Female Rage – Why Women like Me Make Everything About Gender Inequality
“Susanna and the Elders” (c.1610) - Artemisia Gentileschi
On social media and TikTok in particular, women have over the past couple of years created a space to voice and share their experiences. Often that includes their anger.
The videos, usually intended as funny and relatable commentaries on the universal experience of being a woman, regularly include expressing annoyance or anger towards men. What originally started out as a joke men too could laugh about is increasingly feeling like a personal attack for many men. Guys I have talked to in the past years about this have regularly expressed this annoyance with ‘feminists like that’ and it made me wonder – what exactly is female rage and is the degree to which men are scapegoated justified?
Female rage originates in the systematic and millennia lasting discrimination against women on the basis of their sex. In other words, gender based violence (GBV) and gender based discrimination is directed against women because they are women, and the offenders are usually men.
Does that mean that female rage is directed against men? Not necessarily, after all it is not all men… (sorry I couldn’t stop myself from saying that). Female rage explores women’s anger with our society and the enduring system of patriarchy, and as a consequence this rage is directed at the men in particular that continue to enforce it.
If a man, or any person for that matter, speaks up against it, spreads awareness on equality and checks their own internalized misogyny as well as that of the men around them, then female anger is not directed against them.
Negative emotions of any kind can easily take on a life of their own and sometimes it is, therefore, difficult to realize a person’s good intentions in the haze of frustration.
I sometimes think that the misunderstandings on both sides have caused hostility and pain for everyone involved – for the women that feel not listened to or taken seriously and men that constantly feel blamed and attacked.
I would love to be able to tell men that they shouldn’t take it personally, but it wouldn’t be my truth, because female rage, my rage, is personal. Only if men take it personally and make it their responsibility to change something and not take on the role of the victim will change flourish. At the same time, I do think that it is important that women communicate clearly that men are not inherently wrong. We need to continue speaking about other people with nuance and empathy and see each other for more than our sex, gender or political labels in order to establish an environment where female rage is addressed as the serious, justified issue that it is.
Even if men empathize with our frustration, many are still unable to see that feminist issues weren’t solved decades ago. Our fight for equality goes beyond the surface of the gender pay gap or having a gender quota (not to say that these aren’t serious issues, naturally they are.) Yet, they only show the surface of the continuing dust criminal ion against women on the basis of their sex. The extend of gender inequality is much more nuanced and sometimes difficult to see through the lens of capitalism and normalized patriarchies structures in our society.
But, when men get annoyed by women like me making everything about patriarchy and misogyny because ‘they are not doing anything wrong’, our anger is fuelled even more.
Even if things have changed, they have not changed enough for women, non-binary people, and trans people to feel safe around many men. Things have not changed enough for the numbers of gender based assaults and harassments to cease and things have not changed enough for women, non-binary, and trans people to have the same access to our bodily autonomy and safety as men.
In Suzanne Lacy’s and Leslie Labowitz-Starus’ 1977 performance ‘In Mourning and In Rage’ the protestors screamed: “In memory of our sisters, we fight back!”. I felt that deeply.
Our fight is ongoing and materializes in female rage. I can't think of any historical fight for equality that has been achieved without anger. Just as white people aren’t entitled to get defensive about their internalized racism and have the responsibility to check themselves, listen and do better, men must do the same. We do not need men to protect us from other men. We need them to listen and hold themselves as well as other men accountable for their behavior.
For a long time, I was ashamed of my own anger. I knew that some people treated me unfairly because I am a young women, at work as well as in my personal life. Especially older men have not been shy to harass me at work or raise their voice at me when they did not like my opinions.
More often than I would like I still keep quiet and bite back the tears of frustration from being talked down to and the knowledge that no matter how good my argument was, it would never be taken seriously on the basis of my age and sex.
I and most women I know have experienced this for years and it most certainly does not get any easier with age, because even if I do speak up and express discontent or anger, I question whether I have a right to my feelings I too was raised in a patriarchal society and it is difficult to break your own thought patterns.
Female rage can be difficult to accept in yourself because we are taught not to be angry, not to be difficult. But how else will things change if we are quiet and tolerate mistreatment?
