Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

That’s why, one day when I was fifteen, I was dumbfounded to see my mother standing on the long veranda outside our kitchen, chucking one china plate after another as far and as hard as she could into the hot, humid air. Our kitchen was on the second floor of a house that sat perched at the top of a long, rolling hill. I watched each dish soar through the atmosphere, its weight generating a sharp, steady trajectory before shattering into pieces on the terrace far below.

Additionally, men more frequently associate feeling powerful with experiencing anger, but women, notably, associate powerlessness with their anger.

Women’s anticipation of negative responses is why so many women remain silent about what they need, want, and feel, and why so many men can easily choose ignorance and dominance over intimacy.

This is the real danger of our anger: it makes it clear that we take ourselves seriously. This is true in our homes and in our public lives. By effectively severing anger from “good womanhood,” we chose to sever girls and women from the emotion that best protects us against danger and injustice.

Because the truth is that anger isn’t what gets in our way—it is our way. All we have to do is own it.

She behaved exactly how you would want someone to behave if she was following all the rules about how to be a nice person. It didn’t work.

Angry school-age girls tend not to vent but, instead, to dig in and find ways to protect their interests quietly.

They were perfectly content to rely on her cooperation in his working through what he wanted to work through, yet they felt no obligation to ask him to do the same.

“It’s okay—even expected—for men to express anger,” she said. “But when women have a negative emotion, they’re expected to express their displeasure with sadness.”

We are so busy teaching girls to be likeable that we often forget to teach them, as we do boys, that they should be respected.

We are all sluts and hos in waiting. “Reappropriated” words, like slut or bitch, are casually connected to the threat of violence. “Happy birthday, Bitch!” escalates into “Suck my dick, bitch,” in the blink of an eye. Most everyone knows that making someone your bitch might not mean that person is female, just as they also know it means that being dominated and powerless are feminine states of being.

We look away from girls’ anger and collude in the systems that erode their sense of worth; then we turn around and wonder what it is about their “nature” that makes them so lacking in confidence as women.

Many girls conform to gender norms because it’s easier and more comfortable for everyone involved, and they are conditioned to put others at ease.

Exerting power did. The actors in this study, both men and women, were instructed by researchers to conform to gender stereotypes while playing their parts. These performances resulted in negligible differences in testosterone production. The most influential quality affecting testosterone production was what van Anders and her associates labelled “wielding power.” Firing a person increased testosterone in men by 3 to 4 percent. In women it generated a 10 percent increase.

The more that youngsters believed in meritocracy, the more they grappled to come to terms with their own experiences of inequality, and the more they began to lose faith in themselves.

What matters appears to be parental support for a girl’s staying true, first and foremost, to herself, and community honesty about discrimination and building resilience to that discrimination.

When we are taught that our anger is undesirable, selfish, powerless, and ugly, we learn that we are undesirable, selfish, powerless, and ugly. When we forgo talking about anger, because it represents risk or challenge, or because it disrupts a comfortable status quo, we forgo valuable lessons about risk and challenge and the discomforts of the status quo.

What I wish I had taught my daughter in that moment was that she had every right to be angry, and subsequently demand that the adults around her pay attention to that anger. Only then can she feel she has the right to make demands on the world.

“This exchange tends to uplift boys’ popularity at the expense of girls’ reputations. Some boys collect photos of girls like playing cards, assigning value to each image. Essentially, girls are treated as sex objects and punished for doing what is expected of them.”

The kind of objectification the man was describing causes feelings of shame and anger in women every day, but we frequently ignore both the objectification and the feelings because even the idea of being insulted or demanding dignified treatment is difficult to reconcile with certain types of femininity. Indeed, indignity can often feel immanent in femininity.

that the anger women have tied up in anxiety, depression, and self-harm is rooted in steady experiences of inequality both at home and in the world at large.

Researchers speculate that women who use makeup signal that they are responsive to social norms, gender stereotypes, and society’s greater propensity to police women’s behavior, “in ways that keep women distracted from really achieving power.”

Been programmed to self-destruct!

Byrne notes, depressingly, that women who curse when in pain, however, are less well cared for by those around them.

Repressed anger is now considered a risk factor for a panoply of other ailments.

Clinicians now understand anger as a mediator between the perception of injustice and the intensity of pain. People who perceive injustice experience greater pain, both mental and physical, and those who experience the most chronic pain have the highest rates of inhibited anger and depression.

Women describe being under constant, intense stress as the result of workplace hostility and disproportionate responsibility for caring.

No amount of work stress, or anger that I felt related to work, came close to the stress I felt at home. In 2014 a trio of researchers at Penn State measured people’s cortisol levels and found that they went up significantly when people returned home from work, with women’s stress-hormone level skyrocketing.

For the record, being treated like a fetal container is enraging.

If suturing is necessary following labor, due to vaginal tearing or because an episiotomy had to be performed during birth, some doctors still add a “husband stitch”: an additional closure to “tighten” the vaginal canal and thus enhance the woman’s partner’s sexual pleasure. I. Kid. You. Not. Some women learn that they have this extra stitch only after enduring intense pain during sex.

Everyone has her own reaction. But I am personally so fed up with this continued harassment that I can barely contain myself when it happens. And I shouldn’t have to.

There is probably not a woman alive today who doesn’t know what it feels like to be incessantly and disruptively interrupted, talked over, and ignored.

Women who have traditional gender-role beliefs are far less likely to actively confront prejudice as it happened. They also tend to have higher rates of internalized misogyny, meaning accepting and perpetuating negative beliefs about femininity and women. Studies indicate that these beliefs generate more mental distress and self-silencing when women are confronted by sexism and are the least likely to speak up. A woman with internalized misogyny is the most likely to have self-directed anger.

Eleven is a prime age to introduce your family to the feminist killjoy you have become. When I heard the story this time, I was outraged. I pointed out that it sounded as though she had been kidnapped, raped, impregnated, and moved across the planet against her will. I said that the man who took her, terrorized her, and never repented should be held accountable.

People and misogyny are complicated, and there it was. That this story was told entirely from a perspective that glorified my great-grandfather doesn’t mean that he was undamaged by the norms he enforced and that benefitted him. He may have suffered real trauma related to the political violence that surrounded him for most of his life. Any harms that he suffered were not, however, vividly inscribed on his body and mind. He did not suffer the indignities and abuse that my great-grandmother had at his hands. In the story of our family, he was the hero, accruing accolades for his acquisitions, moneymaking, and manly reproductive capabilities: his seven children conferred a sure sign of his virility.

As feminist writer and activist Ijeoma Oluo eloquently put it: “If you wanted to avoid our rage, maybe you shouldn’t have left us with so little to lose.”

Sexism is usually discrete, in that a person can act in sexist ways or experience incidents of sexism. Misogyny is systemic. Sexism is interpersonal, misogyny is structural. Sexism might alter your day, but misogyny and the power behind it will alter your life outcomes and shape the world around you at every level.

“I am not a cool, chill girl anymore. I am a woman who is very angry and very tired. I know that that makes me unlikeable,” explained writer and activist Andrea Grimes. “I know this will literally cost me money in lost bylines

gal, because she’s crazy about this thing, she’ll nag the shit out of you, man—she’ll fuckin’ tag you in a tweet about rape culture on a Friday, dude.” The importance and visibility of women’s collective anger can’t be overstated. This anger takes determination, thoughtfulness, and work. It means respecting our own anger and being willing to respect the

People who deny sexism will always be more hostile to your anger than to what is actually causing your anger. A lot of the difficulty of denial is that women’s inequality is woven into men’s identities in early childhood. Teenage boys are heavily invested in masculinity and achieving it. They can and do suffer real penalties when they don’t.

Powerlessness is one of the reasons women cry more. It is less likely to cause an angry response in the person a woman is talking to. Girls are constantly seeking ways to convince people they know, respect, and love that what they are saying when they describe their experiences or their anger and frustration is true, and that it is serious. Even at just eight to ten years old, young girls have been found in studies to think they will be made fun of or disciplined when they display

They identify four skills that are good baselines for anyone using anger productively: (1) anger consciousness, (2) anger talk, (3) listening to others, and (4) what they term “think tank,” or strategizing. Below, I have elaborated on these themes to include a broader constellation of suggestions.

Aggression is a more directly confrontational behavior, less civil, but, in many cases, respectful. It is possible to be both assertive and aggressive without being angry at all and, conversely, to be angry without being assertive or aggressive. Each, depending on context, has its place. I remind myself sometimes that the root of the word aggressive is related closely to the Latin word aggredi, meaning “to go forward.”

Your anger and assertiveness will make some people unhappy, uncomfortable, sensitive, cautious. They will resent you, your thoughts, your words. They will hate your willingness to risk social connections and challenge social conventions. Be prepared to be labelled humorless, difficult, a spoilsport, and a ruiner of parties, meetings, dinners, and picnics.

Care with purpose. Understand that this includes taking care of your own health and well-being. Learn to say no and to say no unapologetically.

Self-objectification makes it harder to feel your anger or do anything about it. It makes you more vulnerable to threat and assault. It contributes to low self-esteem, self-silencing, and a heightened likelihood of self-harm, anxiety, and depression. If there are people in your life telling you or girls that you know that “girls are prettier with their mouths shut,” demand that they stop. Studies of athletes show a strong correlation between body competence, self-esteem, and healthier anger expression.

In reality, the mass movement of girls into athletics meant that an entire generation, currently coming into its political own, was able, in unprecedented ways, to join teams, develop competitive bonds, and express feelings physically, including aggression and anger. Sports are a way of learning teamwork and developing physical prowess, but they are also important because they teach people how to regulate and channel aggression, violence, and power.

Organize your thoughts and actions with clear objectives. That may mean asking for a long-overdue raise, but it might also mean saving money to quit a miserable job and look for another one or taking the step to report harassment.

The first women we know are our mothers, and yet we sometimes treat them, especially when they are angry, with the least compassion. That becomes a model for how we treat other women.

Power is, for example, associated in implicit bias studies with domination and not nurturing. Powerlessness is, on the other hand, implied in femininity.