Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

“missing white woman syndrome,” an almost fetishistic fascination with violent stranger dangers to white girls and women at the expen...

Gossip, quiet exclusion, slights, and innuendo, for example, are familiar to us all. They are also passive-aggressive behaviors associated mainly with girls and women.

Being indirectly aggressive is one way that many women navigate strong negative emotions and competition in the face of social prohibitions on displaying them more openly. It is also a way to regulate group behavior. A girl or a woman who is brazenly ambitious, “too popular,” or “winning”—gender transgressions—can find herself on the receiving end of gossip, exclusion, and bullying both online and offline.

Anger is an emotion, but assertiveness and aggression are behaviors.

Aggression is more hostile than assertion: the former suggesting less care for another’s needs or perspectives, the latter being a clear display of need expressed within understood constraints and norms of behavior.

having to control oneself in situations that often generate a sense of risk or threat, is a skill that sometimes results in women being described as “manipulative” and “deceptive.”

The popular understanding of this relationship is that testosterone causes aggression and anger, and that because boys and men produce far more testosterone than women do—indeed, it is the male sex hormone—they are more prone to aggressive, angry behavior.

while testosterone results in more aggression (not anger), acting aggressively, in turn, spurs the body to release more testosterone into the bloodstream.

The most influential quality affecting testosterone production was what van Anders and her associates labelled “wielding power.” Firing a person increased testosterone in men by 3 to 4 percent. In women it generated a 10 percent increase.

We live in a culture that grinds their pride and confidence in being girls into a fine pulp and then blows it back in their faces. They acutely feel the very real disparate impact of limitations on their physical freedom and behavior. Feelings of anger become enmeshed in ideas about being “good,” and about beauty, bodies, food, relationships, and power.

When asked what triggers their feelings of anger and aggression, most girls cite some form of social inequality, experienced in varying degrees, as a significant factor. They are also aware, even when very young, that their feelings of anger will face adult resistance and peer sanction. A feedback loop exists between self-esteem, anger, and how a community responds to a person’s needs.

The more that youngsters believed in meritocracy, the more they grappled to come to terms with their own experiences of inequality, and the more they began to lose faith in themselves.

As girls approach puberty and silence their anger, many exhibit the troubling and risky behaviors found in the study,

Bullying spikes during this period, as girls increasingly turn to aggression,

Hispanic girls report slightly higher self-esteem than white girls do,

Girls of Asian descent have the lowest recorded self-esteem and one of the largest gaps between the sexes, a gap that may be tied to cultural orientation toward communalism

Black children in the United States exhibit a different pattern. They are much more likely to report high self-esteem and have the smallest gender gap. By twelfth grade, African American students are the only subg...

fewer than 50 percent of white women strongly agree with the statement, “I see myself as someone who has high self-esteem,” comp...

What matters appears to be parental support for a girl’s staying true, first and foremost, to herself, and community honesty about discrimination and building resilience to that discrimination. Furthermore, black children are able to look up to black women, as mothers, valued members of extended families, and leaders of...

black mothers, studies show, are less likely to socialize their daughters to be subservient to the powers that be.

Anger remains the emotion that is least acceptable for girls and women because it is the first line of defense against injustice. Believing that you have the right to use your anger with power reflects multiple, overlapping social entitlements.

When we are taught that our anger is undesirable, selfish, powerless, and ugly, we learn that we are undesirable, selfish, powerless, and ugly.

When we call our anger sadness instead of anger, we often fail to acknowledge what is wrong, specifically in a way that discourages us from imagining and pursuing change. Sadness, as an emotion, is paired with acceptance. Anger, on the other hand, invokes the possibility of change and of fighting back.

cell phone photos of girls are more valuable currency. Boys use them for cred.

Some boys collect photos of girls like playing cards, assigning value to each image. Essentially, girls are treated as sex objects and punished for doing what is expected of them.”

The young man’s choice of a toaster was fascinating. He equated the woman in the photograph with an actual tool, perceiving both in terms of their instrumentality. They were inert, possessions to be used, and lacking in self-determination.

Stymied

No one brought up the woman’s potential emotional response, consent, privacy, or agency. The entire conversation centered around the man’s property rights

Insults are the most common provocation for anger because, whether we think about this or not, they generate social imbalances.

The relationship between “woman” and “dignity” and “rights” is far weaker than that between “man” and “property” and “free speech.”

Being indignant is a powerful emotional response to insults and to threats against dignity. It is a specific kind of anger rooted in believing that you are being treated unfairly.

A precondition for indignation is a secure sense of your worth and an equally strong sense that some valuable standard or norm has been violated. Subjecting someone to indignity involves making a person feel shame or a loss of self-respect. It’s the core of humiliation, embarrassment, and loss of face as well as pride. It is the bleeding edge of dehumanization and violence.

When your ability to gauge insult is worn away by learning to see yourself mainly in terms of usefulness to others, there is no expectation. No expectation means no violatio...

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Our bodies are used to market everything from toys and clothing, to food and games. Women pose as tables for people to eat off of, chairs for people to sit on, and bicycles for people to ride. And that’s all before the mindlessly sexist and racist fetishizing of mainstream pornography, which in its most popular forms frequently eroticizes violence. Often women’s bodies appear with no heads. No head, no brain. No head, no mouth. No brain, no mouth, no objections.

Almost 35 percent of five-year-old girls restrict their food intake,

More than half of young girls think they are too fat,

the girls surveyed believed, in a meaningful connection, that showing anger actually made them ugly; therefore, when they felt angry, they responded, unconsciously, by doing things like not eating dinner and throwing out snacks and school lunches. The association between being angry and ugly becomes tesselated into wanting to be liked and therefore more attractive, or, the opposite of ugly, “pretty.”

Film and television programming studies show that girls and women are up to five times more likely to have their appearances remarked upon.

55 percent of girls reported that because of their gender they could not speak freely.

The four children were physically indistinguishable, physically active on a hot beach. When I made no move toward shielding her son from the girls’ scary, tempting, and corrupting bodies, she pulled him out of the water by the arm.

sexual entitlement. Which is, at its heart, what schools are justifying by prioritizing the perspectives of straight boys.

Girls and women with any number of concurrent marginal identities are harassed more frequently.

women’s humanity, taken seriously, that is the problem because it reminds us of birth, death, and decay. Our physicality—the leaking, bleeding,

Self-objectification and -surveillance become mechanisms of vigilance as we think about how we appear to others, how we compare to other women, and how we compare to images of idealized beauty. Both are linked to higher rates of suppressed anger, self-silencing,

Women’s unhappiness, disgust, anger, and shame about their own bodies is so universal that researchers refer to these feelings collectively as “normative discontent.”

For many men, just seeing a woman in a sexually objectifying pose, such as in a bikini, deactivates the part of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain where thinking about people and their intentions, feelings, and actions happens. Instead, the region of the brain that lights up on imaging scans, for example positron emission tomography (PET), is the one that reacts to looking at inanimate objects, such as a pen or a ball. In what researcher Susan Fiske

after viewing sexually objectified women, men are more inclined to use gendered slurs such as ho, bitch, slut, and cunt to describe women.

Girls’ and women’s thinking is impaired by self-objectification. Sexualized pictures, for example, lead women to spend mental resources managing their body surveillance, shame, and self-esteem. Additionally, when a person is aware that she is part of a stigmatized group—a category that sexualized women fall into despite protests to the contrary—she grows anxious about confirming negative images about that group but ends up doing exactly that!