Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

isolation and was not worth sharing verbally with others. That furious feelings are best kept to oneself. That when they do inevitably come out, the results can be scary, shocking, and destructive.

In the United States, anger in white men is often portrayed as justifiable and patriotic, but in black men, as criminality; and in black women, as threat. In the Western world, which this book focuses on, anger in women has been widely associated with “madness.”

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

It’s as children that most of us learn to regard anger as unfeminine, unattractive, and selfish. Many of us are taught that our anger will be an imposition on others, making us irksome and unlikeable. That it will alienate our loved ones or put off people we want to attract. That it will twist our faces, make us ugly. This is true even for those of us who have to use anger to defend ourselves in charged and dangerous situations. As girls, we are not taught to acknowledge or manage our anger so much as fear, ignore, hide, and transform it.

boys and men, anger has to be controlled, but it is often seen as a virtue, especially when it is used to protect, defend, or lead.

When a woman shows anger in institutional, political, and professional settings, she automatically violates gender norms. She is met with aversion, perceived as more hostile, irritable, less competent, and unlikeable—the kiss of death for a class of people expected to maintain social connections.

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.

Anger is usually about saying “no” in a world where women are conditioned to say almost anything but “no.”

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.

Anger has a bad rap, but it is actually one of the most hopeful and forward thinking of all our emotions. It begets transformation, manifesting our passion and keeping us invested in the world. It is a rational and emotional response to trespass, violation, and moral disorder. It bridges the divide between what “is” and what “ought” to be, between a difficult past and an improved possibility. Anger warns us viscerally of violation, threat, and insult.

And why does it fall so disproportionately on the shoulders of women to be “better” by putting aside anger in order to “understand” and to forgive and forget?

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.

I don’t throw plates, but I do throw words.

It took me too long to realize that the people most inclined to say “You sound angry” are the same people who uniformly don’t care to ask “Why?” They’re interested in silence, not dialogue. This response to women expressing anger happens on larger and larger scales: in schools, places of worship, the workplace, and politics. A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women—not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.

What would it mean to ungender our emotions?

In 2014, researchers from multiple universities conducted a large-scale, four-country study into preschool preparedness and gender. Children in the United States showed the largest gender gaps in self-regulation.

Researchers found that parental and teacher expectations of gender informed the way that children acted and were evaluated, and, ultimately, whether or not they were held accountable for controlling themselves.

Anger is an “approach” emotion, while sadness is a “retreat” emotion.

Social science researchers

have shown that anger, unlike sadness, encourages “unstructured thinking” when a person is engaged in creative tasks,

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.

“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.

Really?

Simmons in her book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls.

Middle-class white girls appear to be the most likely to suppress negative feelings and the least likely to be openly angry.

“When girls make a choice to value their emotions,” explains Simmons, “they value themselves.”

In women in particular, assertiveness, aggression, and anger are

often considered one and the same.

Anger is an emotion, but assertiveness and aggressi...

According to clinicians, anger as a significant component of anxiety and depression is a specific type of anger, the kind of anger caused by a perceived or actual loss or rejection.

Because of racial alienation and the need to take active steps to combat discrimination, black mothers, studies show, are less likely to socialize their daughters to be subservient to the powers that be.

When we are taught that our anger is undesirable, selfish, powerless, and ugly, we learn that we are undesirable, selfish, powerless, and ugly.

Sadness, as an emotion, is paired with acceptance. Anger, on the other hand, invokes the possibility of change and of fighting back.

Being indignant is a powerful emotional response to insults and to threats against dignity. It is a specific kind of anger rooted in believing that you are being treated unfairly.

tesselated

Societal and religious pressures that generate conflict in a gay, lesbian, or trans person are often internalized and manifested in self-objectification and shame.

Whereas 7 percent to 20 percent of the general population report anxiety and depression, almost 50 percent of gender-nonconforming people do. Rates of suicide for members of the LGBTQ community are nearly nine times the national average.

Guilt is the response of a person who feels he had some control but failed to exercise it properly. Shame, on the other hand, reflects no expectation of control. It is a feeling that you, your essence and being, are wrong.

Suppressing anger and internalizing objectification are as linked to middle-aged drops in self-esteem and increased mental distress as they are in younger girls and women.

is notable that anxiety, depression, and concerns about weight and appearance tend to cluster around puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause, and menopause.

they are all also times in which girls and women find themselves in the crosshairs of objectification, social inequality, and, often, intense and unacknowledged anger.

Women live their lives trying to create bodies of deference.

Objectification denies us subjectivity, and anger is all about subjectivity. You can’t express anger without asserting I and your own perspective.

People who score high in “masculine” behaviors—even women—display higher pain tolerance than those who react in a more “feminine” manner, while people who score higher for femininity and feminine behaviors exhibit less pain tolerance.

These findings are particularly insightful because they clearly and compellingly demonstrate that behaviors many people learn to think of as “natural” ones stemming from biological sex are actually fluid and relate, instead, to socially constructed gender norms and expectations.

Through a series of creative experiments, scientists have found that the stronger the curse words people use while experiencing pain the higher their tolerance for that pain. Byrne notes, depressingly, that women who curse when in pain, however, are less well cared for by those around them.

the United States, the medical profession has an ugly history of using black bodies for brutalizing scientific experiments, based on the belief that black people can’t feel pain.

mid-nineteenth century by Alabama surgeon J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology.” Sims invented the speculum,

and pioneered several landmark surgic...

expertise and fame were gained at the expense of enslaved black women on whom he performed experimental...

Anarcha Wescott, who was seventeen at the time of the first experiments, survived thirty of the...