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In the United States, anger in white men is often portrayed as justifiable and patriotic, but in black men, as criminality; and in black women, as threat.
men more frequently associate feeling powerful with experiencing anger, but women, notably, associate powerlessness with their anger.
When a woman shows anger in institutional, political, and professional settings, she automatically violates gender norms. She is met with aversion, perceived as more hostile, irritable, less competent, and unlikeable—the kiss of death for a class of people expected to maintain social connections.
We go from being “cute princesses,” to “drama queens,” to “high-maintenance bitches.” Girls who object to unfairness or injustice are often teased and taunted. Adult women are described as oversensitive or exaggerating.
As women, we often have to bite our tongues, eat our words, and swallow our pride.
It took me too long to realize that the people most inclined to say “You sound angry” are the same people who uniformly don’t care to ask “Why?” They’re interested in silence, not dialogue.
Girls learn to smile early, and many cultures teach girls explicitly to “put on a pretty face.”
An angry little girl is “cute” and “sassy,” two of the most highly ranked adjacent terms to the words “angry girl” on Google. Teenage girls who express anger or frustration are less cute. If they are dusky and dark, they are less cute and become “uppity.”
Angry women are butches, lesbians, and man haters. We are called Sad Asian Girls, Hot-tempered Latinas, Crazy White Women, and Angry Black Women. It goes without saying that “angry women” are “ugly women,” the cardinal sin in a world where women’s worth, safety, and glory are reliant on their sexual and reproductive value to men around them. None of this leads us to think of anger as the moral or political property of women.
Anger is particularly treacherous. Any displays of emotions, vulnerability, and passivity—“traditional feminine” characteristics—signal weakness. But implicit-bias studies show that girls who are assertive, don’t hedge their speech, actively claim verbal space, and, yes, maybe say they are mad, are considered rude, confrontational, uncooperative, and transgressive by adults.
Before accusations of “angry black women” are used to stereotype, silence, and police women, they are used to penalize girls for “talking back,” “being belligerent,” and “having too much attitude.” These girls, labelled “angry” and “disruptive,” are often acting in ways that are indistinguishable from behaviors seen in young white boys as “rambunctiousness” and signs of “leadership potential.”
“We are socialized to understand that we can’t express anger, but that it’s okay to cry. When I saw emotion in women, it meant tears. I thought men could not biologically cry. Even crying, however, can be discouraged, leaving us with few ways to express what we feel.”
Women and girls are not supposed to be angry about pornography and its impacts, but women, when asked, report feeling anger about porn. They often keep it to themselves because to say so immediately turns a person into a prude and a scold.
expressing anger is disobedient and rebellious, powerful and threatening, because it is the seed of aggression and collective action.
The period pain that women have, for example, at work, is often either treated like a contagious disease or a minor irritation that women should shut up about.
How many times does a woman say, “I’m so tired,” because she cannot say, “I am so angry!”
Feminism isn’t ruining marriage—sexism and the persistent expectation of masculine entitlements are.
A “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. In 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
Sometimes we throw plates. What we should be throwing are people with retrograde ideas out of office.
In a standard ultrasound, we see a fetus, but no woman.
Many women don’t want to get pregnant, have babies, or be mothers, and for this, they are considered freakish, incomplete, unfeminine, and even ignorant about their “real” desires.
Women who make this decision have to deal with insensitive “jokes,” most hiding a genuine discomfort and hostility, about ticking clocks, being cat ladies, or not being “real” women.
Anger is one letter short of danger.
For the most part, girls’ and women’s experiences with harassment are still cloaked in silence, and we continue, as a global society, to peddle dangerous advice to girls about “staying safe.” This isn’t about safety. If it were, we’d teach boys, who are also subject to childhood molestation and risk, the same lessons, but we don’t. It’s about social control.
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?
Another is the insistence on “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 and are attacked in familiar places where they feel safe.
There is virtually no vital issue or topic (climate change, war, peace, authoritarianism, white supremacy, immigration, poverty, famine, refugee crises)—not one—in which women don’t have expertise and in which gender does not play a central and pivotal role. And yet men continue to sit in womenless rooms, confident that they can create lasting solutions to humanity’s most serious problems.
We learn to expect women to speak less, so when we talk, it always seems like we are talking too much. Women are supposed to be quieter and, when they speak, apologetic. Being closemouthed is a feminine quality.
Hands up if you think women aren’t storing up their anger at being told, in millions of small ways, that they should follow the rules, shut up, and be grateful for what they are given.
There is really no such thing as the “voiceless.” There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
WOMEN’S FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION? MEH.
I don’t get to express my feelings of fear or how tiring it is to be constantly vigilant. In our society, women are not allowed to express feelings without being characterized as hysterical, erratic, highly emotional, or overly sensitive. Our expression of insecurity, doubt, anger, or sadness are all policed and often used against us. By denying ourselves the space to feel and to share those feelings, we perpetuate this notion that we should suffer alone. That we should toughen up or grow a thicker skin, which we should not have to do.
“I am not a cool, chill girl anymore. I am a woman who is very angry and very tired. I know that that makes me unlikeable,”
“My daughter, my wife, my sister, my mother.” This defines women not by their rights or as individuals but as extensions of men and their rights. Women have a right to walk, go to school, look nice, and work unmolested by entitled bores, independent of their relationship to a man.
If there is a word that should be retired from use in the service of women’s expression, health, well-being, and equality, it is appropriate—a sloppy, mushy word that purports to convey some important moral essence but in reality is just a policing term used to regulate our language, appearance, and demands. It’s a control word. We are done with control.
Be brave enough to stop pleasing people, to be disliked, to rub people the wrong way. In many environments, all you have to do to be castigated as an angry woman is to say something out loud, so you might as well say exactly what’s bothering you and get on with it. This means that, usually, you have to come to terms with not always being liked. Your anger and assertiveness will make some people unhappy, uncomfortable, sensitive, cautious. They will resent you, your thoughts, your words. They will hate your willingness to risk social connections and challenge social conventions. Be prepared to
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think of the difference between being nice, which girls are taught to do at all costs, and being kind. Nice is something you do to please others, even if you have no interest, desire, or reason to. Kindness, on the other hand, assumes that you are true to yourself first.
Learn to say no and to say no unapologetically.
Forgive nothing until you are good and ready to, especially if there has been no indication that the behavior causing you distress has changed.
if a man gets angry, he’s having an off day, if a woman does, she’s a raging bitch.
