Name: 【TED】Soraya Chemaly: The power of women's anger (The power of women's anger | Soraya Chemaly)
Uploaded: 2019-02-28T16:38:12.000Z
Duration: 11 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

and it took me many years to be able to say just those words.

sometimes my body thrums, I'm so enraged.

But no matter how justified my anger has been,

I've always been led to understand that my anger is an exaggeration,

Mainly as a girl, I learned, as a girl, that anger is an emotion

When I was 15, I came home from school one day,

and she was standing on a long veranda outside of our kitchen,

Imagine how dumbfounded I was when she started to throw them like Frisbees...

When every single plate had shattered into thousands of pieces

she walked back in and she said to me, cheerfully, "How was your day?"

Now you can see how a child would look at an incident like this

and think that anger is silent, isolating, destructive, even frightening.

Especially though when the person who's angry is a girl or a woman.

Anger is a human emotion, neither good nor bad.

It warns us of indignity, threat, insult and harm.

And yet, in culture after culture, anger is reserved as the moral property

an angry black man is viewed as a criminal,

Regardless of where we are, however, the emotion is gendered.

And so we teach children to disdain anger in girls and women,

and we grow up to be adults that penalize it.

What if we didn't sever anger from femininity?

Because severing anger from femininity means we sever girls and women

from the emotion that best protects us from injustice.

What if instead we thought about developing emotional competence

The fact is we still remarkably socialize children

Boys are held to absurd, rigid norms of masculinity --

told to renounce the feminine emotionality of sadness or fear

and to embrace aggression and anger as markers of real manhood.

On the other hand, girls learn to be deferential,

and anger is incompatible with deference.

In the same way that we learned to cross our legs and tame our hair,

we learned to bite our tongues and swallow our pride.

What happens too often is that for all of us,

indignity becomes imminent in our notions of femininity.

There's a long personal and political tale to that bifurcation.

In anger, we go from being spoiled princesses and hormonal teens,

to high maintenance women and shrill, ugly nags.

We have flavors, though; pick your flavor.

Are you a spicy hot Latina when you're mad?

Or a sad Asian girl? An angry black woman? Or a crazy white one?

But in fact, the effect is that when we say what's important to us,

people are more likely to get angry at us for being angry.

Whether we're at home or in school or at work or in a political arena,

anger confirms masculinity, and it confounds femininity.

and women are penalized for doing the same.

This puts us at an enormous disadvantage,

particularly when we have to defend ourselves and our own interests.

If we're faced with a threatening street harasser, predatory employer,

our brains are screaming, "Are you kidding me?"

And it's conflicting because the anger gets all tangled up

with the anxiety and the fear and the risk and retaliation.

If you ask women what they fear the most in response to their anger,

If you have multiple marginalized  identities, it's not just mockery.

If you defend yourself, if you put a stake in the ground,

Now we reproduce these patterns not in big, bold and blunt ways,

When my daughter was in preschool, every single morning

she built an elaborate castle -- ribbons and blocks --

and every single morning the same boy knocked it down gleefully.

His parents were there, but they never intervened before the fact.

They were happy to provide platitudes afterwards:

"It's so tempting, he just couldn't help himself."

I did what many girls and women learn to do.

and I taught my daughter to do the same thing.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Soraya Chemaly: The power of women's anger (The power of women's anger | Soraya Chemaly)

anxiety

recognize

enormous

deserve