Allow Women to Be Strong
By Linda M. Crate
I happen to deeply love the Avatar series. I started by watching Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. What I’ve noticed, however, is that some of those in the fandom are really sexist. They call Korra weak and they point out all of her flaws while giving male characters the benefit of the doubt, excusing their bad behavior.
Korra is a girl who is powerful and faces not only tough battles against tough adversaries but she has to fight against PTSD, depression, and other traumas. Yet she does so. She thinks it is weak to ask for help (which is honestly a trait of hers that I relate to) despite having friends that are willing and able to help her. She learns, in the end, to lean on her friends for strength, and becomes even stronger for it.
It is rather disheartening to me that women, strong women, are often seen as weak or hated simply because they are not men. People act as if we’re not all flawed, imperfect beings trying to live our best lives. They will try to pick away at our strength and our power because the fact that we can still go on despite all the situations in life that try to break us is terrifying to them.
I’ve experienced this as a woman writer—I sometimes am not taken seriously because of the subject matter I write about. When I do write about serious or heavy topics in some poems and about love in other ones, the love poems are sometimes the ones that are picked up.
I once wrote about the man who attempted to assault me, only to have a male editor tell me that it made him feel nothing. I cannot tell you how angry that made me—like the suffering of another person doesn’t make you feel anything? The editor then proceeded to tell me to send him more writing when I could write well. If that’s not insult to injury, I don’t know what it is.
Women aren’t all whimsical and romantic creatures that can only write about sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes talking about the dark things that have happened to me actually helps heal me, and strong people need places where they can be vulnerable. In society, I think this is a huge problem. Emotions are seen as weaknesses. They are not. Women should be able to express themselves, men should be able to express themselves; we should all be respected for the things that we feel. I feel like people let men publish things that are just mediocre or don’t make me feel anything, but a woman sometimes is expected to be completely flawless and exquisite to even get noticed as a writer.
Women should be able to write about the things that they want to write about and still be respected.
I want to write about things other than love because love isn’t the only thing I’ve experienced in life.
We deserve to be seen as something other than lovers. Women deserve to be seen for our strength, our fight, our ferocity, and our ability to stand tall despite everything that tried to break us.
Women are strong, they are powerful, and our voices deserve to be heard no matter what we’re talking about. We need to stop discriminating against people based on their gender. We all have talents and abilities that can be strengthened and become better with time, and we all deserve that chance.
I am not weak because I am a woman, but you might be weak if you believe someone is weak for being a woman.
Linda M. Crate is a Pennsylvanian born in Pittsburgh but raised in Conneautville. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, both online and in print. She is the author of six poetry chapbooks, the latest two which are the samurai (October 2020) and More Than Bone Music (March 2019). She also is the author of the novel Phoenix Tears (June 2018) and two micropoetry collections. Recently, she has published two full-length poetry collections, Vampire Daughter (February 2020) and The Sweetest Blood (February 2020). Follow her on Facebook, Instagram @authorlindamcrate, or Twitter @thysilverdoe.
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