Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

After looking at pictures of other women in sexually revealing clothes, women report higher levels of aggression, anger, body dissatisfaction, and sadness. Not only do women feel strong negative emotions and unhappiness with their bodies, but also they report feeling less able, effective, and competent. More than half of girls who have low esteem and body confidence are markedly less likely to assert themselves.

Women and girls experience anxiety, depression, self-harm, eating disorders, a desire for body modification, and sexual dysfunction at substantially higher rates than boys and men do.

People with eating disorders also record high levels of self-silencing, as well as a markedly high propensity to prioritize the needs of others over their own feelings.

Roughly one in three to two in three teenage girls, depending on the study, report using laxatives and pills, or fasting and dieting, to control their weight.

adulthood, half of all women say they have used laxatives to meet “quick weight loss” goals, even though almost 60 percent said they knew it was “bad for my health.” Women who are angry or sad also eat impulsively more often than men do.

Social discrimination hasn’t been related to eating disorders that are emaciating as frequently as it has be...

obesity can also frequently be a stress response t...

African American girls and women have particularly high...

girls are more than three times as likely to hurt themselves deliberately than boys are.

Girls think about killing themselves almost twice as frequently as boys do, but boys have traditionally used more dangerous and lethal methods, succeeding at four to five times the rate of girls. US

many girls and women feel inferior and insufficient. Those feelings drive distress.

women are consumed by feelings of inadequacy, and many exhaust their mental resources being aware of how they look at all times. Women are prone to what’s called imposter syndrome,

Whereas 7 percent to 20 percent of the general population report anxiety and depression, almost 50 percent of gender-nonconforming people do.

Women feel shame more than men, who are more inclined to say they feel guilt. Guilt is the response of a person who feels he had some control but failed to exercise it properly. Shame, on the other hand, reflects no expectation of control. It is a feeling that you, your essence and being, are wrong.

Shame infuses women’s most intimate experiences, from menstruation to sex. Women who internalize objectified ideas about their bodies often feel intense disgust with bodily functions—even pregnancy. Objectification and self-surveillance also put women at higher risk of sexual dysfunction. Rather than enjoying sex or engaging with their partners to ensure sexual satisfaction, women, distracted by what their bodies smell, feel, and look like, become unable to think about their own pleasure.

abated

In 2015, news outlets announced a plastic surgery that promised to fix women with “resting angry face,” popularly known as Resting Bitch Face.

The belief that women should be babyish and childlike means that women physically infantilize themselves.

Looking perennially young means not looking as though we have successfully weathered life in such a way that we might have authority or have developed expertise, wisdom, and skills that are of value to us or to the people around us.

According to a recent study in the journal of Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, the more time and money a woman spends on grooming, the higher her salary at work, regardless of how well she rates on job performance.

Researchers speculate that women who use makeup signal that they are responsive to social norms, gender stereotypes, and society’s greater propensity to police women’s behavior, “in ways that keep women distracted from really achieving power.”

anxiety, depression, and concerns about weight and appearance tend to cluster around puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause, and menopause. These stage-of-life changes, we never cease to be reminded, involve hormones, but they are all also times in which girls and women find themselves in the crosshairs of objectification, social inequality, and, often, intense and unacknowledged anger. Therapeutic approaches to managing emotional distress focus mainly on “fixing” the individual through behavior modification rather than addressing considerations of anger and power.

what is pleasing and instills a sense of control in girls and women isn’t sexualization, but the power it brings.

Studies show that the positive emotions experienced by women who self-sexualize in social media, for example, are not actually correlated to the degree of self-sexualization but to a specific motivation: being admired, attracting attention—the likes and followers of social media. Those are symbols of influence and status. That is a far more accurate reflection of what women are reporting, as is the fact that sexualization remains the most available, albeit very narrow, path to power for girls.

Women don’t own the media and marketing companies that profit from their images, and they don’t lead the religious and educational institutions that dictate what constitutes obscenity—currently considered inherent in women’s naked bodies.

Men can opt out of sexualization if they choose, but women, given history, have few options.

increasingly degrading depiction of women.”

In porn, as elsewhere, women appear as “flavors,” a riff on our consumability.

driven by demand, mainly heterosexual men’s demand.

Studies reveal that after watching mainstream porn, men and women both are more likely to express adversarial beliefs about sex and gender, express negative opinions about the impact of sexual harassment, be more accepting of interpersonal violence, and are demonstrably less likely to support policies and programs designed to meet women’s needs.

college-aged women, those who are aware of former partners’ pornography usage exhibit higher rates of self-objectification, as wel...

a particular logic of much of contemporary pornography, the heterosexual male sexual entitlement and the denial of women’s experiences required to fulfill that entitlement.

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Problematic Situation

In the end, I did what most women not only do but also are encouraged to do: live with the pain and discomfort.

As with anger, women report feeling pain in more sustained ways—more acutely and more frequently, including following medical procedures—than men do. As with anger, women’s pain is frequently minimized and ignored. As with anger, gender roles, and often racial stereotypes, shape pain.

for men, stoicism is expected in the face of pain that might be experienced sporadically.

women, socialized to be more expressive in general, are more likely to talk about their pain.

Men who scored high in traditional, binary gender beliefs demonstrated higher pain tolerance when in the presence of women dressed in ways that emphasize their femininity. Pain tolerance was highest in men who were told that women are more tolerant of pain.

when we have anger, we respond, often unconsciously, with physical pain. Unaddressed anger affects our neurological, hormonal, adrenal, and vascular systems in ways that are still largely ignored in the treatment of pain. It’s hard to overstate what this means in terms of women’s health.

When a man and a woman use the same curse words, however, the woman’s words are considered more offensive.

Byrne posits that gendered approval and disapproval of swearing is based on social understandings of “male power and female purity.” When women curse they tilt toward the “impure,” and, in essence, are tacitly assumed to deserve punishment.

women who curse when in pain, however, are less well cared for by those around them.

somatization, in which a mental state such as anxiety—or anger—expresses itself physically, despite there being no evidence of a known medical condition.

Anger releases specific stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol,

long-term elevated adrenaline and cortisol are distinctly unhealthy. Cortisol results in increased blood sugars (glucose), affects the immune system, alters digestion, and influences growth and the reproductive system.

Women who repress their anger are twice as likely to die from heart-related disease.

Two hours after a vitriolic outburst, the risk of a heart attack increases fivefold,

even remembering an angry experience results in a decline in antibodies,

within three to four days of an anger incident, people are more likely to develop the common cold.

follow-up to a landmark 1989 study on this topic found that the survival rate for women with breast cancer who expressed their anger was twice that of women who kept their anger to themselves.