Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

Girls are expected by most adults to display a pleasant affect and to be more affiliative, helpful, and cooperative. When a baby girl shows positive emotions or is compliant, she is far more likely to be rewarded with smiles, warmth, and food, whereas a boy tends to be similarly rewarded for being stoic and tough.

Children fine-tune their response to adult expectations, and adults consistently demonstrate discomfort with the idea of a righteously angry girl making demands. Girls, admonished to use “nicer” voices three times more often than boys are, learn to prioritize the needs and feelings of people around them; often this means ignoring their own discomfort, resentment, or anger.

“put on a pretty face.”

We are expected to be more accommodating and less assertive or dominant.

“You’re prettier when you smile,”

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.

When they become more assertive, especially about things that make them unhappy, adults are sometimes taken aback. “What happened to my sweet little girl?”

Every girl learns, in varying degrees, to filter herself through messages of women’s relative cultural irrelevance, powerlessness, and comparative worthlessness. Images and words conveying disdain for girls, women, and femininity come at children fast and furiously,

When girls consume media or participate in cultural events such as watching popular films or attending exciting sporting events, they frequently have to make a simple choice: either put themselves in men’s and boys’ shoes or consider what the relative invisibility, silence, and misrepresentation of girls and women who look like them means.

men, again overwhelmingly white, hold roughly 70 percent to 73 percent of the roles in top US films,

According to a report studying gender, race, and LGBTQ film portrayals in 2014, no women over forty-five years of age performed a lead or colead role. Only three lead or colead women were from minority backgrounds. Not one woman protagonist played a lesbian or bisexual character.

Many adults worry about video games because of violence, but most don’t consider the erasure and common sexualization of girls and women serious enough to prohibit certain games.

Even in school, children get subtle messages about whose stories matter. Literature classes routinely feature literature written by women and men of color as exceptional (one among many white male writers) or available for study in some schools as elective classes only.

Because of the prevalence of boys’ and men’s perspectives, girls learn early to put themselves in boys’ and men’s shoes. A girl’s imagination would be a barren place if she didn’t. Boys, however, are far less likely to do this and are, in some cases, shamed for doing this.

The centrality and visibility that exist, particularly, in the United States, for young, white boys is a source of confidence, invisible capital that becomes evident in self-esteem.

degradation of femininity that fills the air. Phrases such as “cry like a girl,” “throw like a girl,” and “scream like a girl,” are still socially acceptable

Everyday language is peppered with slurs that swing from positive to pejorative, reflecting the structural inequality between masculine and good, versus feminine and bad. We are all sluts and hos in waiting.

Most everyone knows that making someone your bitch might not mean that person is female, just as they also know it means that being dominated and powerless are feminine states of being.

mores.

Much of girls’ social media output—photographs, Snapchats, memes, commentary—powerfully challenges stereotypes that portray women in negative or impossibly idealistic ways.

Those with “unruly” bodies can refute shaming.

Selfie culture has virtues, but it also has a focus on thinness, whiteness, and idealized beauty, highlighting ways that girls and women are “supposed” to look. In all forms of media, for example, girls and women are at least four times more likely to be portrayed as underweight and physically diminished, conveying fragility, weakness, and helplessness. The more physically winnowed a girl is, the more socially popular she might become.

woman’s words, ideas, interests, abilities, and hard work seem to take a back seat to her appearance. Women are most visible as sexualized entertainment.

pronounced lack of sorority in representation of women. Women, isolated from other women, are frequently portrayed as existing in a sea of men. If a woman is brilliant or powerful, it is because she is unique. Even fabulously successful films featuring iconographic “empowered” girls and women—Wonder Woman being among the most recent and popular—struggle to cultivate camaraderie with other women. For

It is important to note how deeply female denigration can shape the lives and emotions of children and adults who do not conform to traditional gender expectations. The vast majority of childhood bullying stems from variations of gender policing, in the form of homophobia, transphobia, and sexist harassment.

trans activist Julia Serano

most of the anti-trans sentiment that I have had to deal with is probably better described as misogyny.”

We look away from girls’ anger and collude in the systems that erode their sense of worth; then we turn around and wonder what it is about their “nature” that makes them so lacking in confidence as women.

The first response to a girl’s being angry might be someone taking a picture or filming a video of her expressing her anger. An angry little girl is “cute” and “sassy,”

Teenage girls who express anger or frustration are less cute. If they are dusky and dark, they are less cute and become “uppity.”

Teenage girls are spoiled, silly, or moody for standing up for themselves. Older women, fed up and saying so, are bitter castrators. Angry women are butches, lesbians, and man haters. We are called Sad Asian Girls, Hot-tempered Latinas, Crazy White Women, and Angry Black Women. It goes without saying that “angry women” are “ugly women,” the cardinal sin in a world where women’s worth, safety, and glory are reliant on their sexual and reproductive value to men around them.

“preemptive self-condemnation,” and it’s common in women when they are angry. I was sensitive to how poorly my anger might be received, so I set about using some well-developed alternatives.

At six and seven, 65 percent of boys believe that boys and men are “really, really smart,” while only 48 percent of girls think girls and women are.

Throughout adolescence, boys retain the sense that they are exceptional and competent, despite the fact that girls outpace them in grade point average and college ambitions.

they are less likely to run for student government or to support other girls, particularly white girls, who do.

the importance of understanding anger and aggression, demonstrating how girls—operating in a vacuum of information about their negative emotions—channel their anger and aggression covertly, resorting to gossiping and spreading untruths about others, for example. Girls also police themselves to avoid the negative judgment of other girls.

pecking order,

Marginalized and minority girls express anger more freely and demonstrate a more developed sense of how and when to use anger consciously.

By adolescence, most girls know that overt displays of anger threaten their safety and success. They understand their anger puts status, likeability, and relationships at risk.

working-class and black girls,

Before accusations of “angry black women” are used to stereotype, silence, and police women, they are used to penalize girls for “talking back,” “being belligerent,” and “having too much attitude.”

Starting in early childhood, adults see black girls as less innocent or less in need of nurturing or protection.

In school environments like these, many girls go out of their way to be “good” and to avoid expressing anger under any circumstances,

Latina girls are more likely to face dismissal when they “act out.”

they are listening to us through stereotypes that paint us as hot-blooded and explosive.”

“We are socialized to understand that we can’t express anger, but that it’s okay to cry.

Girls of Asian descent

are more often to encounter the expectation that they will “naturally” be quiet and agreeable.

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

A distancing from emotions like this is necessary to maintain standards of femininity built around relative helplessness, vulnerability, sadness, thinness, and passivity as dominant norms. This is also an ideal of femininity that can be easily weaponized. The need to protect white women, portrayed as frail, innocent, and defenseless, is a centuries-old justification for terroristic racist violence.