WEBVTT

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So sometimes I get angry,

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and it took me many years
to be able to say just those words.

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In my work,

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sometimes my body thrums, I’m so enraged.

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But no matter how justified
my anger has been,

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throughout my life, I’ve always been

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led to understand that my anger is
an exaggeration, a misrepresentation,

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that it will make me rude and unlikable.

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Mainly as a girl, I learned, as a girl,
that anger is an emotion

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better left entirely unvoiced.

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Think about my mother for a minute.

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When I was 15, I came home
from school one day, and she was standing

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on a long veranda outside of our kitchen,
holding a giant stack of plates.

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Imagine how dumbfounded I was when she
started to throw them like Frisbees

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(Laughter)

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into the hot, humid air.

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When every single plate had shattered
into thousands of pieces

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on the hill below,

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she walked back in and she said to me
cheerfully, “How was your day?”

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(Laughter)

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Now you can see how a child
would look at an incident like this

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and think that anger is silent, isolating,
destructive, even frightening.

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Especially though when the person
who’s angry is a girl or a woman.

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The question is why.

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Anger is a human emotion,
neither good nor bad.

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It is actually a signal emotion.

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It warns us of indignity, threat,
insult and harm.

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And yet, in culture after culture,
anger is reserved as the moral property

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of boys and men.

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Now, to be sure, there are differences.

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So in the United States, for example,

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an angry black man
is viewed as a criminal,

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but an angry white man has civic virtue.

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Regardless of where we are, however,
the emotion is gendered.

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And so we teach children to disdain anger
in girls and women, and we grow up to be

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adults that penalize it.

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So what if we didn't do that ?

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What if we didn’t sever
anger from femininity?

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Because severing anger from femininity
means we sever girls and women

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from the emotion that best
protects us from injustice?

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What if instead, we thought about
developing emotional competence for boys

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and girls?

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The fact is, we still remarkably
socialize children in very binary

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and oppositional ways.

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Boys are held to absurd, rigid norms
of masculinity told to, sort of renounce

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the feminine emotionality
of sadness or fear,

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and to embrace aggression and anger
as markers of real manhood.

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On the other hand, girls
learn to be deferential,

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and anger is incompatible with deference.

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In the same way that we learned
to cross our legs and tame our hair,

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we learned to bite our tongues
and swallow our pride.

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What happens too often
is that for all of us,

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indignity becomes imminent
in our notions of femininity.

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There’s a long personal and political
tale to that bifurcation.

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In anger, we go from being
spoiled princesses and hormonal teens,

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to high maintenance women
and shrill, ugly nags.

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We have flavors though, pick your flavor.

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Are you a spicy hot Latina
when you’re mad?

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Or a sad Asian girl? An angry black woman?
Or a crazy white one? You can pick.

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But in fact, the effect is that when
we say what’s important to us

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which is what anger is conveying,

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people are more likely
to get angry at us for being angry.

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Whether we’re at home or in school
or at work or in a political arena,

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anger confirms masculinity,
and it confounds femininity.

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So men are rewarded for displaying it,

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and women are penalized
for doing the same.

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This puts us at an enormous disadvantage,
particularly when we have to defend

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ourselves and our own interests.

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If we're faced with a threatening street
harasser for predatory employer,

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a sexist, racist classmates,
our brains are screaming,

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“Are you kidding me?”

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And our mouths say, “I’m sorry, what?”

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(Laughter)

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Right?

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And it’s conflicting because
the anger gets all tangled up

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with the anxiety and the fear
and the risk and retaliation.

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If you ask women what they fear the most
in response to their anger,

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they don’t say violence.

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They say mockery.

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Think about what that means.

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If you have multiple marginalized
identities, it’s not just mockery

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if you defend yourself.

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If you put a stake in the ground,
there can be dire consequences.

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Now we reproduce these patterns,
not in big, bold and blunt ways,

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but in the everyday banality of life.

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When my daughter was in preschool,
every single morning

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she built an elaborate castle,
ribbons and blocks.

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And every single morning, the same boy
knocked it down gleefully/

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His parents were there, but they never
intervened before the fact.

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They were happy to provide
platitudes afterwards.

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“Boys will be boys.”

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“It’s so tempting, he just
couldn’t help himself.”

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I did what many girls
and women learn to do.

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I preemptively kept the peace and I taught
my daughter to do the same thing.

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She used her words.

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She tried to gently body block him.

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She moved where she was building
in the classroom to no effect.

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So I and the other adults mutually
constructed a particular male entitlement.

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He could run rampant
and control the environment,

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and she kept her feelings to herself
and worked around his needs.

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We failed both of them by not giving her
anger the uptake

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and resolution that it deserved.

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Now that’s a microcosm of a much bigger
problem, because culturally, world wide,

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we preference the performance
of masculinity and the power and privilege

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that come with that performance,
over the rights and needs

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and words of children and women.

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So it will come as absolutely no surprise,
probably, to the people in this room

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that women report being angrier in more
sustained ways and with more intensity

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than men do.

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Some of that comes from the fact
that we’re socialized to ruminate,

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to keep it to ourselves and mull it over.

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But we also have to find
socially palatable ways

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to express the intensity
of emotion that we have

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and the awareness
that it brings of our precarity.

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So we do several things.

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If men knew how often women were filled
with white hot rage when we cried,

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they would be staggered.

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(Laughter)

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We use minimizing language.

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“We’re frustrated, no, really, it’s okay.”

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(Laughter)

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We self-objectify and lose
the ability to even recognize

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the physiological changes
that indicate anger.

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Mainly, though, we get sick.

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Anger has now been implicated
in a whole array of illnesses

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that are casually dismissed
as “women’s illnesses.”

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Higher rates of chronic pain,
autoimmune disorders, disordered eating,

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mental distress, anxiety,
self harm, depression.

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Anger affects our immune systems,
our cardiovascular systems.

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Some studies even indicate
that it affects mortality rates,

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particularly in black women with cancer.

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I am sick and tired of the women
I know being sick and tired.

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Our anger brings great discomfort,

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and the conflict comes because
it’s our role to bring comfort.

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There is anger that's acceptable.

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We can be angry when we stay in our lanes
and buttress of status quo

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as mothers or teachers.

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We can be mad, but we can’t be angry
about the tremendous costs of nurturing.

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We can be angry at our mothers.

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Let’s say, as teenagers, patriarchal
rules and regulations.

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We don’t blame systems. we blame them.

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We can be angry at other women
because who doesn’t love a good catfight?

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And we can be angry at men with
lower status in an expressive hierarchy

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that supports racism or xenophobia.

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But we have an enormous power in this.

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Because feelings are the purview
of our authority,

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and people are uncomfortable
with our anger,

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we should be making people comfortable
with the discomfort they feel

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when women say no, unapologetically.

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We can take emotions and think in terms
of competence and not gender.

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People who are able to process their anger
anger and make meaning from it

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are more creative, more optimistic,

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they have more intimacy,

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they’re better problem solvers,

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they have greater political efficacy.

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Now I am a woman, writing about women
and feelings, so very few men with power

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are going to take what I’m saying
seriously, as a matter of politics.

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We think of politics and anger in term
of the contempt and disdain and and fury

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that are feeding a rise
of macho-fascism in the world.

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But if it’s that poison,
it’s also the antidote.

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We have an anger of hope,
and we see it every single day

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in the resistant anger of women
and marginalized people.

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It’s related to compassion
and empathy and love,

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and we should recognize
that anger as well.

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The issue is that societies that don't
respect women's anger don't respect women.

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The real danger of our anger isn't that
it will break bonds or plates.

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It’s that it exactly shows
how seriously we take ourselves,

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and we expect other people
to take us seriously as well.

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When that happens, chances are very good

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that women will be able to smile
when they want to.

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Thank you.

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(Applause) (Cheers)