Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

Price differences such as these reflect unconscious ideas about men as “standard” humans and women as more complicated variations.

in 90 percent of the games, the male characters were free, whereas 85 percent of the games charged extra for the ability to select a female character. This is a simple but telling example of the ways children learn to think that masculine = normal; male = standard; boys = human; and girls = have to pay.

Most governments continue to categorize tampons and sanitary napkins as “luxury items,” and tax women accordingly.

Medical research in the United States is still primarily conducted using men, mainly of European descent,

insurance coverage historically treated having a woman’s body as an exception, and a pregnancy as a noncovered “preexisting condition.”

Men who were freely walking in and out of the adjacent men’s room cracked jokes about women’s vanity. Yes, women do spend more time in bathrooms and have more reasons to be in them, but not because of vanity.

Women take care of other people, carry bags and packages, wear bulkier clothes, get pregnant, menstruate, and are more likely to have urinary tract infections.

The issue is, of course, not lines but the audacity that women want more. That we want centrality and equity in our own societies.

recent history is any indication, a child is more endangered in a church sacristy than in a gender-neutral lavatory.

Studies show that women, on average, have between one and two “impactful” sexist and/or racist experiences a week. These include gender or racial stereotypes, demeaning humor, degrading comments and behaviors, and harassment and objectification.

women have higher levels of daily stress and frustration than men do. We don’t generally speak of this stress as a function of injustice, but sexism and racism, and feelings of powerlessness in the face of them, are daily stressors.

We are mainly trying to make it through the day as efficiently as possible, and this almost always means participating in the tacit reproduction of the everyday racism and sexism that undermine us.

Studies of social equity and justice show that anger and resentment are first lines of defense when a person feels that she is doing more than her fair share or more than is reciprocated. 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.

Women are more likely to enact confrontations with sexist and racist aggressors in their minds than they are to actually confront aggressors or challenge policies.

desire to be polite, wanting to be liked, a disinclination to challenge norms, and a fear of retaliation all contributed

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.

“These alternatives are chosen,” wrote psychiatrist Teresa Bernardez-Bonesatti in 1978, “rather than risk the loss of the support and approval of males . . . and a concomitant loss of one’s given self-esteem and appraised value.” Carol Tavris, in her book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, explained how men also do this. It’s called “punching down,” and it happens when they encounter higher-status men and then turn on women and children “below” them in an expressive hierarchy.

A recent study examined sexist online harassment among gamers. Low-status and less talented male gamers (or, as one journalist put it, “literally losers”) showed the most vitriolic hostility toward women who were better players and “winning.” These players defer to more skilled men, but they viciously attack women.

“If you don’t challenge things, all you have done is passed it on to the next woman to deal with. It would be a disservice for women in this industry if I didn’t stand up.”

“Women endorse sexist beliefs, at least in part because they do not attend to subtle, aggregate forms of sexism in their personal lives,”

In 2008, sociologist Dr. Moya Bailey and Trudy Hamilton coined and popularized the word “misogynoir” to specifically address antiblackness and racist misogyny.

small reminders of not belonging, called microaggressions, are the building blocks of discrimination and inequity.

critically assessing the comforting habits we support out of nostalgia and tradition, which would require no small measure of effort. It means walking out of places of worship, not buying certain movie tickets, closing certain books and picking up others, refusing to pay for certain products, and finding compelling ways to disagree with friends and family at the dinner table. It means explaining to grandparents, engaging with school administrators, and demanding rights at work. The slow and productive burn of anger is an asset. But leveraging it means taking a risk: the risk of finding out how much what you care about matters to your community.

Her entire mien—expression, posture, and lips—conveyed disgust and exhaustion.

No one was equipped with words to describe the outcome of a life filled with unuttered experiences, such as kidnapping, marital rape, domestic abuse, post-traumatic stress, postpartum depression, or patriarchal violence. Instead, in an obtuse neo-Victorian way, people mainly said she’d “lost her mind,”

Philosopher Miranda Flicker has a name for what the women of my family, across decades and generations, experienced: epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice has two defining features. One is testimonial injustice, in which a speaker, because of prejudice on the part of the person or people listening, is not considered trustworthy or credible.

second dimension of epistemic justice: hermeneutical injustice, or the injustice of having one’s social experience denied and hidden from communal understanding. A lack of communal understanding inhibits social responses and, with them, the distribution of resources that can remedy social problems. One of the key aspects of hermeneutical injustice is that the people who experience the effects of the injustice themselves have no framework for understanding what is happening to them.

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when social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter verify users on the basis of their public profiles, they rubber stamp these hierarchies, exponentially amplifying already more powerful voices by giving them visibility, security, marketing advantages, and prominence.

when women make up roughly 17 percent of a crowd scene (an eerie coincidence with leadership percentages), viewers perceive a fifty-fifty gender balance. There is an auditory corollary to this visual one: when women speak 30 percent of the time in mixed-gender conversations, listeners think they dominate.

On the evening of October 15, 2017, as the Weinstein story became more and more horrifying, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” “MeToo” as a movement to end the silence around assault had been started ten years earlier by Tarana Burke, an advocate for survivors of sexual abuse, assault, and harassment.

Weinstein himself was a good example. Photomontages of Weinstein’s victims depicted mainly a thin, white, idealized womanhood that Hollywood, controlled by men like Weinstein, has promoted and profited from handsomely.

“The floodgates have opened,” she agreed, but cautioned, primarily, “for White women.” The ugly racism that keeps darker women out of so much work in Hollywood may have ironically also buffered them against Weinstein’s gross predation.

Hollywood is a culture shaper, but its executives are not held to journalistic standards, nor do they make claims that their products serve lofty goals or practice rigorous objectivity.

the women Charlie preferred and preyed upon—at least that I witnessed—were white. It was an environment that all but erased me, while simultaneously exploiting me as a black woman.”

You dont want to fuxk me. Im safe but also without ay chance to rise if you dont findmy lools valuale

“In a world where sexual assault isn’t taken seriously,” wrote journalist Sarah Jeong, “a whisper network becomes a form of protection.” Whisper networks, spoken, emailed, written in spreadsheets, exist when systems are failing.

have learned that when I’ve spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself. So I’ve been waiting to feel less angry. And when I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.” Thurman not only tone policed herself, she talked about tone policing herself.

“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.”

regularly brandished her fury and aggression in public appearances, appearances that seemed to fill other people with discomfort. Vanity Fair described her as the “white-hot voice of rage.”

Tarana Burke did this. For decades before being catapulted onto a national stage by Alyssa Milano’s tweet, she worked with survivors of sexual assault and violence in marginalized communities.

People who harass in the workplace are not sex addicts or people with poor dating skills; they are abusers of power and of people.

The problem isn’t that some people don’t understand. It is that they understand too well, and what they understand is that they can get away with predatory abuse.

If they wonder how their every word and action will be judged and used against them, Welcome to our world.

how many women have been lost and damaged over decades, how much creativity and accomplishment has been derailed,

Women may not have cultural parity in mainstream storytelling, but we have alternative ways to tell stories today that never existed before.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” he said, going on to say that the women were lying and that the judge was craving attention and the media were “sensationalizing” his case. It was too hard, he said, to have to listen to all of his victims.

Critiques of Aquilina betrayed a deep unease with women passing judgment on men.

Stephens and her “sisterhood of survivors,” as the judge called them, did something remarkable: they reversed the traditional trajectory in which shame accrued to rape victims and anger was reserved for the defense of “wronged” and “misunderstood” aggressors.

Her assailant was sentenced to just six months in jail by a judge who explained that anything longer would have “a severe impact on him.” His father asserted that this was “a steep price to pay for twenty minutes of action.”

Women journalists on Twitter record three times as many abusive comments as male counterparts,