If you were to ask my friends what the first word they would use to describe me is, they would say I’m optimistic and rarely get angry. The truth is that I do have a long fuse and I don’t like expressing my anger. Many women are taught that they can’t be angry and don’t have a justified reason to be angry while men are encouraged to be angry. This is what I have noticed through the influence of my environment and the media I consume.
I was once in a physics group in high school where I was the only female member of the group. When I was in this group, it was hard to get the other members to work together to complete the assignment. At first, I tried to be calm and nice, but after a while, I felt what anyone would’ve felt: annoyed. However, when I voiced that annoyance, all I got in response was, “Are you on your period or something?” This is the symptom of the problem in our social norms because this implies that only men are allowed to be angry. If it’s a woman who’s angry then it’s because we’re hormonal and hysterical. All of the women I have met in my life so far have told me that they also learned this growing up. Questions about if we are on our period aren’t the problem but the symptom; the real problem is that society uses constructed social norms to gatekeep emotions.
Years later during quarantine, I watched “Nanette,” a comedy special by Hannah Gadsby on Netflix. She is wickedly smart and I was laughing the whole way through, but something in particular about how she talked about anger spoke to me.
Gadsby said, “People feel safer when men do the angry comedy; they are the kings of the genre. When I do it, I’m just a miserable lesbian, ruining all the fun and the banter. When men do it, heroes of free speech.”
This may seem to be just a commentary about the comedy industry but it goes much deeper than that. Having this division about the perception of anger even in comedy puts forth the idea that power over our self-expression is only for the few: men. It says that women are to stay in the shadows when they are hurt, that it is okay to hurt women, and women can only absorb. Men get to be angry, men get to be the ‘heroes,’ but as Gadsby puts it, “You don’t have a monopoly on the human condition.”
The human condition is vast and complex for everyone, not just men who society has given the power. People cannot just turn off one emotion because others have deemed it unacceptable. Women are allowed to be angry when they are being treated unfairly. And so to you, especially female and non-binary readers, I say this: You are allowed to be angry and to use that anger to speak up for yourself and others. You do not need anyone’s permission to feel, no matter what society says.