#36 Dear Angry Women
So now when I do feel vulnerable, when I do feel like to cry, when I do feel like to say I'm sad, anxious or scared, I say it because I'm a human, not because I feel comfortable to say or do these things because people expect a woman to say these things, to do these things
ep 36
We all feel angry. Every one of us. Anyone that claims they never do has really never lived.
Anger is an emotion that is just as important as any other, however it is one of the most looked down upon and negatively connoted emotion of all. We are constantly told that anger leads to jealousy and hate, and hate leads to destruction and pain. Very little attention has been given to the need for anger to be in our lives, and even lesser attention has been given to how gendered the emotion has become.
Anger teaches us about our boundaries or flaws that need to be addressed before they transform anger into aggression. So when we prevent women from expressing their anger and encourage men to continue on using it as a weapon for domination, we end up with a further gender divide and generations of women suffering from poor anger management and trauma of not being able to express the very emotion that lets them know they are not okay with the environment they are in.
This episode emphasises on the urgency to destigmatise and demasculinise anger so that women are able to practice health portrayal of their anger and work towards creating a more just and safe environment for themselves and other women.
Episode Structure:
- Privilege of achieving transparency in life
- Being unable to embrace my ability to be compassionate without having it associated as a "good girl" personality trait
- Stark difference between anger and hatred and the need for the difference to be understood
- Need for the shameful post-feminism ideology to be abandoned
- Attributing success of female liberation movements to the emotion of anger
- Movements don't need to be violent to express collective anger but violence in form of self-defence and defiance against suppression is valid
- Need to shift away from narrative of anger having negative effects on personal life in order to allow women to express the emotion without being gaslighted/ridiculed
- Studies showing the ill-treatment of women in professional environments that frequently express their anger
- Open letter to all women that have taken the courage to abandon gender stereotypes by practicing their right to feel angry to thank them for showing the rest of us how to unlearn the sexist teachings of what it takes to be a good woman
Resources:
- Success of suffragettes in winning vote for women
- Some women rights movements
- Study showing women feel anger as frequently and intensely as men but can manage it much better
- Study showing biological differences in the brain between the sexes can influence better anger management in females than males (sex-based differences only)
- Study showing angry women political candidates often lose their influence whilst their angry male counterparts gain influence
- Harvard study showing sexism in the workplace against angry women
- Excerpt from Soraya Chemaly's book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger
Thanks for listening!
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