The power of women's anger

Anger is a powerful emotion -- it warns us of threat, insult, indignity and harm. But across the world, girls and women are taught that their anger is better left unvoiced, says author Soraya Chemaly. Why is that, and what might we lose in this silence? In a provocative, thoughtful talk, Chemaly explores the dangerous lie that anger isn't feminine, showing how women's rage is justified, healthy and a potential catalyst for change.

So sometimes I get angry,

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

In my work,

sometimes my body thrums, I'm so enraged.

But no matter how justified
my anger has been,

throughout my life,

I've always been led to understand
that my anger is an exaggeration,

a misrepresentation,

that it will make me rude and unlikable.

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

better left entirely unvoiced.

Think about my mother for a minute.

When I was 15, I came home
from school one day,

and she was standing on a long veranda
outside of our kitchen,

holding a giant stack of plates.

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

(Laughter)

into the hot, humid air.

When every single plate had shattered
into thousands of pieces

on the hill below,

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

The question is why.

Anger is a human emotion,
neither good nor bad.

It is actually a signal emotion.

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

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

of boys and men.

Now, to be sure, there are differences.

So in the United States, for example,

an angry black man
is viewed as a criminal,

but an angry white man has civic virtue.

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

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

and we grow up to be adults
that penalize it.

So what if we didn't do that?

What if we didn't sever
anger from femininity?

Because severing anger from femininity
means we sever girls and women

from the emotion that best
protects us from injustice.

What if instead we thought about
developing emotional competence

for boys and girls?

The fact is we still
remarkably socialize children

in very binary and oppositional ways.

Boys are held to absurd,
rigid norms of masculinity --

told to renounce the feminine emotionality
of sadness or fear

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

On the other hand,
girls learn to be deferential,

and anger is incompatible with deference.

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

we learned to bite our tongues
and swallow our pride.

What happens too often
is that for all of us,

indignity becomes imminent
in our notions of femininity.

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

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

to high maintenance women
and shrill, ugly nags.

We have flavors, though; pick your flavor.

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

Or a sad Asian girl? An angry black woman?
Or a crazy white one?

You can pick.

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

which is what anger is conveying,

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

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

anger confirms masculinity,
and it confounds femininity.

So men are rewarded for displaying it,

and women are penalized
for doing the same.

This puts us at an enormous disadvantage,

particularly when we have to defend
ourselves and our own interests.

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

a sexist, racist classmate,

our brains are screaming,
"Are you kidding me?"

And our mouths say, "I'm sorry, what?"

(Laughter)

Right?

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

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

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

they don't say violence.

They say mockery.

Think about what that means.

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

If you defend yourself,
if you put a stake in the ground,

there can be dire consequences.

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

but in the everyday banality of life.

When my daughter was in preschool,
every single morning

she built an elaborate castle --
ribbons and blocks --

and every single morning the same boy
knocked it down gleefully.

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

They were happy to provide
platitudes afterwards:

"Boys will be boys."

"It's so tempting, he just
couldn't help himself."

I did what many girls
and women learn to do.

I preemptively kept the peace,

and I taught my daughter
to do the same thing.

She used her words.

She tried to gently body block him.

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

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

He could run rampant
and control the environment,

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

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

and resolution that it deserved.

Now that's a microcosm
of a much bigger problem.

Because culturally, worldwide,

we preference the performance
of masculinity --

and the power and privilege
that come with that performance --

over the rights and needs and words
of children and women.

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

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

than men do.

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

to keep it to ourselves and mull it over.

But we also have to find
socially palatable ways

to express the intensity
of emotion that we have

and the awareness
that it brings of our precarity.

So we do several things.

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

they would be staggered.

(Laughter)

We use minimizing language.

"We're frustrated. No, really, it's OK."

(Laughter)

We self-objectify and lose the ability

to even recognize the physiological
changes that indicate anger.

Mainly, though, we get sick.

Anger has now been implicated
in a whole array of illnesses

that are casually dismissed
as "women's illnesses."

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

mental distress, anxiety,
self harm, depression.

Anger affects our immune systems,
our cardiovascular systems.

Some studies even indicate
that it affects mortality rates,

particularly in black women with cancer.

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

Our anger brings great discomfort,

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

There is anger that's acceptable.

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

As mothers or teachers,

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

We can be angry at our mothers.

Let's say, as teenagers --
patriarchal rules and regulations --

we don't blame systems, we blame them.

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

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

that supports racism or xenophobia.

But we have an enormous power in this.

Because feelings are the purview
of our authority,

and people are uncomfortable
with our anger.

We should be making people comfortable
with the discomfort they feel

when women say no, unapologetically.

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

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

are more creative, more optimistic,

they have more intimacy,

they're better problem solvers,

they have greater political efficacy.

Now I am a woman
writing about women and feelings,

so very few men with power

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

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

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

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

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

in the resistant anger of women
and marginalized people.

It's related to compassion
and empathy and love,

and we should recognize
that anger as well.

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

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

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

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

When that happens, chances are very good

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

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause) (Cheers)