Angry Girls Are Unattractive
The cultural story that damages female psyches and bodies
Several years ago I did some healer training that was offered by an organization that also does a lot of survival training. The work had all originated with an Apache shaman and tracker in the 1950s, and both elements of that work were very intertwined. I was there for the healer part, but at one point the instructor asked for a volunteer to walk through a sandpit and I raised my hand. Then he read my tracks and told me what was going on with me to a degree that seems preternatural to modern humans — how much was in my bladder, about a hip injury that I’d suffered many years before in childbirth, and the fact that I had a huge amount of repressed anger. “The earth sees all,” said the teacher. “It shows you who you are.”
After some very intensive healing work, I again walked through the sand, and this time my big toes made a much deeper impression, a sign that I had released a lot of that repressed anger and was now in a more emotionally balanced place. I’d spent my entire life as a female containing and repressing anger — from the ongoing bullying and harassment to the routine marginalization, I was fucking furious. And mostly, I didn’t allow those feelings into my conscious world, at least not until that course.
Someday I’m going to do more tracking courses with someone who is trained in this tradition — not so I can hunt fugitives in aid of the FBI, which the Apache tracker’s first student has done many times — but as another tool that I can use to help clients figure out what is really going on for them on a deep level.
Today someone told me that anger is a killer, but in truth, repressed anger kills too, particularly women. Not that you should indiscriminately vent your anger on anyone and everyone, but feeling your anger and channeling it is a very important thing for a healthy and happy life. If you stuff it down, it leads to things like depression, eating disorders, high blood pressure, insomnia, low self-esteem, and anxiety. These types of disorders affect many women, particularly young women who have been culturally trained to sublimate their anger.
“How we manage anger is a critical factor in predicting our long-term physical health. Studies suggest that suppressed rage and frequent angry outbursts are associated with:
1. Higher mortality rates 2. Elevated risks of certain cancers 3. High blood pressure 4. Cardiovascular disease
Anger can have its advantages. It can clarify objectives, give voice to deep fears, and propel us to safety.” It can also take a toll on health and happiness if it’s the main way that you express your emotions and if you regularly make the people who are dear to you a target of your anger.
But there is a double standard when it comes to anger. It’s one of the few vulnerable emotions that men are allowed to display, standing in for things like fear, uncertainly, shame, and grief, which because they are vulnerable may come off as weak. Women, on the other hand, are shamed and vilified for showing anger, as if it were unseemly and unladylike. This is doubly true for black women, who are even more expected to sublimate their angry feelings in service of making everyone else more comfortable. This is an old, old dynamic that goes back to the days when enslaved wet nurses were expected to feed the baby of their mistress, at the expense of their own baby, who very well might suffer or starve.
As I said in Misogyny Isn’t The Same As Sexism, misogyny is not so much about hating women as it is about wanting them to stay in their socially ordained lane. It’s the policing arm of patriarchy. Misogynists may not expect women to be overtly submissive, but it is anticipated that they will be “cool” girlfriends, loving wives, devoted moms, loyal secretaries, and good waitresses, etc. The emotional labor and care-giving that are a part of so many women’s daily experiences, both in the family and in the larger community, is unremarked upon unless a woman is notably resisting these functions. Misogyny is the hostilities that arise in the face of such resistance, which may be intended to punish, dominate, or condemn the women who are perceived as a threat to the status quo.
Being angry about something, particularly as relates to themselves, is a breach of the social contract wherein women nurture and care for those around them, lovingly putting their own needs last in the equation. When they decline to do that and actually put their own needs to the fore, that is when the censure tends to rear its head.
In view of some women’s social roles in a patriarchal culture as men’s attentive, loving subordinates, this suggests one obvious possibility to consider. A woman’s perceived resistance to or violation of the norms and expectations that govern these social roles would naturally tend to provoke just these kinds of reactions. What could be a more natural basis for hostility and aggression than defection from the role of an attentive, loving subordinate?
The hostility they display to women who disrupt or pose a threat to gendered social hierarchies, say, is compatible with their being egalitarians in the abstract. They may nevertheless perceive powerful women who do not wield their power in service of men’s interests as abrasive and threatening. For that reason among others, a misogynist social environment may be partly the result of more or less well-intentioned people acting out of disavowed emotions, or exhibiting flashes of aggression that are not consciously experienced.
Manne, Kate. Down Girl (p. 49). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Men aren’t the only ones who feel uncomfortable with women’s anger. Other women can subconsciously react to what feels like aggression that is actually only a woman being assertive. As I said in, On Being A Very Direct Woman In A Passive-Aggressive World:
“Yesterday I was in a conflict discussion with a colleague and she accused me of being aggressive. I pointed out to her that I had not been aggressive, only direct, and had laid what was going on out clearly so that it could be addressed. Because we are so conditioned away from healthy conflict, and women, in particular, are expected to be nice, demure, conciliatory, and agreeable, my directness landed for her as aggression. When I reread to her what I’d written, and asked her to point out the aggressive parts, she couldn’t.”
If you’ve read much of my work before, you know that I despise the use of the word girl to describe adult women, but I used it in my title to make a point. In many cases, women are still expected to be subordinate to men’s interests and needs, even when it’s entirely subconscious. They are often still treated like social children because a mere 50 years ago, that was considered entirely appropriate — which is why I use that term now. In a patriarchy, men provide and women nurture. As far as we’ve come, the echos of that paradigm are still in play in too many ways to adequately address here.
Girls, even before they reach puberty, know that they should not challenge boys, and should not exhibit anger towards them — not if they want to be well-liked and considered “cool.” They learn to repress their anger at having their bra straps snapped, having their bodies rated, and groped, and commented upon because to do otherwise is to invite scorn, not just from the boys and men who do this but quite often from authority figures and parents who insist that “boys will be boys” and excuse these violations upon female body autonomy as being inconsequential. But to fight that is largely to rage against the machine, bloodying your own head and gaining little ground in the process. Instead, girls and women learn to stuff that anger
Girls learn early on that in this dominance hierarchy called patriarchy, they are second-class citizens and that they are expected to deal with that graciously. They learn that their sexual assaults will be blamed on them because after all, they wore yoga pants or a tank top with spaghetti straps — even if they were 10 years old. In order to “fit in” and to be “acceptable,” they often stifle their voices and their anger. This quite often results in depression, anxiety, and eating disorders.
Girls begin cutting themselves and otherwise attempting to create a sense of control in a world that seems to be telling them that their humanity does not count, and like the enslaved woman forced to watch her baby starve, she is taught to stifle her anger and her tears, or be punished more severely if she does not. Her culture tells her that the way out; the redemption is through being thin and pretty enough, through being accomodating and conciliatory enough, but this is a lie.
Some of these girls shame other ones for being too sexual or too accomodating to boys at the same time that they are desperate to have that validation because boys are higher up the pyramid of power. As they continue to grow and mature, this dynamic continues. Angry and assertive men are powerful leaders. Angry and assertive women are hysterical bitches, even sometimes to each other. Don’t forget, it’s only been 50 years since this stuff was widely accepted as normative.
Angry girls are unattractive; they should smile more. Hey, you’ve got resting bitch face. Your purpose on earth is to provide pleasure and enjoyment for men, and you seem to be falling down on the job. Be more conciliatory; be more understanding; don’t be so angry — it’s really unattractive.
Suppressing anger is detrimental to anyone, male or female. So is always being driven by anger. Feelings are information from your deeper self to your more surface self. They are trying to tell you that something is out of alignment. If you are angry all of the time, it’s a good prompt to look at what you are tolerating that you shouldn’t.
ANGER IS AN EMOTIONAL TRAFFIC SIGNAL. It tells us that we’ve been mistreated or hurt in some way. When we don’t feel ashamed of our anger, it can help us notice our needs and cultivate self-care.
Paying attention to these traffic signals helps us to set good boundaries and to take good care of our own emotional and physical selves. It indicates to us where we need to distance ourselves from potentially triggering people, as well as acceptance of abuse. If a lot of things make us mad, perhaps we also need to take a look inside ourselves as well to notice where we might be a part of our own problem, but reacting to societal ills, pervasive abuse, and harm, with anger is not inappropriate.
“Historically, ‘angry women’ have been and continue to be branded troublemakers. But they have used their anger to fight injustice, intolerance, lack of representation, inequality and more. In this context, anger in women is being used constructively.”
In other words, anger is vital, and should not be considered unattractive, even when it’s uncomfortable for some people. No-one should be fueled exclusively by their anger, but being in touch with it and using it as a tool to foment change and progress is a good thing. In order to reach a place of healthy balance, I believe that men need to learn to be less angry and better access their other vulnerable emotions and women need to learn to be more openly angry and then move through it.
Bottling up anger is unhealthy and from personal experience, it often leads to explosions that would have been less volatile if they had been expressed at an earlier time. As Grandfather used to say, “The earth shows you who you are.” If you walk in the dirt or the sand, and your big toe print is very faint, it’s time to start owning your anger, hopefully in a healthy and constructive way.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.
