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I’m stumped.

Why is it that my ability to feel is used to demonise me and my femininity? Why is it that my rage is unacceptable? Of course, I’m not only talking about myself here. I mean all women. No one likes emotional women unless the emotions they express are happiness and sadness. Society is not a fan of women expressing their rage. Despite the fact that rage is visceral and human. Rage in its unadulterated form is ugly and terrifying and women can be neither ugly nor terrifying so how dare they get angry?

Feminine rage or female rage has been explained as an ancestral and inherited response to the struggles, oppression, and wrong doings that women have been subjected to.

Humans scatter in the face of someone expressing their rage. However, a man expressing rage is normal, so while humans do scatter when Mr. hurls his phone across the house, everyone accepts it. When Miss stands up for herself using harsh language, we scamper away from her expression while calling her crazy or unhinged.

Here’s the catch, men are more than welcome by society to express rage. Rage has been coined as an expression that’s inherently masculine. No one bats an eye when a man punches a wall, throws things around and breaks things. No one cares. It’s deemed as something that’s not necessarily a big deal. After all, boys will be boys, right?

WRONG! I hope you didn’t nod your head fervently and agree with that statement that society uses to justify men’s abusive tendencies. Rage is deemed unfeminine. Society has conditioned women and girls to be meek, docile and quiet. Raising your voice is absolutely unheard of. “Arguing is unbecoming of a woman” is the popular phrase used by older generations of men and women who have a habit of forcing women into silence.

There are only a few emotions women can express without inciting any backlash or suppression. I can wager that one of the acceptable emotions is sadness because men adore the sad damsel in distress, they have a strong sense of duty to save her from what might be making her miserable. They want to swoop in like a knight in shining armour and slay the ogre (sorry, Shrek). Sadness is more easily feminised; in fact, it is considered inherently feminine. Sadness is inwardly focused and self-destructive. It does not threaten men. It does not snap at men. It does not speak up against injustice. It’s quiet and contained. Anger, on the other hand is outward and dangerous. It’s an emotion that is rarely shown and when it is shown it is villainised especially when shown by women. Anger snaps at men. Anger threatens power dynamics instilled by the patriarchy. Anger is not quiet or contained or controllable. Society has made it clear time and time again that it loathes women it cannot control—so it hates angry women and might even fear them.

My feminine rage is incited when I think of Zimbabwean women who are dehumanised and maltreated everyday simply because of the decisions they make whether they are in political spaces, economic spaces or social spaces. They are ridiculed, objectified and abused.

My feminine rage is incited by my nation’s inability to rid our country of child marriages. I will never stop talking about 15 year old Ana Machaya who was married off to a 26 year man and died while giving birth to his child in 2021.

My feminine rage is incited when 48 women are raped every hour in Congo because of an unrest that was started by men.

My feminine rage is incited when Sudanese women are killed and raped because of a male induced war wreaking havoc in South Sudan.

My feminine rage is incited when South African women are getting murdered because they break up with their boyfriends.

My feminine rage is incited when I’m objectified because I am a woman.

My feminine rage is incited when they defend a rapist by claiming he was drunk and telling a woman that it was her fault she was raped because she was drunk.  “HE WAS DRUNK” are the words we use to explain and excuse the bad things he does.  “SHE WAS DRUNK” are the words we justify as the reason why the bad things happen to her. – Farida D.

My feminine rage was incited when Linda West realised and said, “The sexualisation of women is only appealing if it’s non-consensual. Otherwise, it is ‘sluttiness’”

FEMALE RAGE IN MY ZIMBABWEAN HOUSEHOLD

Growing up in a Zimbabwean household taught me that a woman should present herself in society with grace and poise. Anger or rage is an emotion that is just too ugly. Witnessing women expressing rage is too uncomfortable and too raw for everyone to digest. Even when faced in situations of unfairness or unfortunate situations women are implored to grin and bear it. In Ndebele culture, women thrust in unfair and abusive situations are told to “bekezela”. This means tolerate. Women are to tolerate abuse or unfairness not address it. It is always shocking that society is then shocked when these “tolerated” negative emotions build up and inevitably explode like a bomb, seeking a release.

I’ve surmised that people are often taken aback by women’s anger. Women who are used to being stifled by the voices and actions of men are also uncomfortable about expressing their rage that is why they tend to reprimand girls and women who aim to express their anger. I’m not new to witnessing the suppression of women’s feelings and their rage…I mean come on, I’m an African who lives in a patriarchal society.

I’ve watched countless cycles of women with suppressed rage that eventually explodes and manifests in extremely terrifying ways. Because it has been suppressed, women have no idea how to express their rage. When that rage eventually implodes it does so in negative ways such as addiction to alcohol, smoking, eating disorders and devastation to name just a few.

 I’ve felt my own rage and experienced its ugly manifestation. My rage was so all consuming that when I expressed it, I felt better. I’m always absolutely stunned and shocked about how much pent-up anger women have inside of them until I am not because of the evident suppression they are forced to endure. It reminds me of a quote that stuck with me. It says, “I’m a woman who carries the rage of the women who came before me.” I couldn’t agree more. In fact, it is sufficed to say that that is a truth that I think women who have greatly suffered from the brunt of patriarchal traditions have actually experienced.

“Feminine rage is a compilation of the anger our ancestors were unable to express, that is passed down through generations. It’s silent. It’s seething. It’s compounding.”

Women in my family have been victims of suppressed rage in all its forms.  I have understood that rage has been passed down from generation to generation until I finally inherited it. The difference between my matrilineal line and I is that I am no stranger to voicing out my opinion or how I feel about anything. If I deem something unfair, I will make it known to everyone and anyone within ear shot. I often used to sit in my little corner and scoff at my predecessors for never having the strength or courage to speak. I often went as far as claiming that it was weakness. Now that I view the world from a bit of a more mature lens, I understand that people’s backgrounds are different. I realise that people’s socialisation is also very different.

I am one of the lucky women. I live in an age were speaking up or expressing rage isn’t nearly as vilified as it was in the past. My great-great grandmother perpetuated patriarchal teachings because that’s all she knew. Then she passed that along with her suppressed rage onto my great grandmother who then passed it on to my grandmother who learnt to silence herself in the face of monstrous men. That tradition of silence was passed onto my mother. My mother is a mirror of what happens when women are stifled from feeling. She’s the melting pot of different generational trauma and issues that have been so heavily shoved down her throat and her life in general. Taking away a woman’s right to speak or express her abuse (be it physical, emotional or psychological), subjugation, unfair treatment and sexual objectification never ends well.  

My mother’s descendants are witnesses. I am a witness. I too am very angry. I am angry about what happened to my great-great grandmother all the way down the line to my mother. I am angry that families uphold toxic norms that involve sweeping trauma under the rug especially if that trauma affects the woman in the family. Pain demands to be felt and my mother is feeling it in devastating ways. My matrilineal line is crumbling because there’s unrest. There’s unrest because families have allowed oppression to be the norm, to make matters worse, they proceed to stifle the women who attempt to express the anger and pain they feel from oppression.

 Women who usually have vitriol and anger towards men who harm them are still silenced so they are still powerless towards fighting against the men or the patriarchy. Women then proceed to normalise silence amongst themselves and other women. For a while, the waters are calm and gentle until one or many women snap and destroy everything and everyone in their path including themselves.

It’s easy to feel powerless and angry as a woman. I can list a couple of times my friend and I have walked in town where we’ve been subjected to disgusting and heinous hollering. The obscene descriptions about our bodies and the claim that they would love to assault us induces my friend and I to fight back with a tongue just as poisonous. My friend insulted these men and they chased after us, claiming they would hurt us and no one did a thing.  The men who chased after us were offended because we didn’t stay silent. They felt emasculated because we expressed our anger and didn’t let them steamroll us. These situations are regular occurrences. We have been told to never retaliate otherwise we would be harmed. How can we not feel stifled when self-expression, a human right clearly spelled out in the Zimbabwean constitution is greatly conditioned when it applies to women? There are consequences to women expressing their emotions—putting ourselves in immense danger.  So how can we not be filled with rage? 

Many women are under the impression that when being harassed or abused, because defending oneself or even kissing one’s teeth invites a possibility of physical escalation from men, they would rather not entertain their rage. When I was 14, I was headed to my math tutoring session. A man who looked old enough to be my father remarked that I have nice breasts. I felt so violated that I gave him the finger. His face contorted into anger as he told me that he would kill me. He threatened me because I had expressed my anger. That was terrifying. Let’s face it, women don’t feel safe expressing anger. At the same time, expressing an emotion as negative and as potent as anger is pretty unpleasant for the person who is feeling it.

WHY MEN CAN BE ANGRY

Men have the privilege to be angry or enraged because those are socially acceptable emotions that men can have. Again, it goes back to the patriarchy that usually stifles men from expressing emotions in any healthy way (like men shooting, stabbing or assaulting a woman for refusing their courtship…yet we’re dubbed the emotional ones?) but I digress. When a man flings a TV or a woman around, it’s normal. It’s something masculine. It’s tough. It’s acceptable. It’s familiar. It’s chartered waters, thus it isn’t much of an issue.

BLACK WOMEN CAN’T FIT INTO THE FEMININE RAGE PIPELINE

Before I grew the tits to be brave enough to speak up against oppression, I was a meek little thing. While I was vocal about oppression and abuse in my teen years, I wasn’t as brave and as outspoken about it as I am today. I could attribute all of that to the lack of knowledge and exposure to feminist ideology and genuine support. I was excited in my late teens to see that a female rage trend had been popularised. I was excited because I couldn’t express my rage out of the fear of being perceived so I looked to the trend as a form of escapism. I had seen patriarchy. I had felt the pain it had caused me but I was terrified of expressing the pain because I was taught that it was more important to keep up appearances as opposed to expressing myself in any shape, way or form.

 I loved watching the character Pearl from the movie Pearl exercising her rage. I enjoyed watching the rest of the world realise that by stifling and subjugating her, they had created a monster that they feared. It brought me joy. Pearl like many other angry women, was a product of her society. I loved watching Jennifer from Jennifer’s Body killing men. That was her rage. She was dehumanised, mistreated and objectified by men for so long and even turned into a succubus (a sexual demon) by men. When she became a demon, her pent-up human and feminine rage manifested itself in murdering men the same way they had slowly murdered her every day by sexually objectifying her and treating her like nothing more than a body.

I enjoyed watching Katherine from Hidden Figures addressing her anger and pain vocally in a room full of men who had segregated her and disregarded her existence. I enjoyed watching Bernadine from Waiting to exhale setting her cheating husband’s car on fire. I lived vicariously through these characters. I had surmised that while I couldn’t express my rage at least I could watch other women expressing their own rage in a way that I never could. I was happy with the female rage trend until I realised how black women’s rage is usually demonised and ridiculed in media.

Ever since colonisation and slavery, black women were dubbed masculine by colonisers and slavers. Aside from being likened to apes, black women were also dehumanised by having their femininity stripped from them. This narrative was carried from Africa by the colonisers, imperialists and slavers back to their own nations. Now it’s a worldwide perception. However, I can see just how much it affects black American women and black European women more (not that when I step out of Africa I won’t be subjected to the same stereotype). What I discovered is that if the nation is predominantly white or has a considerable number of white inhabitants, that narrative is perpetuated. Highly so at that. The dehumanisation of the black woman has rendered their feelings of rage unimportant if not “silly”.

Thanks to technology we’ve all been exposed to what happens around the world. We have access to foreign content, media, news and cultures.  The majority of films that I have seen have shoved black women into a trope or a classification known as the Sapphire. The sapphire trope is the portrayal of a sassy and bitter black woman. “The sapphire is always angry so why should her anger ever be acknowledged?”, is one of the popular sentiments when it comes to black female rage.

After consuming a lot of feminine rage content, I have come to the realisation that, feminine rage is only acceptable and iconic if you’re white, attractive and skinny. Think about it. Carrie from the book Carrie was a fat girl with acne however, in the movie she was portrayed as a conventionally attractive skinny woman.  How many women of colour have you seen expressing female rage in media? Not a lot.

I also reached the conclusion that the media appreciates female rage as long as it’s not on dark skin. Feminine rage portrayed by white women is revolutionary and inspiring. Feminine rage portrayed by Latina women (as long as they are caucasian Latinas) is deemed attractive or sexy. Feminine rage portrayed by black women is aggressive, unsightly and sometimes comedic to people. When I was scrolling through TikTok I was disappointed but not surprised when I witnessed white creators taking iconic feminine rage sounds and using them in a way that one could tell that they took those displays of rage seriously albeit even inspiring. When they used Katherine Johnson from Hidden Figures’ sound they took it as a joke. It was funny. It was something they could laugh about and ridicule. I remembering audibly sighing. I realised that the more intersectional and different a woman is, her race, weight, height and attractiveness, the more threatening her anger is to her oppressors making it less accepted.

While I had never experienced Katherine Johnson’s suffering or Angela Basset’s suffering both in the movie Waiting to Exhale and Wakanda Forever, I was and still am very happy for the representation in all it’s forms. If anything, I was so happy to watch characters with the same skin tone as mine expressing themselves in a way I hoped I would have strength to express myself one day.

It’s not just black women who are left out of the female rage pipeline. Other women of colour tend to be excluded from female rage expression in mainstream media which is a clear sign that there is a need for intersectionality in our societies otherwise these constructs or concepts that claim to be an outlet for all women seize to be inclusive.

SO WHAT NOW?

Pain demands to be felt.

Rage demands to be expressed.

Female suffering has long since been normalised. Feeling anything other than contentment is regarded as an overreaction. I am so glad for female rage because it comes in to validate the experience of women’s pain and feelings.

I refuse to keep my mouth shut and you should too. Society has no right to tell me what I can and can’t feel. No one has a right to subjugate my right to self-expression. Rage is a human emotion and it might surprise a lot of men when I say that women are human too. GAAAAAASSSPP…gosh, I know right because how dare women call themselves humans prone to anger? I shouldn’t have to sit in silence whilst rage poisons me. Anger is there for a reason and it deserves to be listened to. Women are here, they’re angry, they’re in pain and you WILL see it or hear it.

Let the “hysterical” games begin.

• The “Weird” Brown Girl.

SOURCES:

https://www.frieze.com/article/functions-female-rage

What’s this about female rage?

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/3/28/female-rage-anger-women-feminism-olivia-rodrigo-mad-hysteria-cathartic