The “unhinged woman” is a character trope that we continue to see everywhere in mainstream media and literature. These are women prone to irrational reactions and mood swings and shown to be angry and vengeful, who often start off as seemingly controlled, but unravel slowly with a sudden violent episode. More recently, this has often been portrayed as a feminist retelling of women breaking away from the gendered expectations imposed on them, as a way of them taking back control.
I remember watching the recent film Gone Girl, based on the book of the same name, and thinking that while the movie set out to be some sort of empowering, “girl power” narrative, it really is grounded in gender roles and ideologies that have long told us that women’s anger is uncontrolled and has drastic consequences. The depictions at the heart of it are still relying on sexist ideologies that there are natural differences between men and women, in their interests and behaviours.
I find the idea that women’s anger has to be vengeful to be problematic. In Latin American folk medicine, emotions are recognised as powerful enough to cause physical sickness. In 2004, the anthropologist Linda-Anne Rebhun documented her work with north-east Brazilian women in the city of Caruaru, which had a population of 200,000. The people of Caruaru used the term “swallowing frogs” (engolir sapos) to denote the suppression of anger and irritation, and putting up with unfair treatment silently. Strong emotions such as envy, anger and grief were not considered appropriate because of their intensity, so had to be swallowed down. Rebhun’s work showed that many of the ailments manifesting in women were associated with the effort and pain of bridging the gap between the cultural expectations imposed on them and their personal emotional experiences.
What was being seen as nerves by other members of the community and male doctors, was shown to be resulting from the struggle to control and manipulate emotions. When women were not able to live up to the emotional expectations of others, or if they were contradictory to their own experiences, they suffered.
In Andean folk medicine, this type of suffering or nervous disposition was called pena, which was even believed to turn the heart slowly into stone. The word for anger, raiva, was also used for the disease rabies, showing the stigmatised status of this emotion. Showing anger, or experiencing it, was akin to getting the disease: both dangerous and potentially incurable. In Brazilian Portuguese the words raiva (rabies or anger) and colera (cholera) were sometimes used interchangeably with a “glass or cup of anger” translating as both “um copo de colera” and “um vidro da raiva”: both putting the fear in women’s heart. The possibility of madness and death made women feel frightened of experiencing and inspiring such a dangerous emotion as anger.
In 1983, in her work “A Note on Anger”, American philosopher Marilyn Frye declared that anger is a tool by which we, as humans, declare our own agency, and this is why women’s anger is not as well received: women claiming their own agency have long been considered aberrational. Frye asserts that anger has a significant role in shaping the sense of self, as it is often expressed to claim one’s own space or to demand the acceptance of oneself from others. It is to say “I exist” and “Acknowledge me”. Anger therefore often bursts forth as a sense of injustice when a person feels like they are not being perceived as a person with autonomy and rights. It is to say “I demand a right to exist, to be seen, to have the same rights as others.” Frye noted that, when it comes to women’s anger, ‘Attention is turned not to what we are angry about but to the project of calming us down and to the topic of our mental stability.” She wrote this almost 40 years ago, but it might well have been yesterday.
Even today, women’s testimonies about their own experiences are seen as invalid and unreliable. When the root of their anger is not seen as valid or is deemed unintelligible, it is easier to dismiss the anger as unjustified. A 2005 telephone survey of 1,800 adults from across the US found that women reported significantly higher frequencies of anger, annoyance, yelling and losing their temper than men. In the same survey, men subscribed to the statement “I keep my emotions to myself” about 15 per cent more than women did. This apparent difference could have been because women were more open about their anger rather than being angrier, or because they felt more guilty or ashamed about the emotion.
We have already seen earlier in the book that there is no concrete scientific evidence that there is a biological difference in the way male and female brains process external stimuli, only that the way these external events and situations are perceived varies. It is also impossible to know what level of outrage and emotion was classed as “anger” by men and women. Do women overestimate their anger, compared to men, because they have subconsciously been trained not to show rage and anger from a young age, in almost every culture and society? We have seen through history, and there is enough contemporary evidence, that people are more likely to use words like “bitchy” and “hostile” to describe women’s anger, while anger in men is more likely to be described as “strong”. Men are more likely to express their anger by physically assaulting objects or verbally attacking other people, while women are more likely to cry when they get angry as if their bodies are forcibly returning them to the appearance of the emotion − sadness − with which they are most commonly associated.
In 2007, Vaughan Becker at Arizona State University set out an experiment, in which 38 undergraduates viewed pictures of faces showing prototypical happy and angry expressions. The participants were told: “Close your eyes for a moment and imagine an angry face. Try and conjure up a prototypical angry face. Is the face that of a man or a woman?” The participants had to quickly press A or H to show whether the expression was angry or happy. Results showed that when they perceived a face to be that of a man they were more likely to press angry, but when the same expression was shown on a woman, they were more likely to see this as happy.
To further confirm the effect of gender stereotypes, the researchers conducted another study in which they used computer graphics to control not only the intensity of facial expressions but also the masculinity and femininity of the facial features. They showed faces that were ambiguously masculine and feminine (using stereotypes such as heavy brow and angular face for masculine, and roundedness and soft features for feminine), sometimes a little more masculine and at others more feminine. Once again, people were more likely to see the more masculine faces as angrier, even when they had slightly happier expressions than the more feminine faces. These results also show how emotions get interpreted differently the more masculine or feminine a face appears. The more masculine a face appears, the more likely it is that the emotion is interpreted as anger. We know that there is also evidence that women are more likely to adopt a social strategy of “tending and befriending” than men, especially in stressful situations so that they come across as warm, unthreatening and nurturing. Arguably, therefore, people tend to believe that a woman is more likely to have a happier expression on her face than a man.
Women who display anger are judged more harshly for it, and so it is also understood that women would not choose to show anger. And so when a person encounters a woman with an angry expression, they are more likely to see this as a non-normative emotion and be critical of it. Women internalise these messages.
In a growing body of work, self-reporting of anger by women is often accompanied by self-condemnation and derogatory statements such as “I was so embarrassed” and “I felt like a real bitch.” The outward expression of anger in women – such as tears and raised voices – were all self-coded as a “loss of control” and treated with self-derision. What I find interesting in many of these research studies was that, while most of these women were aware at a cognitive level of the judgements from men of their anger expression, and could intellectually reason them to be harmful stereotypes, these had become so deeply embedded that they had internalised them and applied them to themselves.
Men on the other hand have been observed to follow certain rules of hierarchy to ensure that their anger is channelled into aggression: a sign of masculinity. This depends largely on the status of the adversary: aggression is not appropriate against anyone weaker or less physically able than them; not women nor the elderly. Aggression against someone stronger, however, is often not only considered acceptable but heroic. There is also little self-judgement or self-condemnation from men in terms of loss of control; no excuses, merely a framework of instigation and reaction, cause and effect. In several of these self-reported studies, men congratulate themselves and express feelings of satisfaction if they had a “good fight” or when they proved their maturity by containing their aggression against an unsuitable adversary (friend, partner, parents, siblings).
Excerpted with permission from Hysterical: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions, Pragya Agarwal, Canongate.