Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. —AUDRE LORDE

Anger is like water. No matter how hard a person tries to dam, divert, or deny it, it will find a way, usually along the path of least resistance.

It took me years to acknowledge my own anger, and when I did, I didn’t know what to do with it.

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.

Unaddressed anger affects our neurological, hormonal, adrenal, and vascular systems in ways that are still largely ignored in the treatment of pain. It’s hard to overstate what this means in terms of women’s health.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” Parks explained once, “but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Rosa Parks

What kind of woman resents taking care of the people around her? How selfish is a woman who has her own desires and, worse, puts her own interests first sometimes? Not a “good” one.

Gritting teeth is something people do when they are in pain. But it also happens to be something they do when they are filled with rage.

"Grin and bear it"

Feminism isn’t ruining marriage—sexism and the persistent expectation of masculine entitlements are.

Women surpassed men in terms of life satisfaction and happiness only in their eighth decade. In other words, until they are no longer responsible for caring for other people.

“The Trump administration had discussions about performing medical experiments on an undocumented minor simply because she was in their custody and they thought they could.”

What the actual fuck?!!!

we can’t truly know which men are harmless. And the cost of being wrong is high. 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.

Men learn to regard rape as a moment in time; a discrete episode with a beginning, middle, and end. But for women, rape is thousands of moments that we fold into ourselves over a lifetime.

It’s the sting of knowing that exactly as the world starts expanding for most boys, it begins to shrink for you.

Re: harassment, assault, purity culture, modesty, etc

“When your community fights for those same people who terrorize you, it sends a very complicated and mixed message . . . that your pain is not a priority.”

Hello, Trump presidencies

This isn’t about safety. If it were, we’d teach boys, who are also subject to childhood molestation and risk, the same lessons, but we don’t. It’s about social control.

Ask a man what his greatest fear is about serving jail time, and he will almost inevitably say he fears being raped. What can we deduce from the fact that jail is to men what life is to so many women?

Women should be angry about the violence and fear that inform so much of our lives. So should men. Anger is the emotion that best protects us against danger, unfairness, and injustice.

“10 Simple Words Every Girl Should Learn.” The ten words are: “Stop interrupting me,” “I just said that,” and “No explanation needed.”

Bodies of men acting in the absence of women is unethical, and it’s dangerous.

A benevolent sexist says, “Motherhood is the most important job in the world”—and then proceeds to act on the belief that “girls are worse at math,” to pay mothers less, and to penalize men who want to care for their children. It’s a solid way to make people feel good while they are being materially discriminated against. Men who hold benevolently sexist beliefs actually smile more at women than men who don’t.

Re: bishop telling me not to go to college to study the same thing his son in law was, and that my place was in the home

Unable to speak with authority, women have to work their way to the divine either in silence or through the power of men’s speech.

Building the world this way may not have been intentionally sexist. But continuing to do so at this stage absolutely is.

The unfairnesses that we intuit and experience but cannot “prove,” as we are asked to do so often, are more likely to become internalized anger rather than externalized action.

When a society willfully looks away from injustice, it fails to develop language to describe it, to communicate what is happening, or to prepare individuals to adapt to it.

“I didn’t consider my voice important, nor did I think it would make a difference. . . . Women are talking today, because in this new era, we finally can.”

If #MeToo has made men feel vulnerable, panicked, unsure, and fearful as a result of women finally, collectively, saying “Enough!” so be it. If they wonder how their every word and action will be judged and used against them, Welcome to our world. If they feel that everything they do will reflect on other men and be misrepresented and misunderstood, take a seat. You are now honorary women.

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.”

During the 2016 presidential campaign, pornographic memes, fake videos, and sexualized images of Hillary Clinton were used to portray her both as a violable slut and as frigid and undesirable.

Rinse and repeat in 2024

all women are affected by misogyny even though all men are not sexist.

#yesallwomen

“#NotAllMen practice violence against women but #YesAllWomen live with the threat of male violence. Every. Single. Day. All over the world.”

People who deny sexism will always be more hostile to your anger than to what is actually causing your anger.

Women are not in competition with other women for their human rights. My rights are not relative to another woman’s pain and vulnerability. They should not be contingent on affiliative male status.

If more men asked women the question “What is making you angry?” and cared about the answer, then maybe divorce initiation would even out.

*and cared about the answer*

Unfairness and facts aren’t what provoke anger; people like me who point them out do.

If the exposure to what he dismissed as “locker room talk” agitated liberal and progressive women, for conservative women, it was more threatening, to a worldview, by an order of magnitude. Here was a man who was like men they knew well, saying the same things, in the same ways, promising to be a protector and yet, right there, in plain view, being venal, misogynistic, and predatory.

Re: trumps bus conversation

Every picture, video, and audiotape of Trump on the campaign stump, however, dragged unwelcome memories from women’s subconscious.

Every time Trump lurched, leered, and blathered on about “respecting” women, he not only stirred up trauma but, importantly, also called into question the legitimacy of his saying he was “protecting” women.

The Trump tape lodged itself in women’s brains but was promptly evacuated from men’s.

Piled on top of the Trump tape, the memories and feelings it provoked, and the hypocrisy it revealed, women were apparently also forced to come to grips with how little sexual harassment and assault seemed to matter to the men in their lives. Deny. Deny and deny some more.

📢📢📢📢

“I think, for so many women in this country, when they are angry, there is confusion between anger and sadness,”

This is an era of angry women and women willing to make noise. This is not a luxury but a necessity. Be angry. Be loud. Rage becomes you.

What now? What to do with all the rage? This was not a question I could have even asked myself ten years ago. The anger I felt was so deplorably mismanaged that I didn’t recognize it.

If there is a word that should be retired from use in the service of women’s expression, health, well-being, and equality, it is appropriate—a sloppy, mushy word that purports to convey some important moral essence but in reality is just a policing term used to regulate our language, appearance, and demands. It’s a control word. We are done with control.

Like most people, I had learned to think of empathy and compassion as divorced from anger, but empathy and compassion were fundamental to my anger.

Be brave enough to stop pleasing people, to be disliked, to rub people the wrong way.

There will always be people who are deeply uncomfortable with your anger. They will attempt to diminish what you say by disparaging your choice of expression. This is a kind of laziness and a sure symptom of dismissal and, sometimes, abuse. If someone does not care to consider why you are angry, or why anger is your approach to a specific event or problem, then that person is almost certainly part of the problem.

Demanding fairness and describing a problem doesn’t make you a “victim.” Silencing, denial, mockery, intimidation, and callousness might, though.

A second very consequential binary to reconsider is the one that supports stereotypes about emotions and reason, instinct and thinking. It is frequently used to invalidate women’s anger and concerns. Women are designated more emotional, but then the designation itself is used to undermine our reason. In this framework, a man, a thinker, can have emotions, but a woman, a feeler, is emotional. To paraphrase one study, if a man gets angry, he’s having an off day, if a woman does, she’s a raging bitch.

Contrary to the idea that anger clouds thinking, properly understood, it is an astoundingly clarifying emotion.