Rage Becomes Her

Soraya Chemaly

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781471172137
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A conversation-shifting book urging 21st-century women to understand their anger, embrace its power, and use it as a tool for positive change ' How many women cry when angry because we've held it in for so long? How many discover that anger turned inward is depression? Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her will be good for women. After all, women have a lot to be angry about.' GLORIA STEINEM Women are angry, and it isn't hard to figure out why. We are underpaid, overworked, thwarted and diminished. The assertive among us are labelled bitches, while the expressive among us are considered shrill. We are told to stand down when we have an opinion and to calm down when we are fired up. And when we somehow manage to put one high heel-battered foot in front of the other despite all of this, we're asked if it would kill us to smile. We are mad as hell, and that's completely okay. Because contrary to the endless barrage of self-help rhetoric about anger management and letting go, the reality is that our rage is the most important resource we have as women, a force for creation rather than destruction, our sharpest tool against both personal and political oppression. Anger is not what gets in our way, it is our way. All we need to do is own it. This is apitch perfect, engaging, and accessible credo written by one of today's most influential feminists. Analysing female anger as it relates to topics like self-worth, objectification, pain, care, fear, silence, and denial, Soraya illuminates how and why we repress our anger, revealing the harm that this causes, and helping us recognise the liberating power of owning our anger and marshalling it as a vital tool for positive change. Just as Quiet brought about a new embrace of introversion, Rage Becomes Her will bring about an embrace of feminine anger that will leave women feeling liberated, inspired and connected to an entire universe of women who are no longer interested in making nice.

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1

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MAD GIRLS

[My mother] had handed down respect for the possibilities—and the will to grasp them.

—Alice Walker

Each morning in preschool, my daughter constructed a tall and elaborate castle out of blocks, ribbons, and paper, only to have the same classmate, a little boy, gleefully destroy it. Over a period of several weeks, one or the other of the boy’s parents, both invariably pleasant, would step forward after the fact and repeat any number of well-worn platitudes as my daughter fumed: “He’s just going through a phase!” “He’s such a boy! He loves destroying things,” and, my personal favorite, “He. Just. Can’t. Help. Himself!” Over time, my daughter grew increasingly frustrated and angry.

But my daughter didn’t yell, kick, throw a tantrum, or strike out at him. First, she asked him politely to stop. Then she stood in his way, body blocking him, but gently. She built a stronger foundation, so that her castles would be less likely to topple. She moved to another part of the classroom. She behaved exactly how you would want someone to behave if she was following all the rules about how to be a nice person. It didn’t work.

For weeks, his parents never swooped in before he took apart her building, they only commented afterward. Like many parents, I followed an unspoken rule about not disciplining other people’s children. In the meantime, I imagined his mother and father thinking, because they often did their thinking out loud, “What red-blooded boy wouldn’t knock it down?”

It was so tempting. She was building a glittery tower in a public space. He was a boy who couldn’t control himself and, being a boy, had violent inclinations. Besides, ultimately, wasn’t she responsible for keeping her building safe? It’s not like she made a big fuss when he knocked it down, so she mustn’t have cared that much. As a matter of fact, she did what studies show is common among girls this age. Angry school-age girls tend not to vent but, instead, to dig in and find ways to protect their interests quietly.

Meanwhile, what example did I set for my angry daughter? It depends on your perspective. Many people would say it was good for her to learn to be patient and kind, polite and understanding. Looking back, I think I set an awful example. My attempts to teach her how to avoid damage, live cooperatively with others, and be a good citizen were gendered in unhelpful ways. I tried to help her to accomplish her goal—an intact building—but I didn’t give her anger the uptake, meaning validation and support, that it deserved. Neither did any of the other adults. She had every right to be angry, but I didn’t encourage her to express herself in a way that was public, disruptive, or demanding.

In the interest of classroom relations, I politely talked to the boy’s parents. They sympathized with my daughter’s frustration but only to the extent that they sincerely hoped she found a way to feel better. They didn’t seem to “see” that she was angry, nor did they understand that her anger was a demand on their son in direct relation to their own inaction. They were perfectly content to rely on her cooperation in his working through what he wanted to work through, yet they felt no obligation to ask him to do the same. Even in this early, and relatively innocent setting, he was already mislearning the meaning of “no.” He was running roughshod, with no sense of consequences, over the people around him. By default, his feelings were prioritized, and he was not only allowed but also encouraged to control the environment.

Scenarios like this one play out over and over again throughout childhood. In my experience, it is difficult for many adults to accept that boys can and should control themselves and meet the same behavioral standards that we expect from girls. It is even harder to accept that girls feel angry and have legitimate rights not to make themselves cheerfully available as resources for boys’ development. In 2014, researchers from multiple universities conducted a large-scale, four-country study into preschool preparedness and gender. Children in the United States showed the largest gender gaps in self-regulation. Researchers found that parental and teacher expectations of gender informed the way that children acted and were evaluated, and, ultimately, whether or not they were held accountable for controlling themselves. Sex differences in self-control, other research indicates, are almost certainly what we call epigenetic, reflecting the interaction of genetic predisposition and social and cultural expectations.

Had my daughter responded with a disruptive, loud display of anger, the focus of the discussion probably would have concerned her behavior, not the boy’s. It would have been falsely equated with, or even prioritized over, the boy’s lack of control or empathy, instead of being seen as a justifiable response to his bad behavior.

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In 1976, in one of the earliest attempts to understand how parental biases influence behavior, researchers deliberately masked babies’ gender and asked adults to describe what they saw when they observed them. Adults “saw” different emotional states depending on whether they thought the baby was a boy or a girl. A fussy boy, for example, was considered irritable and angry, whereas a fussy girl was more likely to be described as fearful or sad. Adults even attribute gendered emotions to simple line drawings. A series of 1986 experiments revealed that when adults studying a particular drawing thought that the artist was a boy, they were inclined to describe the images as angrier, or more violent and hostile.

The finding that adults have emotion gender biases holds true decades later. Harriet Tenenbaum, a developmental psychologist at England’s University of Surrey, has studied the ways that parents talk to children. “Most parents say they want boys to be more expressive,” she explains, “but don’t know [they] are speaking differently to them.” Parents speak to daughters more about emotions, using a wider range of words. The one exception to what researchers call “emotion talk”? Anger and negative feelings. Parents talk to boys about being mad but don’t do the same with girls. Mothers in particular tend to use words related to anger when talking to boys or telling them stories.

Assumptions about emotionality and gender extend well into adulthood.

In 2011 Dr. Kerri Johnson, an assistant professor of communication studies and psychology at UCLA, released the findings of an innovative study on perceptions of gender and emotion. “It’s okay—even expected—for men to express anger,” she said. “But when women have a negative emotion, they’re expected to express their displeasure with sadness.”

Sex bias leads us to see happiness and fear on women’s faces more easily, categorizing women’s neutral faces as less angry than men’s faces. In studies, women’s neutral faces are described as “submissive,” “innocent,” “scared,” and “happy.” In one, women’s faces were labelled by participants as “cooperative” and “babyish.” Multiple experiments reveal that an angry woman’s face is one of the most difficult for people to parse, and an androgynous face with an angry expression is overwhelmingly categorized as male.

A “sad” woman and an “angry” man might be experiencing similar negative emotions, but these words, and the stereotypes they elicit, produce radically different outcomes. The difference is not trivial.

Power, considered by some theorists to be the “entrance requirement” for anger, is not necessary for sadness. Anger is an “approach” emotion, while sadness is a “retreat” emotion. Thinking of a person as sad makes us see them as weaker and more submissive. Anger, not sadness, is associated with controlling one’s circumstances, such as competition, independence, and leadership. Anger, not sadness, is linked to assertiveness, persistence, and aggressiveness. Anger, not sadness, is a way to actively make change and confront challenges. Anger, not sadness, leads to perceptions of higher status and respect. Like happy people, angry people are more optimistic, feeling that change is possible and that they can influence outcomes. Sad and fearful people tend toward pessimism, feeling powerless to make change.

Social science researchers Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad have shown that anger, unlike sadness, encourages “unstructured thinking” when a person is engaged in creative tasks, and that people who are angry are better at generating more ideas. Even more interesting, one study found that the ideas they came up with were highly original.

There are cognitive benefits to sadness, however. For example, sadness often means that a person is thinking more deeply and methodically about what is upsetting her; sad people tend to consider social ills instead of assigning individual blame. Sad people are also more generous. On the downside, sadness can easily turn into paralyzing rumination, lowered expectations, and costly impatience. Sad people expect and are satisfied with less.

What does separating anger from femininity mean for us as women? For one thing, it means that we render women’s anger ineffective as a personal or collective public resource. This treatment of women’s anger is a powerful regulation; an ideal way to reduce women’s pushback against their own inequality.

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In 2012 an in-depth analysis of research into gender, childhood, and emotional regulation canvased three decades of studies into how children display emotions. The studies included more than twenty-one thousand subjects and looked not only at how children express themselves, but also at how adults responded and how children, in turn, adapted to expectations. Researchers found “significant, but very small gender differences” in boys’ and girls’ expression and experience of emotions, but significant differences in how their emotions were treated by others.

At home or in child care, babies learn about their emotions as subjects of gender bias, meaning few interactions with adults do not involve their being treated differently depending on assigned sex. Girls are expected by most adults to display a pleasant affect and to be more affiliative, helpful, and cooperative. When a baby girl shows positive emotions or is compliant, she is far more likely to be rewarded with smiles, warmth, and food, whereas a boy tends to be similarly rewarded for being stoic and tough. As they leave toddlerhood, girls express negative emotions and aggression—both verbal and physical—less and less openly.

By the time they are preschoolers, children already associate anger with masculine faces and report believing that it is normal for boys to be angry, but not for girls. As they move from the intimacy of their homes into schools, sports clubs, and places of worship, children come under more intense social pressure to behave in stereotypical ways. Observed gaps in how boys and girls display anger grow largest outside of their families as children try to reduce friction by conforming to dominant norms.

By the time they enter school, most children already think of disruptive behaviors and assertiveness—for example, using loud voices, interrupting, burping, joking, and cursing—as linguistic markers of masculinity, acceptable for boys but not for girls. Children fine-tune their response to adult expectations, and adults consistently demonstrate discomfort with the idea of a righteously angry girl making demands. Girls, admonished to use “nicer” voices three times more often than boys are, learn to prioritize the needs and feelings of people around them; often this means ignoring their own discomfort, resentment, or anger.

Ask most parents, and they will swear that they teach children to be polite in the same way, regardless of gender. But as it turns out, boys and girls are not learning this lesson in equal measure. In one study, researchers deliberately disappointed children in a series of gift-giving scenarios. Regardless of how they felt, girls were more likely, on average, to smile, say thank you, and appear to be happy, despite feeling disappointed. Studies show that girls who begin to exhibit behavioral problems at these ages score high in measures of feeling that they are unable to openly express displeasure or anger, even in private, after a disappointment. These tendencies—self-silencing and acting out—are bidirectional, with each one acting on the likelihood of the other.

Girls learn to smile early, and many cultures teach girls explicitly to “put on a pretty face.” It is a way of soothing the people around us, a facial adaptation to the expectation that we put others first, preserve social connections, and hide our disappointment, frustration, anger, or fear. We are expected to be more accommodating and less assertive or dominant. As girls’ smiles become less authentic, so, too, does their understanding of themselves.

For black girls, being expected to smile is additionally infused with racism and historic demands that black people set white people at ease by showing they are not actually unhappy with circumstances of inequality. Yet few people are interested in thinking about the ways that encouraging girls to be “nice,” maybe admonishing, “You’re prettier when you smile,” is also related to social status.

We are so busy teaching girls to be likeable that we often forget to teach them, as we do boys, that they should be respected.

CULTURAL RELEVANCE MATTERS TO HOW WE FEEL AND THINK ABOUT OURSELVES

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After a period that psychologists call latency, girls enter puberty and begin to express emotions, including anger, more openly and frequently again. When they become more assertive, especially about things that make them unhappy, adults are sometimes taken aback. “What happened to my sweet little girl?” is a common question. Girls, however, often express negative emotions without being able to say why they have them.

Every girl learns, in varying degrees, to filter herself through messages of women’s relative cultural irrelevance, powerlessness, and comparative worthlessness. Images and words conveying disdain for girls, women, and femininity come at children fast and furiously, whereas most boys’ passage to adulthood—even for boys disadvantaged by class or ethnicity—remains cloaked in the cultural centrality of maleness and masculinity.

When girls consume media or participate in cultural events such as watching popular films or attending exciting sporting events, they frequently have to make a simple choice: either put themselves in men’s and boys’ shoes or consider what the relative invisibility, silence, and misrepresentation of girls and women who look like them means. Women aren’t acknowledged on most national currencies or as public statues. Books, movies, games, and popular entertainment feature men and boys two to three times more often as protagonists—more often white than not. As children get older, similar metrics become even more true.

Every year, media analyses come to the stubbornly unchanging conclusion that men, again overwhelmingly white, hold roughly 70 percent to 73 percent of the roles in top US films, as well as the majority of speaking parts and creative and executive positions on-screen and off. The gender breakdown in films globally is equally skewed. According to a report studying gender, race, and LGBTQ film portrayals in 2014, no women over forty-five years of age performed a lead or colead role. Only three lead or colead women were from minority backgrounds. Not one woman protagonist played a lesbian or bisexual character.

Similar patterns are evident in media ranging from video games to school materials. Many adults worry about video games because of violence, but most don’t consider the erasure and common sexualization of girls and women serious enough to prohibit certain games. For example, EA Sports’s phenomenally popular FIFA soccer video game franchise didn’t include any women’s teams until a 2015 release. Does it matter that players of this video game rarely or never see women as players, managers, coaches, or even audience members within the game?

Even in school, children get subtle messages about whose stories matter. Literature classes routinely feature literature written by women and men of color as exceptional (one among many white male writers) or available for study in some schools as elective classes only. A recent global review found that gender bias is also “rife in textbooks.” The result of pedagogical choices like these shape self-esteem, empathy, and understanding. They also shape resentment, confusion, and anger.

A few years ago, I asked a roomful of more than a hundred students ages fourteen to eighteen if they had learned about slavery and the civil rights movement. All had. That day, we were talking about sexual assault on campus, so I asked how many had knowledge of the rapes of black women in slavery, during Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. ...