Beyoncé and Lena Dunham are on the same page about women over-apologizing
Ever since Beyoncé released Lemonade, the world has been obsessing over so many unresolved lyrics. Like, who is “Becky with the good hair?” Is she a real person? Is her name actually Becky?
These are just some of the questions fans have been asking. According to Lena Dunham, people have been asking the wrong questions. The question should really be, “Why do we feel the need to apologize for things that aren’t our fault?”
On LinkedIn, Dunham wrote an essay about how Beyoncé’s “Sorry” reminded her to stop over-apologizing — a plague she thinks many women deal with every day.
“Apologizing is a modern plague and I’d be willing to bet (though I have zero scientific research to back this up) that many women utter ‘I’m sorry’ more on a given day than ‘Thank You’ and ‘You’re Welcome’ combined,” Dunham wrote.
Sorry, but we agree (see?).
“We rush to say it when we’re interrupted,” she added. “We scream it across a crowded restaurant when someone else arrives late so we’ve lost our table. We mutter it when a man walks too close to us on the street. As I write this, a Mister Softee truck is singing its grating tune right below my window and I want to run and apologize to the driver for how insane he’s making me.”
Her assessment is sadly so true and definitely something that needs to be fixed.
Dunham discusses the importance of Bey’s lyric and how they’ve empowered women to stop unnecessarily apologizing.
“[‘Sorry, I ain’t sorry’] immediately became the stuff of Instagram captions and yearbook quotes and screaming, drunken bachelorette parties: partially because it’s catchy as fuck, but also because it allowed women to express (safely, while pretending with all their might to be Bey) just how sick to death they were of apologizing.”
The solution? She suggests replacing the word “sorry” with an “actual expression of your needs and desires.” She believes being totally honest about your feelings will make for a more open and healthy conversation.
Saying “sorry” when you actually mean it should, of course, still be a thing. But we are completely on board with both Beyoncé and Dunham’s advice to quit being sorry all the time.