Are we angry enough?

On anger, and who’s allowed to feel it.

“Frustration is just another word for passion,” our coach says. “What really pisses you off? What do you wish somebody would fix? That’s your passion: that’s what you’re here for.”

By here, she means on this programme, a training & mentorship scheme for people with ideas that they think could be businesses. We’re at the beginning, all thirty of us, starting by looking at ourselves: our skills and our experience, but mostly our values, what we really care about. What does make us angry?

For me, it’s the systems that stop all the smart, talented, dedicated people in the world from achieving all the things that they are trying really hard to achieve: policy change; better healthcare systems; fairer economies. If I’d been asked a year ago, though, I wouldn’t have known the answer. Like so many women I know, I’ve spent a lot of my life not letting myself be angry. Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger,  says that the most common response she’s had since the book was published has been ‘I didn’t know I was angry’.

“We become so detached from even understanding the emotion in ourselves,” she says. “We learn to calibrate ourselves so carefully to the environments we’re in, so that we’re pleasing and nice and make people comfortable.” This calibration process isn’t gentle; we learn by trial and error, by losing arguments or friends or jobs.

Ashley Porciuncula, MD, producer and film director at Hightail Entertainment, a media production company committed to breaking gender norms in the industry, says, “it doesn't take a lot from a young age to say, hey, so I stood up for myself. That wasn't appreciated. And so maybe next time I don't do that. And a handful of those experiences ends up with somebody not standing up for what they believe in, or majoring in what they want to major in, or starting that company.”

Florence Pardoe, food systems activist and director/founder at GOOD: Stories in Food, agrees. “I do wonder if my outrage and the way that I chose to communicate my concerns would have landed differently if I were a boy. Growing up, I was quite an outspoken, forthright kind of person, which a lot of people didn’t like. That negative reaction has been quite formative for my self-confidence. It makes you question your ability to express yourself and not be misunderstood.” 

Both Ashley and Florence share stories of having justified anger met with indifference or disbelief, too: a brother refusing to believe in the threat of the global water crisis, a headteacher barely reading a letter protesting an unfair new policy despite signatures from the whole class. 

Soraya describes this as epistemic injustice, a term coined by Miranda Fricker in 2007; groups of people not being considered as valid holders of knowledge and truth. “This is where anger becomes such a challenge,” says Soraya. “If you’re a white woman you’re crazy, and if you’re hispanic you’re hot, and maybe you’re compared to consumable food substances. All of those are political, belittling, but they’re also infantilising. And that active infantilising us in our anger is denying us the right to self-governance,” implying that the ‘crazy’ woman isn’t to be trusted, that she needs to be calmed down by some outside force because she is incapable of doing so herself.

This is an idea that’s centuries old, created in service of free labour and high birth rates. In early modern Europe, women were being portrayed “as savage beings, mentally weak, unsatiably lusty, rebellious, insubordinate, incapable of self-control,” writes Silvia Federici in Caliban and The Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. This helped, she argues, to justify the exploitation that women were undergoing as reproductive control was systematically removed from them and their labour was brought under the control of men. 

In The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, Angela Saini writes that a lot of mediaeval literature is “about how to tame your wife”. She points out that “the fact that a wife would need to be ‘tamed’ at all tells us something about her circumstances”. 

“What is it that Taylor Swift says?” Ashley asks. “‘Men can react, women can only overreact.’ It just makes you feel like you’re going crazy. Am I actually too angry of a person? Do I come in too hot? And you look around you and you go, Well, no, because none of the men that I work with is having these accusations thrown at them.” She describes the experiences of women she’s worked with: “We were having all our reactions attributed to something in us that was toxic, something calculated, when in reality it was the environment we were in that was toxic.”

“Without acknowledgement,” Soraya says, “anger becomes material in the body. It contributes to a whole array of illnesses, physical and mental, and one of my objectives was to say stop. We have to stop making ourselves sick.”

Last November, in the middle of the kind of work stress that makes your hair fall out and gives you a rash nobody quite knows what to do with, I found myself with some time on my hands and a desire to run away to somewhere I wouldn’t have to think. I ended up at a holistic retreat centre in Dorset, scheduled for treatments I’d never heard of (shamanic therapy; quantum healing).

People were very nice to me. I had my cards read. I lay on a table while Lucinda, the therapist, took me on an imaginary journey to meet the parts of myself I’d stopped acknowledging. On this journey, there was a tree (also imaginary). A version of myself stepped out from behind it, aged 14: the last time I thought I could change the world. The last time I thought it was worth trying. The last time I was really, properly, angry. 

Anger can be generative; it’s manifested in political action and the work that we do. “It’s the things that we feel really passionate about that make us get up and get out and go on a march and write to our MP,” says Florence. “It’s the things we’re outraged about and that we need to change.” 

Ultimately, Soraya says, women are socialised not to point out the injustices we see. “Anger centres the self: I need this to happen, I feel this is wrong, I have a problem. And in stating this as calmly or as irrationally as I might, I'm saying that you have to pay attention to what I'm saying, and that I'm going to hold you accountable - as a person, as an institution, as a political system - and women are not supposed to hold people accountable.”

What if we did? “It's something that I think about often,” says Ashley. “If all other things were equal, and all of this bias and unconscious bias wasn't there, what would the outcome be? How much does it actually hold us back?”