Women are not angry. Women are just tired. There is a meaningful difference, and if you need that explained, you might want to read this article twice. Every day, without fail, without exception, and without anyone apparently being able to stop it, women navigate an obstacle course of small and absolutely exhausting interactions that individually seem minor and collectively make you want to move to a remote island with good Wi-Fi and a strict no-mansplaining policy.

Not the big stuff, although that too. The stuff that happens so regularly that women have developed a whole facial expression for it that men have never correctly identified. On a Thread , a user asked women to list the microaggressions they field way too often, and the answers were so universally recognized by every woman who read it that it could have gone on indefinitely. These are the highlights, although "highlights" is doing a lot of work as a word here.

“World Cup” vs “Women’s World Cup”. “Basketball” vs “ Women’s Basketball”. “Soccer” vs. “Women”s Soccer”. Asking women what they use for birth control, but not asking men. Medical records not even having a place to document what men do for their part in contraception. It doesn’t even occur to people that men can (and should) play a role in pregnancy prevention.

All of the men who think they can beat elite female athletes in their sport... like sir, I swam d1, you're not beating me in a 500 free without years of training.

“I did the dishes for you” No. You did the dishes because you’re an adult who Iives here and eats food. Also, please stop announcing it like I’m supposed to throw confetti and cheer.

Microaggressions are exactly what they sound like, micro. Not the big, obvious stuff that everyone can agree is a problem, but the small, everyday moments that individually seem almost too minor to mention and collectively make you feel like you are losing your mind. The term was coined by psychiatrist Chester Pierce in the 1970s and later expanded by psychologist Derald Wing Sue, who defined them as the commonplace verbal and behavioral indignities that communicate something negative, whether the person delivering them meant to or not.

That last part is the one that tends to derail every conversation about this topic, because intention and impact are not the same thing, and the woman who just got asked if she is sure she understands how the software works does not feel better about it because the guy asking probably meant well. The message landed all the same, and the damage is the same regardless.

Thinking their 8 hour work day is harder than our 8 hour work day for no reason.