One voice, your voice, and our collective voices can make a difference. We are on the precipice of a revolution whose call to action needs to be heard loud and clear. – Grace Tame
Women have been angry since Eve. And the responses to that anger are just as old.
We saw it play out as the prime ninister and his government struggled to get a handle on the issues Brittany Higgins’ accusations raised, held up by the swell of voices rushing in behind her.
The platitudes and the “that’s terrible, but what can we do” shrugs. The attempts to move on. The pushback and the patronising “when will these emotional women stop being so emotional” sighs.
There isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t recognise the signs. In men, anger, no matter how unreasonable, is always reasonable. At least at first glance. In women, that same anger is irrational – spurred by emotion, not rationality.
Men argue, women rant. Men speak with authority, women screech like banshees. Men were driven to it, women must have done something. While expressing my frustration and rage with the political response, one man asked me in jest, “Are you sure you’re not just hormonal?” It was a joke, made in an attempt at irony, but we both knew it was tinged with what he believed to be true. Women everywhere seemed to be angry, and the usual tricks used to calm them weren’t working. You could see the frustration in the male political leaders as they delivered well-rehearsed lines and headed down well-trodden paths of placation, only to be met with stony faces and pointed questions about actual solutions.
By the time historical rape allegations against Christian Porter were made public (allegations the former attorney general has vigorously denied), the government’s lack of response had led the resolve of women around the country to harden into steely determination. Women asked for their leaders to listen. They were told, repeatedly, to listen to how much they were not being listened to. It’s not unusual for those in power to be confused by a woman’s anger.
Some of the most famous of western civilisation’s myths have been built around the fall of an angry woman. Medusa, raped and betrayed, was understandably angry – and was turned into a Gorgon for her troubles. She was slayed as she slept, her powers then used against her will. Circe handled rejection so poorly she would turn suitors into swine and poison waterways. Cassandra, so beautiful she tempted a god, was then doomed to never be believed when she rejected him. Medea handled Jason’s infidelity and rejection by murdering his new wife and her own children. The Greek spirit of mad rage was encapsulated by Lyssa, a woman. Clytemnestra became synonymous with being every man’s worst nightmare after she murdered her husband for sacrificing their daughter. Eve has never been forgiven for mankind’s first sin, tasting the forbidden fruit.
Story after story, myth after myth, women receive comeuppance for their anger and are doomed to live as monsters, cast away from friends and family, or hunted by righteous men.
Women have been angry since before they could name the emotion, but they are quickly taught to hide it. Study after study after study into anger show how women suffer professionally from displaying the emotion – while men are rewarded. We see this played out in our personal lives, too. An angry woman is a shrew, unattractive, unlovable and in need of taming. Her voice is too shrill to be heard, her face too flushed, her eyes too full of fire to focus on. Angry women commit the greatest of feminine sins – they make themselves unfuckable. “It’s probably why she’s so angry – no one will fuck her.” “If you would just calm down, then we can talk.” “Just settle, petal.” “Calm your tits.” “You’re taking it too far.” “Keep your hair on!”
As with so much of womanhood, anger is framed through the male gaze. Men’s anger is perceived as just, while women’s anger is irrational – and so, when aimed at men, is usually unjust. An angry man is credible. An angry woman is difficult. Add in other institutionalised discrimination, such as being a woman of colour, and there are more stereotypes to contend with, to silence anyone who dares to speak up – not just as a woman but as a woman who is not white. She’ll often find her white “sisters” joining the chorus to drown her out.
Girls absorb all those messages at the same time as their ABCs. Boys too. It’s why women’s anger has become such a trope: something men have to suffer, humour or bounce along with – but only to a point.
In her 2018 book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, Soraya Chemaly writes how it is as children that many women “learn to regard anger as unfeminine, unattractive, and selfish … As girls we are not taught to acknowledge or manage our anger so much as to fear, ignore, hide and transform it … ”
Women know others will be making those assessments and work to counter them, even as they struggle to make their anger known. So it’s no wonder our leaders are not used to seeing it. It’s no wonder, in the instance of Brittany Higgins, that they believed platitudes and politics as usual would solve it. For the first time in a long, long while, within a long, long list of tragedies and injustices Australians should be angry about, the anger didn’t seem to be dissipating. In fact, it was growing. Women were marching. They were mobilising. They were telling their stories – loudly – and they were refusing to calm down or express their anger in a more palatable way. As one woman I met in a supermarket told me, “It’s liberating to be this angry and not have to hide it.”
These were not the first angry women to speak up to their leaders. But here were a lot of straight, white women – a core constituency of the Coalition – refusing to calm down or let the matter drop.
Anger can be destructive, but it can also be transformative. Used well, it can bring about a necessary clarity, stripping back all the frosting to what lies rotten underneath. In trying to appease without offering solutions, the government found that anger only grew. And for those feeling that anger, it was cleansing.
This is an edited extract from On Reckoning by Amy Remeikis (Hachette, $16.99), out 26 January
