Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

The topics that garnered the most abuse? Feminism, rape, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Nothing will ever convince me that the intent and effect of being called an asshole are the same as opening your in-box in the morning to dick pics, cannibalistic rape porn, racist gore, and videos of men masturbating. The intention of this harassment is pretty straightforward: to make women shut up. The desire for women to stop talking is profuse in the language and imagery of harassment. Hanging, strangulation, forced fellatio, decapitation, and choking women with objects are

“Women that talk too much need to get raped,”

“Shut your whore mouth now,” demanded another, “or I’ll shut it for you and choke you with my dick.”

Women can’t afford to either “get offline” or ignore the connection between online threats and offline violence. The “choices” women have are limited, and women are often forced to silence themselves.

Sarkeesian was one of three women who were the primary targets of a multiyear campaign of misogynistic online harassment called Gamergate.

Operation: Lollipop.” In 2014, harassers, primarily men’s rights agitators organizing on the forum 4Chan, began impersonating feminist women of color across multiple social media platforms. The impersonator accounts posted abusive and hostile commentary and content designed to provoke discord and embarrass the women who were targeted. The campaign, planned over a year was revealed when women fought back using #YourSlipIsShowing.

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

the United States went from being 52nd in the world for women’s representation to 104th.

United Kingdom, women’s increasing participation in government was marked by gains during the 2017 general election. Women now make up 26 percent of the House of Lords and have the same percentage of cabinet posts, both record highs.

Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton fifty-one times during the first presidential debate in 2016, as he appeared to stalk her on stage. “For more than 90 minutes on a national stage,” wrote the Associated Press’s Tamara Lush, “Trump subjected the first female presidential candidate from a major party to indignities [women] experience from men daily, in the workplace and beyond.”

“I’ve had people tweeting that I should be hung if they ‘could find a tree big enough to take the fat bitch’s weight’ ” said the United Kingdom’s Diane Abbott, MP and shadow home secretary. “I’ve had rape threats . . . and n*gger, over and over and over again.” A 2016 analysis of six months’ worth of tweets revealed that 45 percent of malicious tweets sent to women MPs in the United Kingdom targeted Abbott.

The survey of parliamentarians also found that 42 percent of women reported “extremely humiliating or sexually charged images spread through social media.” When men want women to stop talking, they send them porn.

isn’t “harmless” fun, it’s a political strategy. Research shows that sexual objectification sullies a woman’s reputation, degrades viewers’ perceptions of the person’s moral standing and competence, and demonstrably hurts her chances of being elected.

Pornhub in 2016 were mom, stepmom, MILF, and lesbian. What does it say that these men got their kicks sexualizing these particular women? Women who represent taboo violations, but it is clear, too, women with power over them as boys and men, or women who reject men outright.

an accurate contemporary definition of misogyny would mean “entrenched prejudice against women,” as well as institutional and pathological hatred and the persistent exclusion of women from positions of leadership and authority.

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 know this will literally cost me money in lost bylines and recognition and respect from men who decide who gets hired to write what and when, who decide not to recommend me for a gig or who tell their buddies to steer clear of this particular 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.”

Women’s judgments, thoughts, work, and contributions are constantly ignored, abbreviated, and squelched by a dense matrix of violence and discrimination. In the face of erasure, we are forced to reconcile our identities, hopes, and ambitions with a constant awareness of threats to our safety, humanity, and dignity.

to create something vital: language and communal understanding.

We need diverse stories to proliferate across media, in our classrooms, and at our dinner tables. We need to hear women’s stories, in their own words. Women

in 2014, twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people: four men and two women.

kill every “stuck-up blond slut”

He talked about quarantining, raping, and breeding women.

Rodger was affiliated with “incel” groups online. “Incels,” originally a benign description of involuntary celibates, is now commonly understood to represent a subculture of profoundly misogynistic and, increasingly visibly violent, communities of men.

The words “blonde sorority sluts,” “everything I hate in the female gender,” and “I will destroy all women because I can never have them” hadn’t made it into the mainstream news.

When I began to describe his misogyny, the almost uniform reaction among the people was that I must be wrong and, if not, certainly exaggerating.

stems from feelings of threats to identity, a knee-jerk expression of sexist beliefs that is itself deeply sexist in that it is frequently rooted in the idea that women are too emotional, less intelligent, and in need of guidance.

Nearly 50 percent of men without high school diplomas and 25 percent of those with college degrees believe that women fall back on using gender discrimination as an excuse for workplace outcomes that they don’t like.

people with identifiable men’s names deserved higher incomes and assigned equally prepared and skilled women lower salaries. When presented with these outcomes, many men dismissed them by questioning the study’s “objectivity” or rejecting them as unimportant.

“I think you would convince more boys if you said things in a nicer way,” he suggested. “I just think that you sound too angry.”

When students were asked “Where, if anywhere, does sexism come up in your everyday life?” girls told personal stories of sexual harassment or violence, denigrating humor, and demeaning stereotyping. The boys, however, provided mainly hypotheticals. All of the students reported witnessing acts of sexism against girls and women. There were virtually no actual examples of antimale sexism. Instead, students focused, for instance, on stereotypes in advertising.

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

Four in nine men say that because of greater gender equality and labor competition, it’s harder to be a man today.

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 experienced as a threat to masculine identity.

Most assaults that men experience happen in childhood, and they are smothered in shame and trauma, not in the least because being violated is considered feminizing.

Fathers are often particularly surprised when they learn that their daughters will face sexism and that their own privileges or attempts to protect them will not be sufficient to offset the impacts. A common response is to empathize by defining women, the ultimate in unhelpful patriarchal thinking, relationally: “My daughter, my wife, my sister, my mother.” This defines women not by their rights or as individuals but as extensions of men and their rights.

a polite way of saying, effectively, “Shut up, and be grateful we treat you as well as we do.”

It asserts the superiority of some men over others who treat “their” women less well, as in, “Consider yourself lucky that we are not selling you on Amazon.”

The behaviors that women say cause them to feel intense anger are often those that men display as aspects of traditional masculinity. In women, on the other hand, the controlling and aggressive behavior that men might find enraging indicates that a woman is not conforming to traditional norms.

“To hold somebody else’s anger involves being able to hear and listen without being defensive,” explained psychologist Robin Cook-Nobles in 1977.

On average, people are angered by the same things: unfairness, perceptions of injustice, and threats to safety, family, and status. But men get angrier when challenged by women than they do by other men—in other words, when their “natural” higher status is questioned.

Studies show that men are particularly bothered when women do not prioritize their needs, for example, and, instead, express their own needs or discomfort or desire for change.

women are significantly more likely to initiate divorce. For men, the institution of marriage comes with the assumption of certain privileges.

Women cite inequality in their personal relationships as the reason why they seek to end their relationships,

Women cite onerous demands of domestic and emotional labor as the reasons why they would rather not be in relationships. Many men are brought up to expect this labor.

they want wives who are more dependent, obedient, and less self-sufficient, but daughters—extensions of themselves in ways that wives aren’t—to be smart, ambitious, and independent.

The degree to which you agree or disagree with binary ideas about gender roles depends on where you fall in terms of separate spheres ideology (SSI), the underpinning of benevolent sexism.

Women restrict their power and influence primarily to social life, religious life, churches, schools, and parenting, while men do the same in the public sphere: moneymaking, lawmaking, and media.

The higher a person’s separate-spheres beliefs, the more negative his or her attitudes toward gender-equalizing changes.