Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

Women in communities with greater gender equality, for example, have superior cognitive skills, while men in gender-unequal communities underperform in social sensitivity.

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

In the world of separate spheres, as long as women follow the rules and are “good”—a

sort girls and women into groups:

The “whore” deserves what she gets, while the “Madonna” can’t possibly be victimized because she would never do anything to deserve punishment.

on top of this are the racism and ethnocentrism that historically and enduringly restrict the meaning of “real woman” to stereotypes of white women and, for example, reduce black women to undeserving and violable Jezebels, Hispanic women to salacious tarts, Asian women...

System justification is the name given to the emotional and cognitive process that kicks in when a person encounters information or behaviors that challenge their sense of self and their worldview.

just-world theory, when evidence suggests the world is not a just place, people with this orientation seek to reassert fairness either by ignoring dissonant information or by blaming people for the ills that befall them. Poor people are lazy and don’t work enough. Black people are more likely to be criminals. Women who go out, drink, and have sex are culpable for their rapes.

So, mockery, trivialization, suppression, and denial often ensue because denial is psychologically assuaging—an effective managing of “feelings of dissonance” and “anger related to unfairness.”

WOMEN ARE ALSO SYSTEMS-JUSTIFYING

Women against women

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.

fear of competition and what other women’s success says about gender and gender roles.

women with benevolently sexist beliefs are the most hostile to other women when they demonstrate raw ambition or display political power.

she claimed, and women were equating clumsy flirting with crimes, or they were weak and oversensitive, or vindictive and lying.

The primary thrust of her arguments was that, in her experience, most women do not face #MeToo problems, and those that do bring them on themselves.

women will maintain beliefs in separate gender spheres and a just world, supporting patriarchal norms even when it puts them at a clear disadvantage.

Priti

while I rattled off statistics, the other woman kept repeating, “This is not a world I recognize.”

identity protection cognition, the process by which people “selectively dismiss asserted dangers in a manner supportive of their preferred form of social organization.”

falling back on benevolent sexism by blaming female victims and defending and prioritizing male wage earning probably made the dissonance of having to think about what women’s harassment...

Denial is rarely based on facts or reasoning.

“white male effect” and describe it as a mechanism for protecting status.

identity-protective cognition. In countries such as Sweden, where women enjoy higher status, the effect is seen in relation to ethnicity, with both white men and women assessing risk differently than other, lower-status ethnic groups do.

Men who believe in separate spheres and adhere to benevolently sexist beliefs don’t “see” women’s anger as legitimate because to see the problems, and risks, that women face as real would require status-threatening change.

Women who believe in separate spheres and adhere to benevolently sexist beliefs also become some of the strongest e...

most likely to harshly judge rape victims or women who have been abused by intimate partners. They will overlook the broader meaning and context of male perpetration and its prevalence.

anger, and arguing on the basis of facts, so often fail to change minds.

“choice feminism,” which can be summed up by the fatuous idea that every choice a woman makes is a feminist choice because a woman is making it.

They are actively encouraged by adults to see sexism as a matter of their personal responsibility, not as a social wrong and an institutional inhibitor to equality.

a college-educated white woman who acted “against her own best interests” by voting for Donald Trump

what this voting bloc did was leverage racial privilege to maintain status, even if their gendered rights were being degraded. Institutional white male supremacy means that white women benefit from access to patriarchal norms (for example, systems that continue to favor white men in power) in a way that other women don’t, but it requires a trade and comes at everyone’s expense.

Patriarchal bargain

white women reported the highest levels of anger and aggression, especially conservative ones.

Men, in Trump’s worldview, might do disgusting things, but noncompliant women are, themselves, disgusting. The association goes beyond just how people think about women’s bodies and corrupts how they perceive women’s abilities and morality.

People judged women who dropped tampons more harshly, saying that they were less likeable and competent. Some even went out of their way to avoid sitting next to them.

The language of containment was used by political foes and voters who seemed unable to separate their disgust for Clinton’s body from their political anger and punitive agendas. In treating Clinton in this way, Trump and his voters displayed their disgust for women more broadly. Bleeding, leaking, seeping, oozing, and defecating are the stuff of our humanity and for this humanity, we particularly learn to revile women; and, as women, to hate ourselves.

If the exposure to what he dismissed as “locker room talk” agitated liberal and progressive women, for conservative women, it was more threatening,

promising to be a protector and yet, right there, in plain view, being venal, misogynistic, and predatory.

When people encounter overwhelming evidence of social inequality that defies what they believe about their own natures, the world, and their place in it, instead of processing facts and addressing what they mean, they up the ante on gaslighting, victim blaming, exaggerating the benefits of inequitable social systems, and adamantly defending the status quo. They respond in anger and are prone to shut down women’s angry demands.

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.

he routinely promised to protect “people” from racialized violence, mainly against white women. Mexican immigrants are rapists. The Central Park Five were guilty (except they weren’t). Muslims will rape and terrorize. And China is raping (figuratively) the United States.

The threat of rape was a constant drumbeat in reestablishing legitimacy for a historic and endlessly toxic border patrol masculinity inherent to white male supremacy.

requiring women to ignore the plain degradation of women for his entertainment.

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

Forty-four percent of college-educated white women in America voted for Donald Trump.

authoritarian mind-sets: rigid adherence to rules, strict moral codes, strong feelings of contempt and disgust, obedience to social groups, an aversion to introspection, and a propensity and desire to punish others.

It is in families that gender binaries are established and policed through rules, moral codes, expressions of disappointment, and revulsion.

Research shows that adults who grew up in households that adhered to strict and punitive rules and philosophies translate their anger against their parents into strict and punitive politics.

antifeminism and contempt for women are related directly to authoritarian beliefs.

sexism predicted Trump support more than economics, a person’s party affiliation, political ideology, or racial attitudes.

anger around gender and gender roles makes sexism the political force it was in our politics.

For women, as with systems-justification and just-world beliefs, authoritarian beliefs and tendencies are strengthened by exposure to sexism.