Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

loiters

Then ask her why. We are taught to fear rape but not to question its pervasive threat or doubt how “natural” it is or isn’t.

“victimhood,” reject. Every woman has a rape story, whether she has been sexually assaulted or not.

woman’s chance of being sexually assaulted in her lifetime is one in five. For men, it’s one in seventy-seven. Assaults of male victims, even more underreported than those of women and girls, take place primarily before adulthood.

more than 80 percent of juvenile victims are girls, while 90 percent of adult survivors are women. Perpetrators are overwhelmingly male. Three-fourths of rape victims know their assailants.

The role that structural discrimination plays in sexual violence is evident in patterns of rape.

“Many girls who experience sexual abuse are routed into the juvenile justice system because of their victimization,” concluded a 2016 report. “Indeed, sexual abuse is one of the primary predictors of girls’ entry into the juvenile justice system.”

rape is a problem in families: 43 percent of all reported sexual assaults happen before victims are seventeen, which means that a significant number of them involve incest.

What makes a rape “legitimate” in the eyes of conservatives?

Mainly, it is some throwback idea tied to notions of property violation or a moral infraction on the part of the victim.

there is no law giving rapists the right to rape, but fewer than 3 percent of rapists, the overwhelming majority of whom are men, are ever prosecuted and imprisoned. More than half of US states allow rapis...

rape is perpetrated, regardless of who is assaulted, overwhelmingly by men and adjudicated in places where men hold far more power.

Ask a man what his greatest fear is about serving jail time, and he will almost inevitably say he fears being raped. What can we deduce from the fact that jail is to men what life is to so many women?

It is much harder for people to ignore allegations of rape when they involve children, particularly boys, or involve men as victims, such as in the military.

Most college students surveyed, for example, believe that up to 50 percent of women lie about being raped.

studies, conducted across multiple countries, consistently finding that the incidence of false rape claims ranges from just 2 percent to 8 percent,

any other crime. This myth is one of the more powerful inhibitors of making meaningful change to prevent and reduce rape.

“staying safe” rules for girls, precautions that routinely limit freedom of movement and expression, that are based on stranger danger beliefs, even though almost 80 percent of victims know their rapists a...

“You don’t need any foreplay with a dead girl.”

35 percent of women said they’d experienced physical, verbal, or other types of sexual abuse on public transportation.

over the world, sexual violence often seems to be treated, in public as well as in courts, as a matter of opinion and bad behavior, instead of profound violation that has a terroristic effect.

He was not threatening, but he was using his position as a police officer in a way that crossed a line.

the officers, three women and a man, stripped off her pants and, spreading open her legs as they flashed a light into her genitals to search for marijuana, “penetrated her vagina.”

Sexual misconduct is the second most common type of police misconduct in the United States. Sometimes it spills over into gross perpetration. Women of color, trans women, sex workers, and immigrant women, already more vulnerable to violence, are subject to constant overpolicing that almost always itself carries the threat of violence.

He identified vulnerable targets, many of whom had criminal records, so their credibility was called into question more easily.

incidence of intimate-partner violence among police families at two to four times the national average. Officers have access to national databases, making abuse of spouses easier and escape infinitely more difficult. They also have guns. They are able to track women’s movements,

Women also understand, intimately, the power of fraternal orders to protect their own if reports are made.

At least one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused during her lifetime, overwhelmingly by men they are related to,

were killed in Sutherland Springs, Texas—were committed by estranged husbands enraged that their wives had chosen to end their marriages.

According to the World Health Organization, more than two hundred million girls and women live with the lifelong and often painfully debilitating effects of female genital mutilation.

In militarized and war zones, civilian women are automatically made into combatants by the simple fact that men weaponize their bodies. Rape, even when women are involved as perpetrators or men as victims, degrades victims by feminizing them through penetration and is meant to degrade men by violating what is “theirs.”

In fiction, however, these treatments of women and their bodies fill our screens and make millions of dollars in profit. Entire franchises are built around violence against women as entertainment.

pummeling

like many others, knew that by targeting the people least valued in society—runaways, drug addicts, black women who were trafficked or were sex workers—he could easily fly under the radar.

In the wake of a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris, assaults of Muslim girls and women in the United Kingdom made up the vast majority of the 300 percent spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes and yet governments and the media continue to ignore the impact of gender when categorizing hate.

Violence against men is “torture” and “political” because, she explains, it is about when “men control and hurt other men—meaning persons who are deserving of dignity and power.” We are supposed to accept that gender-based violence, a violence that inhibits women every day, is not political in its intent or effect.

Teaching girls to “stay safe” early in life, while simultaneously discouraging anger and aggression and cultivating physical fragility, all contribute to the association of weakness and fearfulness with femininity.

Studies show that fear differentials between men and women regulate our expressions of anger. When women display anger, men are more likely to respond with anger, but when men show anger, women respond with fear.

“Why didn’t she fight back?” “Why didn’t she say ‘no’?” “Why didn’t she just leave?” In the face of threat, we often learn that the “normal” physiological response is fight-or-flight.

Men’s bodies release the chemicals norepinephrine and cortisol, which prompt fight-or-flight behaviors. Women, too, experience faster pulses and elevated blood pressure, but their bodies, instead, produce two different chemicals: endorphins and oxytocin, which lead to “tend-and-befriend” behaviors. Women become more affiliative and appear to be friendly. “Fight or flight” is the “normal” response . . . if you are a man, yet it is the standard to which women are held.

Gender is also a factor: people who identify with feminine gender roles are also more attuned to facial expressions and also feel fearful more often.

Simply “leaving” or “walking away” is often not a rational option. When we feel fear, or anger, or a combination of both, we often freeze, act confused, and stop talking in order to think.

Giggling is sublimation. Laughing is a path to survival. And if smiling and laughter are not options, we cry: a self-silencing deferral that is often misinterpreted as weakness.

Feminine anger is particularly difficult in more conventional frameworks because the expression of anger itself is conceived as a failure to be a “good” woman.

When couples enrolled in the study fought, women were consistently scared that men’s anger would spiral into physical assault. Men did not have the same fear in terms of women’s anger. “Your abusive partner doesn’t have a problem with his anger,” writes Lundy Bancroft, an expert in the dynamics of power and control at the heart of domestic abuse. “He has a problem with your anger.”

male abusers are able to leverage the threat of physical violence and the fear it elicits to engage in emotional abuse.

Women who are disadvantaged by bias, street harassment, and sexual harassment in the workplace, are more vulnerable to intimate violence at home. Financial dependence is a near constant issue for women victims of domestic violence who must be able to secure, at the very least, housing if they leave, particularly with children.

Stand Your Ground law, which protects homeowners who defend themselves against an attack in their own homes,

When men abuse children, women, who are often themselves victim, are sometimes prosecuted for not sufficiently protecting their children from a violent partner.

men who kill women family members and found that they receive shorter prison sentences compared with men who kill strangers. She calls this an “intimacy discount.” Reasons why this is the case include the notion that men are provoked into spontaneous violence, a “crime of passion” defense.