I am tired of playing the role of the Approachable Feminist, and this International Women's Day I urge feminists to embrace their anger uncompromisingly and without dilution, writes Clementine Ford.

International Women's Day is often seen as a time for celebration, and in large part it is. On March 8, women gather in all kinds of assemblies around the world to honour the huge advances we've made in the last century.

Typically, there are speeches given designed to encourage good feelings and optimism - two things that are sorely missing in the lives of feminists. If only we could take a pill every morning that would make the world a little easier, a little calmer and a little bit more rewarding. Alas, doctors are very careful about prescribing Valium, which is just one of the many injustices we face as women.

Of course, with International Women's Day comes the usual asinine bleating about "WHAT ABOUT THE MEN?! WHEN'S INTERNATIONAL MEN'S DAY YOU SEXIST BUNCH OF HARPIES?!?!"

Um ... that would be November 19. Because in the sea of national and international days paying tribute to the mostly masculine dominated legacies of war, you couldn't just let women have one day in the whole calendar to honour our own fallen soldiers in the ongoing battle for our liberation. Thanks, guys.

When I considered what to talk about on IWD, I tried to think of positive things. I thought about how to be funny or how to be uplifting. I considered anecdotes and jokes - anything that might result in people leaving with a spring in their step and a smile on their face.

Unfortunately, I kept running into the obstacles of my own vehement anger. It has been growing lately, this anger, and it is becoming almost impossible for me to quell.

Every day, I hear stories of violence and aggression carried out against women. I read reports of discrimination, whether it's physical, social or financial. I watch, gobsmacked, as retrosexist thoughts are offered in regards to our responsibility to protect ourselves from the world around us by covering our bodies, policing our behaviour and hiding away because "the world is just different for us".

I listen as people offer, with no apparent irony, the belief that women are their own biggest enemies. That it is from ourselves that we face the most severe cruelty and discrimination, as if a smattering of bitchiness could possibly compare to millennia of first being turned into legal property and then just made to feel like we are.

That if we just tried harder, we'd have the workplace success we crave - success we should stop seeking anyway, because deep down all we really want is to find a husband and start a family.

That motherhood is the pinnacle for which all women endeavour, that we can never truly know love until we've had a child, that this alone will cure the unhappiness that supposedly rears its head in our late 20s and then turns us into bitter, desperate shrews once we reach 34 - but that mothers, also, are treated as if they're dull and stupid. Is there a tag more sneering and dismissive of woman's extraordinary ability to produce and sustain life than "mummy blogger"?

These stereotypes are sometimes perpetuated by other women who have been so successfully sold the myth of their own inferiority that they have instead sought symbolic power by presenting themselves to men as turncoats; little foot soldiers who can be relied upon to reinforce patriarchal norms and whose loyalty is rewarded in compliments, pats on the head and a smattering of crumbs saved from the table.

I am tired of playing the role of the Approachable Feminist - the woman expected to hold the hand of all those people who still, in the year 2014, claim not to understand what it is that causes women's oppression; who demand to be convinced even of its existence and who then, when you cite fact after statistic after anecdotal report after reality, still use diversions and hypotheticals to try to prove you wrong.

I have wasted so many hours over the years giving precious energy and enforced respect to people who have only ever been either invested in defending their own privilege by denying the existence of it, or who acknowledge it only to ignore it, just so I can avoid being branded an "angry, rabid feminist" who is made to feel as if she's letting down the side. In the course of trying to make my feminism palatable to people who were afraid or derisive of it, I spent almost a decade conforming to all the patriarchal expectations for women's behaviour that I despise. My feminism wasn't challenging, but conciliatory. It wasn't honest, it was hamstrung.

I succumbed without realising it to one of the more insidious tactics of the backlash - the one that made me question my right to be angry as a feminist, and instead had me thinking I needed to justify my right to exist as one at all.

On this International Women's Day, I'm angry. And I'd like to see more women and feminists embrace their own anger uncompromisingly and without dilution. I want to see us stop pandering to the patriarchal expectation that we once again shrink ourselves - in our very own movement, no less - to make way for men to move in and dominate rather than simply support what is right and what needs to be done. To borrow a very famous tumblr quote: "It is not up to feminism to make space for men. It is up to men to take the space they have in society and make it feminist."

Happy International Women's Day. Don't get even, ladies - get mad.

This is an excerpt from the International Womens' Day keynote address delivered to the Queen Victoria Women's Centre.

Clementine Ford is a freelance writer, broadcaster and public speaker based in Melbourne. Follow her on Twitter @clementine_ford. View her full profile here.