Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

Women who are more expressive are also more assertive—and therefore more likely to research their treatment options and to follow their physicians’ recommendations, and so on.

People with incomes below the poverty line are two times more likely to be living with chronic pain and three to five times more likely to experience regular extreme pain and mental distress. People with so-called anger issues are also at higher risk for substance abuse.

systemic discrimination generates health inequalities.

Ruminating and catastrophizing, as previously discussed, more cultivated and common in women,

linked the tendency to ruminate and catastrophize to an increased likelihood of taking prescribed opioid analgesics.

When a woman says she’s in pain, the person listening to her might respond in any number of ways. Ideally, the person would offer solace or, if in position to, solutions. However, he or she might also laugh at her; or tell her no, she’s actually not in pain; or say the pain isn’t “real”; or describe ways that it’s all in her head; or suggest that she’s too pretty to be in pain; or explain that pain is “just part of being a woman.”

Studies in implicit bias consistently show that most people, including, importantly, medical professionals of all genders and ethnicities, have a difficult time taking women’s pain seriously.

Men are also sent to intensive care units more quickly and frequently. Medical professionals spend more time with male patients than with female patients who have the exact same symptoms.

Heart disease is now the primary killer of women in the United States, yet women are twice as likely to die from heart-related ailments as a result of dismissal and misunderstanding of their pain and symptoms.

In the United States, the medical profession has an ugly history of using black bodies for brutalizing scientific experiments, based on the belief that black people can’t feel pain.

J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology.”

His expertise and fame were gained at the expense of enslaved black women on whom he performed experimental surgeries without anesthesia.

Sexist and racist stereotypes about melodramatic women and pain immunity not only affect perceptions but also behavior—including that of women. Many women internalize the same stereotypes and, not wanting to be seen as angry, hysterical, and demanding, opt for unhealthy and risky stoicism. They second-guess themselves, delaying care and discounting symptoms.

This bias, a symptom of broader cultural androcentrism (male-centeredness), reaches a particular peak in the case of menstruation. The assumption that period pain is not “real,” “bad,” or debilitating is reflected in the near complete absence of serious research about it at all.

Period and period-pain stigma go hand in hand. Forty-three percent of women who participated in a 2017 Australian survey reported that they lie about period pain and, when it was bad enough to affect their work, provided another reason for being “sick.”

Among the more insidious stereotypes surrounding pain is that an attractive and, usually, young, woman can’t possibly be sick. Her pain, when she says she has it, must be some sort of exaggerated delusion.

the “beautiful is healthy” problem requires that a woman provide her own medical evidence and signs of disability for doctors to believe them. “Attractiveness, a contextual variable unrelated to the pain experience,” researchers have concluded, “exerts an even stronger effect when there is less objective information available.”

“You can’t be too sick because you have makeup on,” and “You are not in your sweatpants,” and “You are too pretty to have so many problems.” Three-quarters were told at least once by a doctor that nothing could be done to alleviate the physical hurt for which they sought treatment. Fifty-seven percent were told, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

studies show that people reflexively recognize pain when a man’s face reflects it but not when a woman’s does.

men in pain were given pain relief medication, but women were given sedatives. Sedatives aren’t pain relievers, or analgesics. They’re calming and dulling agents that “take the edge off.”

A sedated patient is quiet and docile, not angry or demanding.

take concrete steps to ensure that busy staff aren’t defaulting to male anatomy, something that continues to happen in possibly life-threatening cases.

Research has shown that a person’s degree of expressed anger singularly explains the success of pain-mitigating interventions. People who articulate their emotions and in a way that “makes meaning” out of strong negative feelings of anger and resentment, are better able to adjust to pain. In particular, research has found that writing about emotions in a way that makes sense of them can result in significant improvements in pain relief.

Clinicians now understand anger as a mediator between the perception of injustice and the intensity of pain. People who perceive injustice experience greater pain, both mental and physical, and those who experience the most chronic pain have the highest rates of inhibited anger and depression.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” Parks explained once, “but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

for many girls and women today, the term “angry woman” was an oxymoron or even an insult. An angry mother and wife was even more transgressive. What kind of woman resents taking care of the people around her? How selfish is a woman who has her own desires and, worse, puts her own interests first sometimes? Not a “good” one.

Even though most women work, and work for pay, regardless of marital status or sexual orientation, they continue to carry the burden of responsibilities for chores, child care, elder care, and emotional labor—both

anodyne,

Women describe being under constant, intense stress as the result of workplace hostility and disproportionate responsibility for caring.

housework and care continue to be done mainly by women. On a typical day in the United States, 85 percent of women do housework, cooking, home maintenance, or care work related to health or finances, compared with 67 percent of men. Married mothers do almost three and a half times as much “core housework”—cooking, cleaning, child care—as married fathers do.

women, on average, spend two hours more on unpaid work per week, whereas men, on average, have two more hours of full-time paid work and leisure.

men engage in relaxing and entertaining activities 35 percent of the time that women are doing chores.

fathers engage in leisure 47 percent of the time that mothers are taking care of kids.

women have five hours less leisure time a week than men do.

since 2000, men’s downtime has increased, while women’s has shrunk.

In Ireland, Italy, and Portugal, women do 70 percent. Italian women continue to do more work than women in other European countries.

women should take responsibility for children’s emotional and physical needs. Respondents assigned men to one primary child-related task: discipline.

This is true even in same-sex couples, where the partner who is considered more “feminine” does more unpaid work.

people surveyed believed that women in straight couples should be responsible for the inside of the home, and almost 90 percent thought men should take care of the outside, such as auto maintenance and yard work.

Two-thirds of cooking for families is done by women.

Child care is not only time-consuming and often time sensitive, but it has a higher stress quotient than maintenance work and isolated chores.

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global studies show that women, and girls, are consistently doing at least an average of two hours more unpaid domestic work a week. Many boys and men, trying to do their best and also feeling tremendous time pressure, believe instinctively that this information is wrong and that they do their “fair share.”

In one 2014 study (conducted in the United Kingdom by a large retailer), 30 percent of surveyed heterosexual men admitted to purposefully doing household work poorly so that their partners would stop asking and do the work themselves.

African American couples, married or not, are less gender polarized

African American fathers spend the most time on child care, followed by white fathers and then Hispanic fathers. In lesbian families, egalitarian divisions of labor are prioritized consciously.

gay and lesbian couples do: more likely to explicitly discuss child care, elder care, domestic care, emotional labor, and the needs of professional life instead of defaulting to women, or more-feminine people, taking on the bulk of the work.

heterosexual couples have higher levels of stress, greater sensitivity to insult, and less ability to use humor to enhance their relationships. They demonstrate more hostility toward each other, including using tactics of interpersonal control and domination.

Two-thirds of the people taking care of rapidly aging populations are women, specifically daughters.