Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

2016 University of Virginia study found white medical students and residents held “fantastical” ideas about black people’s bodies, thinking, for example, that it was possible or probably true that black people really are less likely to feel pain, as well as to have blood that clots more quickly.

androcentrism (male-centeredness),

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.

Eighty-two percent of more than a thousand Americans surveyed in 2015 said that women should take responsibility for children’s emotional and physical needs. Respondents assigned men to one primary child-related task: discipline.

Today it is safer to give birth in Bosnia or Kuwait than in California, and a woman having a baby in the United States is six times more likely to die than one in Scandinavia.

The Mother Bliss Lie: Regretting Motherhood, author Sarah Fischer

“God should have made girls lethal / when he made monsters of men,” writes poet Elisabeth Hewer.

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

woman’s chance of being sexually assaulted in her lifetime is one in five. For men, it’s one in seventy-seven.

Current data, however, indicate that more than 80 percent of juvenile victims are girls, while 90 percent of adult survivors are women.

Native American girls and women are the only demographic cohort more likely to be assaulted by men outside of their own ethnic group.

And while the rapes of boys and men are far more profuse than anyone is willing to seriously consider, rape is perpetrated, regardless of who is assaulted, overwhelmingly by men and adjudicated in places where men hold far more power.

Some estimates put the incidence of intimate-partner violence among police families at two to four times the national average.

Domestic violence injures more American women annually than rapes, car accidents, and muggings combined.

Because of a lack of gun regulations, an American woman is sixteen times more likely to be shot than a woman in another developed country.

Approximately four in five Native American and Alaskan Native women have experienced violence.

The most dangerous man a woman will encounter is the one sitting at her own dinner table,

It is estimated by demographers that femicide, the killing of female fetuses and babies, has led to a deficit of more than a hundred million women on the planet.

The gap is already resulting in the global escalation of trafficking of women to meet demand.

Anger always came later for me, and I think that’s very significant for women. Only afterward do we realize how denied and pushed down that anger

Anger is the emotion that best protects us against danger, unfairness, and injustice. Understanding it and learning to think about its methodical uses in response to threats like these allows girl and women to move from passivity, fear, and withdrawal to awareness, engagement, and change.

Her work examining the gendered construction of speech in early childhood confirms earlier findings that, in Western classrooms, boys are allowed by adults to consume five times as much verbal space through, as she puts it, “imperceptible signals of significance over girls.”

Linguists have studied the role of gender in speech and speech distributions for decades, concluding at one point that “women’s speech”—frequently more submissive and less assertive—is a specific genre of speech. Crosscultural analyses suggest that “women’s speech” is actually “powerless speech,” employed by lower-status people, regardless of sex.

The notion of older women’s anger is even less appealing than girls’ nascent rage. Older women are supposed to disappear or, if not, at least be quiet and take care of others.

Behavioral scientists recognize two related but distinct types of sexism: hostile and benevolent.

Vienna created Women-Work-City, a housing project built for and by women as part of the city’s urban planning initiative. The project altered the city to make it safer and easier for women to live in. They put clinics, child care facilities, pharmacies, and post offices around apartment buildings. They redesigned walkways and added lighting. Because it was shown that after the age of nine, girls stopped playing in public parks, they also found ways to make public spaces safer and more appealing, bringing girls back into them. Most cities have not done what Vienna has.

In India’s city of Mumbai, the ratio of women to toilets they can use in public is roughly six bathrooms for every eight thousand women.

neologisms

8

THERE ARE NO WORDS

There is really no such thing as the “voiceless.” There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard. —Arundhati Roy

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.”

In the United States, women make up just less than 20 percent of Congress and an average of 24 percent of state legislatures.

During the past twenty years, as other countries have made strides toward women’s political efficacy, the United States went from being 52nd in the world for women’s representation to 104th.

In another hearing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, using an obscure parliamentary rule, silenced Senator Elizabeth Warren. “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,”

“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.

Men with higher-earning wives are more likely to have erectile dysfunction and depression.

the idea that men are supposed to protect. Hearing about street and sexual harassment and threats of assault directly challenge a man’s ability to keep “his” woman safe.

This triggers not only confusion, doubt, or anger but also stress and feelings of inadequacy. When women are honest about these issues, their honesty can be ex...

dominant norms of masculinity are actively constructed out of women’s vulnerabilities.

Yes!

What are “real men” if they can’t protect women? What are “real men” if women can provide financially for themselves and their families?

other forms of discrimination and denial. For example, 55 percent of white Americans believe that there is more discrimination against white people in America than against blacks and other minorities.

Studies show that women who adhere to conservative gender ideologies are more likely to deny their own anger and to respond poorly to other women who display anger, particularly in ways that highlight failures in comforting social systems.