Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

Gender gaps in time are even wider than statistics suggest because women take on emotional labor. Whether a woman is parenting, spousing, caring for elders, working for or without pay, she is still expected to think about, if not actually do, care work, and to be content while doing it,

As children, we learn that the realm of “feelings” is feminine, so it is easy for men and boys to fall into a habit of outsourcing relationships, social networking, and the emotional work that comes with them.

subsumes

Faking orgasms, which up to 80 percent of women say they do, is a good example of how the belief that men are owed nurturing, emotional protection, and niceness from women plays out in intimate ways.

Women say that they fake orgasms primarily to protect the feelings and egos of their male partners.

“A casual survey of forums where people discuss ‘bad sex’ suggests that men tend to use the term to describe a passive partner or a boring experience . . . But,” she goes on to say, “when most women talk about ‘bad sex,’ they tend to mean coercion, or emotional discomfort, or, even more commonly, physical pain.”

Five times as many clinical trials have been conducted on the topic of male sexual pleasure, such as for erectile dysfunction, as on female sexual pain.

Starting at a young age, girls around the world do roughly 30 percent more unpaid work than their brothers. That percentage is 50 percent by adolescence.

There’s also a wage gap. Boys are 10 percent more likely to be paid for their time and effort at home.

Because boys’ work is more likely to be compensated and more profitable, they save more.

implicitly associating wage earning and financial acumen with masculinity, also give boys credit cards and talk to them about finances more regularly.

Girls can play doctor, and boys can “cook,” but studies show that even young children feel already that they are crossing established and definitively marketed gender lines.

What girls are doing when they mother dolls is modelling nurturing behavior and unpaid care work.

half of boys ages five through thirteen picked “girl” and “boy” toys equally—until they thought they were being watched. They were especially concerned about what their fathers would think

platitudes.

we are supposed to care in ways that do not infringe on men’s ambitions, success, or earning potential.

The caring mandate is implicit in the pressure on girls and women—tacit or overt—to define themselves relationally.

Americans think that women should take their husbands’ names, and more than half believe it should be enforced legally.

women report feeling and expressing anger more in the context of domestic life and intimate relationships than in other arenas,

When asked what makes them angry or depressed in intimate relationships, women’s most common responses—including betrayal, condescension, and unwarranted criticism—cluster around men’s negative behaviors. Men, on the other hand, report getting angry at women’s negative responses to those behaviors, describing them as women’s “self-focused behavior.”

women initiate 69 percent of divorces, compared with men’s 31 percent.

Unreformed, marriage, explains sociologist Lisa Wade, is “a moment of subordination for women more so than men, [because women] subordinate themselves and their careers to their relationship, their children, and the careers of their husbands.” Single, childless women are the only women who report that they have the time and freedom to pursue interests, ambitions, and hobbies at the same rate as married heterosexual men do. After divorces, men are twice as likely to remarry, whereas women are less likely to want to remarry.

Just because men don’t think they enjoy higher status does not mean that they don’t enjoy higher status. The anger that men report aligns with the emotional responses that people with higher status feel when they perceive insubordination.

Feminism isn’t ruining marriage—sexism and the persistent expectation of masculine entitlements are.

The addition of children to a relationship generates even more traditional attitudes. Today 40 percent of millennials are parents, and, as parents, many hold neotraditionalist views of gender. Among millennial men without children, 35 percent believe women should “take care of the home and children,” a nine-point increase above Gen Xers and a fourteen-point jump above men older than forty-five.

Before or after having children, women assert consistently that their spouses will be equally responsible.

commensurate

one study they conducted reported 77 percent of men doing no daily housework compared to more than half (55 percent) of women. Men do one-third the amount of work of what women do at home.

men whose wives earned more did even less than those whose wives did not. This behavior was not a reflection of relative income but of a woman’s high-earning status.

Choice feminism, which posits that decisions women make are feminist simply because women are making them, researchers believe, also enables women to adopt homemaker roles more readily than their mothers did.

“Caregiver syndrome” is a term used to name the stress women feel.

“caregiver stress,” is actually “debt stress.” But because money = men in the cultural imagination, this connection is often ignored in considerations of care.

Regardless of age, most people report that worrying about money is their biggest cause of stress. Care is expensive, so care often comes down to money. No one wants to think of caring in monetized terms because attaching actual money to care sullies our gender ideals. But all caring is monetized, and for women, negatively so, particularly in consideration of long-term financial security.

despite women’s academic successes and legal victories, the top job for women in the United States was what it was in 1950: secretary/administrative assistant. It was followed closely by two other “maternal” jobs: teacher and nurse. Women compose the majority of low-wage service workers, workers in the food service industries, and sex workers.

The work that nurses and teachers do is hard, stressful, and undervalued specifically because it is women’s work.

efface

emotional labor to describe the work done by people who have to express emotions they don’t truly feel while suppressing those they do.

“no-nonsense” woman is “cold,” “bitchy,” and disliked. If she expresses frustration or anger at being treated unfairly, or even asks for help, she is considered less competent and less deserving of pay or reward.

men, people understand anger as a response to a provocation, but in women, it is seen as an unpleasant characteristic, as in “She is an angry woman.”

The more “feminized” a job, the less people will pay for someone to do

when women migrate into a field, median salaries drop.

employers distrust women when they ask for workplace flexibility. “Women employees are suspected of divided loyalties between home and work and seen as more likely to use time off for personal, rather than career, reasons—no

status and reason made no difference in the strength of the gender difference, which shows you how strong the distrust of women workers actually is among ordinary managers.”

is “more important for men,” whom, he added, “may be a little more money conscious.”

Women’s unpaid and undervalued care work stands as the single greatest wealth transfer in today’s global economy. Without this provision of care, markets would crash, economies would grind to a halt, and men could not continue to dominate entire job sectors and institutional hierarchies.

However, while masculinity brings with it its own costs, the assumption of feminized and largely unpaid care is a very specific tax on women and their families. Within like groups, men’s ability to work full-time, uninterrupted and for higher wages, is greater and, significantly, made so by women “not working” and providing them with unpaid care resources.

No one wants to acknowledge that taking care of the people we love sometimes makes us angry. We don’t want to as individuals, because of guilt, and we don’t want to as a society, because the entire economy depends on women’s assuming this responsibility for this work without complaint and for no wages or little to no institutional benefits.

when women and men have equal incomes, or in situations where women have higher incomes, gender gaps in depression were virtually eliminated.

a household with children leaves men’s sleep relatively unaffected but increases a woman’s risk of sleep interruption and deprivation by 46 percent.

anger and depressive symptoms have been described by sociologists as “the cost of caring” for women.