Emerging Women

By Sonja Andrews

I’m sitting in the rink on an early, early Saturday morning once again, having driven here with a quiet but not sullen pre-teen next to me. He was eating a bagel. The pouring rain and inky, black pre-dawn required most of my concentration, but in the quiet times I’ve had recently I’ve been thinking about anger. More specifically, how we treat anger and gender. I had a couple of instances recently that brought it to my attention, one is personal and the other happened to a friend.

First, the friend: Makeesha writes about her anger – “I have never felt this much anger – ever – and I don’t know what to do with it. I know anger is a secondary emotion and I can identify the primary emotions but I still feel angry and I still don’t know how to stop feeling angry.” Go read her whole post so you know what’s driving her anger … I’ve only copied the part that’s pertinent to what I’m writing about here.

I had a recent incident with LightGirl’s hockey team in which I had an inappropriate outburst at her new (male) teammates for treating her poorly. She has a couple of guys on the team who are making life miserable for a lot of kids, but they are using her gender to make life miserable for her and that is steaming me up. I lost my temper after a recent practice and … well … let’s just leave the details out of it, but the boys in question just laughed. And, to be fair, I bet I was pretty funny looking. We talked it through with her coach and it’s being worked out. But that’s not the point of all this.

I began to specifically think about women and anger. I don’t think women are supposed to be angry in our culture. We’re considered either funny or unacceptable in some way when we get angry. When men get angry, they are frightening and taken seriously. Women are … something else.

The other thing that I’ve been tossing around both in my mind and in conversation (with LightGirl) is the idea that we should “stop feeling” anger (as Mak puts it). That anger is an emotion to get rid of. What if it’s an emotion that is to signal that something is wrong (which it is) and it is to give us energy to change that wrong or walk through the wrong (if we can’t change it)? I wonder a lot about our culture’s desire to ameliorate negative emotions so that we don’t feel sadness or anger or pain for too long.

Which brings me to a quote I heard on a new drama on NBC called “Mercy.“ The main character is being convinced against her will to get marital and PTSD counseling by some friends. They are giving her all the standard advice about why she should talk about her feelings and her response? “I like my feelings all pushed down and compressed. That way they pop out at random and inappropriate moments.” This is not the way we should live, but it’s the way most of us do live despite all that we know about how to be emotionally healthy individuals or communities. No one likes to see a sad face or someone with angry eyebrows, so we put on masks for the outside world. Women in particular are very good at this … and we’re expected to be. We’re expected to smooth the waters for the family, for any given mixed gender group we are a part of, and when we do not the labels that are attached to us are not complimentary. To say the least.

So I have not come to any conclusions; I still have questions and wonderings about what role anger should play in our lives. Should we embrace it? Sit with it longer and see what it will tell us about ourselves and what we need to do? Without allowing it to control us (that is). Do you see things differently than I? Are women treated the same as men in anger? Or are they treated differently? What are your thoughts about all of this? I’d love to hear them …

This post first appeared at Sonja’s blog Calacirian.

Tags: anger, Gender, Women