Old
When, on April 14, 1857, Queen Victoria gave birth to her ninth child, Beatrice, she was nearly thirty-eight—hardly what any reasonable person would call “old,” especially today, but the arc of ageism is long, and lifespans in the nineteenth century were comparatively short (although Victoria proved an exception to this). After the delivery, her doctors admonished against having any more children, to which she reportedly replied, “Can I have no more fun in bed?”1 Presumably she was not referring to the exertions of labor and delivery.
This anecdote flies in the face of the long-cherished assumptions about Victorian—and Victoria’s—prudery: the good queen loved a hearty romp with her husband. And for all her vast privileges, Queen Victoria also lived according to the social clime. To bear nine children and to endure nine pregnancies before one turns thirty-eight is no small feat, and the queen abhorred much of what was involved, from breastfeeding to the nine-month gestational slog itself. But Victoria, for all she enjoyed having sex with Prince Albert, was also setting an example for her kingdom by modeling what was then c
onsidered a British woman’s primary duty: motherhood. If the means to the end were pleasant for her, as they apparently were for the queen, then a woman was lucky, but the matter of her physical pleasure was so immaterial as to be nonexistent. That she bear sons who would grow up to defend Britannia and safeguard its vast empire—that was the paramount expectation. Victoria’s question to the doctors—can I still have sex with my husband?—gestures to a culture at once preoccupied with women’s ripe reproductive organs and, accordingly, disinclined to accommodate “aging” women—that is, those no longer capable of successful breeding. The royal physicians suggested that the queen guard against pregnancy because she was deemed too old to safely deliver another child. Victoria’s immediate response is funny, but it’s equally telling: women of her age were, for the most part, utterly desexualized. Even if the Victorians were discussing sex more than is typically assumed, those conversations were unlikely to reassure a woman in her late thirties that she was erotically empowered, that she ought to enjoy her coital proclivities. And they certainly weren’t suggesting that women of Queen Victoria’s age were desirable, because popular opinion, for all manner of reasons, dictated otherwise.
* * *
“Old” is a fraught and capacious term, and so by extension is the baggy pejorative “too old,” an accusation lobbed with abandon at women of all ages with the paramount object of marking us according to a continuum of obsolescence and undesirability and, based on that metric, applying strictures of behavior. What sorts of acts and pleasures become “too much” for a middle-aged or elderly woman? In what ways are we permitted to age without being regarded as grotesque? Even in recent decades, as we see the rise of the “MILF”—women who embrace their sexuality long after their twenties and thirties and, most notably, after bearing children—it remains the case that aging women must combat de-eroticized invisibility. At best, what Western culture tolerates is the paradox of chaste sexuality: the older woman who has abandoned her sexpot days in exchange for genteel performance.
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