Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

Any woman interested in her own equality would do well to avoid men and institutions that claim to want nothing more than to protect her.

As women, we are continuously told to live in the cracks of a world shaped by and for men, without complaining or demanding.

There is really no such thing as the “voiceless.” There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

The “miscommunication model”—the idea that men and women simply don’t understand each other—is a bankrupt one. The problem isn’t that some people don’t understand. It is that they understand too well, and what they understand is that they can get away with predatory abuse.

While everyone can encounter harassment online, the harassment that women face is more intense, more sexualized, and tied to higher levels of offline threat and violence.

In our society, women are not allowed to express feelings without being characterized as hysterical, erratic, highly emotional, or overly sensitive.

People who deny sexism will always be more hostile to your anger than to what is actually causing your anger.

Women are not in competition with other women for their human rights. My rights are not relative to another woman’s pain and vulnerability. They should not be contingent on affiliative male status.

In one of the only studies I found about what women dread most in response to their anger when they express it in a close relationship, women did not say violence, harm to their connection, or retaliatory anger. They said what they dreaded and anticipated the most was being mocked.

While women are aware of their anger and more comfortable expressing emotions, they are also aware—particularly in interpersonal contexts—that their anger might have very little traction.

the greatest predictor of a nation’s peacefulness and security is the way that girls are treated in their own homes.

That’s what I want: to hear you erupting. You . . . who don’t know the power in you. —Ursula K. Le Guin

“What to do? What to do with all this rage?” I kept asking myself.

For women, assertiveness and aggression, like anger, can be conflicting, because they suggest a woman’s lack of interest in yielding. To doing what she is told. And women are supposed to yield.

Being porous to other people’s needs will almost always exhaust and anger you.

Forgive nothing until you are good and ready to, especially if there has been no indication that the behavior causing you distress has changed.

therapy is not automatically beneficial to women. The field has a long history of enforcing, rather than challenging, the status quo inequities that cause us so much harm.

“By writing,” she explained, “I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger . . .

Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth. Anger is the demand of accountability. It is evaluation, judgment, and refutation. It is reflective, visionary, and participatory. It’s a speech act, a social statement, an intention, and a purpose. It’s a risk and a threat. A confirmation and a wish. It is both powerlessness and power, palliative and a provocation. In anger, you will find both ferocity and comfort, vulnerability and hurt. Anger is the expression of hope.