Sugar, Spice, And Anything With Spite
- Youth 4 Journalism
- Jun 16, 2023
- 11 min read
By: Dan Aries Amian
Published: June 16, 2023
They say rage is a wicked force on the burning fingertips of a woman – curdling with unknowable territory and howling with a scratchy throat of jutted spikes. This emanation of wrath is never confined to one limiting space; its never-ending supernova-like explosion has no possibility of being wrestled or restrained for the benefit of looking tame. It’s a wrecking ball of trauma, fervor, dauntlessness, guilt, fears, untucked rawness, debilitating melancholia, anxieties, vulnerabilities, untended choices, dismissed voices, and other dark nuances wrapped in a barbed wire of every woman’s struggle. All these conflicts have one thing in common ground: they are pulsating with that punk vivaciousness of wrath - screaming daily inconveniences from a domesticated setting to larger gender disparities.
Women have rights, but not equality at its best purpose within a society geared with patriarchal conditioning. Despite amendment of recognition to their sound femininity, intellectual values, and physical strengths – there is still so much opposition and taint of hatred from toxic masculinity. This backlash is a result of threatened feelings against the rise of women power. Women have always morphed themselves into angry containers, backbiting their fire to avoid the scrutinizing brand of being vindictive. They have carried in the marrow of their bones the insults and detriments of sexist culture and misogyny. Their womanhood is tattooed with scars of societal expectations on what it means to be a woman going with grace. It usually meant holding back the ironic safety and relief that their anger could have given to them.
Perhaps, society has mastered a teaching of effectively internalizing rage for women: to abide by the rules that men created for the sake of not triggering danger to their womanhood. The problem lies even with historical perspectives about angry women. They have been marinated into a dark narrative that allowed derogatory terms to demonize their powerful rage. Labels such as bitches, harpies, whores, irrational, vindictive, delusional, crazy, dramatic, petty, hormonal, postpartum, witches, jealous, bitter, hysterical, and ridiculous were the fitting words that described their anger. In circumstances where they had to unleash their furies to fate, they were seen as demonic creatures that needed to be shunned, ignored, caged, and worst of all, killed. Maybe that’s how it started – the female rage in all its fatality hidden under the gracious attempts to be ladylike: an oppressive imperative that tells women to sew their mouth shut to be filtered out from making history. This patriarchal aspiration needed them to be a lady and being one meant not being angry.
But in the recess of a woman’s psyche, rage is hard to unlearn even in a millennium of conditioning. It continues to unfurl itself into poisonous flowers – seeping with beauty and seething with glorious destruction. Lately, in the wake of digitalization and modern feminism, there has been a lot of spotlight blinking onto the discussion of women’s rage and its shark-bite power. Most of the discussion centered around its transformative power to blaze activism, intersecting on focal points of women’s autonomy over their bodies, trans-inclusive radicality, racism, queerphobia, and other political voices. This launched a new idea that anger in women can be used as a political microphone – amplifying visibility to issues and conflicts that politicians mostly turn their backs to. It’s idiotic to think that anger in women is feminine because it’s just a way to undermine how this anger is bubbling with acidity underneath the cool façade; and once it has enough, it will erupt like a volcano with eroding and disastrous effects. But its aftermath would somehow shape a new landscape for society.
Everyone was swept up in all the conversations circulating around female rage, but it was quickly intensified when Roe V. Wade was overturned in the United States. Background information for this landmark decision: it ruled that the Constitution of the US would protect an individual’s autonomy and liberty to have an abortion. But as it was powerful and progressive, in June 2022, a ruling of 6-3 decided the end for this landmark decision, and I was angry, and many women screeched backlash, and many more women screamed for a fight, and tears were retched, and anger – so much of it – flooded the political sector of United States. This rage was so tumultuous that it chanted alongside many protests that were coordinated; it expelled uprising, it dominated a girl boss status, and it highballed into a wicked witch of the west movement that demanded an upchuck of a decision for power return. Every stomp, every claw that held banners of political sayings, and every bark for justice snowballed into an activistic riot. And it was valid. It was enchanting. It was finally good to unleash wrath. And did the leaders listen? Did the world revolve into progression? It was a loss, but the battle isn’t ending.
But stepping beyond the boundary of female anger as a political engine, I also want to explore its multidimension when it comes to anger in its own terms of expression. Not just as a political advocate, but also as a personal link to understanding more its individuality because anger is an emotion that deserves expression. Putting it in the pedestal of having purpose to serve its worth is invalidating to the fatality of feminine rage as a whole. Anger, with the stereotyped quality of being brutal, is sometimes repressed and conveyed into another guise of emotions – guilt, sadness, fear, numbness, etc. It can’t always express itself and even so, it has a purpose, and it can be used no matter how society brands it as grotesque.
There is so much to be angry about and every woman I know is angry. Their rage radiates off like mirage or kept quiet in an act of sophistication and I am so angry about the world that it’s hard sometimes to breathe with my lungs burning. My suffocation is an effect of my combustible indignation about the society still capitalizing on everything, ignorance on SOGIE, violence against women, deaths because of misogyny, oppressive racism; and I am angry that so many still refuse to reshape autonomy into a new definition that women and everyone can totally enjoy. And I am so angry that I want to scream in front of an ocean; the waves vibrating with my furies and the bluest of blues intimidated by the reddest of reds dwindling inside my chest. If there’s something about female rage that is beautiful – it’s its ubiquitous presence that sometimes makes us feel like we are brittle and vulnerable; and other times, it allows us to feel huge, expansive like the Goddesses, and unstoppable. As Lilly Dancyger puts it in her introduction of the feminist nonfiction novel, ‘Burn It Down’, “My anger is a place inside myself that I breathe into to make myself larger, taking up space and making space for others, by refusing to let my boundaries be ignored, and by standing up for women in trouble.”
The feminism that I grew up with is a modern one, a product that rolled onto the lint of its previous waves. And in my orthodox household that saddled generational trauma like sport, there were a lot of conflicted cultures that I negated. When I criticized most of them after reading liberal nonfiction works about intersectional feminism, I was met with scrutinizing gazes from my relatives. Their eyebrows furrowed with confusion; eyes slitted into questions on when I began to grow up as a know-it-all slug. They thought of my young adulthood as a status of ignorance, and maybe it’s true that I still must learn a lot, but the same sentiment could also be applied to them. I grew a hunger in me that was not sedated. It craved for knowledge about feminism, SOGIE, politics, and how society works under the despotic capitalism. As I blossomed into a person kneaded and equipped with necessary political information, I also realized that most of my relatives looked at my views as distasteful and refracting from their conservatism. Soon, I was angry when the women in my family corrected me for speaking out about denormalizing rape culture. And I harbored that anger again when I witnessed a blatant attack of slut-shaming on another woman – her identity reduced into a self-eroding definition of a whore just on the criteria of her clothing choices. And that anger became spiky as I watched another woman get all the blame as her husband left – her own free will attached like an umbilical cord to the decisions of a garbage man. The drunken talks I overheard from men, sexualizing women’s bodies into their perverted museum and displaying those visualizations into an artifact of the male gaze, angered me so much that I wanted to smash something and throw the shattered pieces into their skin. The half-Cheshire smirks of misogynistic men as they whistled and hooted on girls, self-absorbed to their mentality that catcalling is an artful compliment, pushed me into a steep of darkness. And the last straw of it all was my father. He left so much anger and pain that it tainted my mother into a crumbled victim of the patriarchy. He excavated a space within my mother and in that solitude of darkness, it sparked into a fire that ceaselessly grew. Leslie Jamison wrote in her essay ‘Lungs Full of Burning’ that “The phenomenon of female anger has often been turned against itself, the figures of the angry woman reframed as threat – not one who has been harmed, but the one bent on harming.” And that’s how my mother lived with her anger – stoking its fires and going with grace as it consumed her slowly into a conflagration.
My mother was my first definition of the feminine rage. It was fiery. It stunk a lot. It bit me with complexity. It clawed on my back with confusion. But watching her wade through that rage has also taught me to play better with mine. Without her knowing, she became a teaching ground for me to become more aware of my anger. As I sifted through my growing years, I also burrowed myself into media and pop culture, becoming obsessed with the ominous presence of feminine rage in fiction and films/TV shows. While I reeled into the representation of feminine rage, one work of fiction became a manifesto for me to understand the systemic rage of my mother – Gone Girl.
While a lot of films and TV shows feature feminine rage in its earthiness of screaming and animalistic primitiveness, it didn’t conflate with how my mother’s rage manifested. Gone Girl, with its subversive attack of the popular idea of female rage, became an enthralling key to learn more the other side of rage: seething silence. From an article published by Sukanya Shaji entitled: “We Need More Angry Women In Fiction: ‘Female’ Rage And Her Inner Worlds”; she described there that the movie Gone Girl explore the layered, cultural, gendered triggers of untapped, unexpressed female anger in the eye-opening ways. What she meant with that interpretation is that female rage is not always wild, but sometimes it’s excruciatingly psychotic. It can transform itself into a dark brilliance that seeks to destroy, avenge, and erode. The story of Gone Girl is about a woman’s revenge towards her failing matrimony; and in the analysis of Sukanya Shaji, “the author skillfully used her protagonist’s anger to critique matrimony and its structural hostility towards women.”
As I finished reading the book back then, I saw so much of Amy in my mother and it was not a correlation to the disturbing psychopathy of the protagonist, but rather, it was its human feature of not internalizing anger to become the bigger person in a sinking situation. Instead, Amy Dunne, akin to my mother’s vengeance, didn’t high-heel into a silent exit from her unfaithful husband for the cost of looking like a gracious and sane woman. With a chillingly human attribute, the anger of the two shared a quality of self-corrosion. As Amy became more determined to escalate her anger into plotting a revenge, it showed an intricate inner workings about a woman’s anger and how it can push even the most good-natured ones into criminality. And it was then that I understood more of my mother - her manipulative ways of hurting my father with emotional spiderweb mastery. Shaji called me into an awareness about “the rousing frustrations of women who refuse to water down their rage for social acceptance.” With that said, instead of frowning at women expressing their anger with turbulence, we should start focusing more on prosecuting men for their lack of accountability to triggering these types of wrath.
Feminine rage, despite being a human emotion, has been a subject of fetishization in different social medias. With the constant rise of movies and literary works displaying female rage in its cohort, people began to skyrocket into a new movement of fetishizing female rage as part of their inner experience. Megan Nolan in her article about ‘The Functions of Female Rage’ has also begun to wonder about it – if female rage is beyond the fetish and her answer was cutthroat to the truth: “I don’t think female anger is any harder to fetishize and commodify than our sadness.” I agree for most of my teenage years being exposed to media representation about complex women characters – I idolized their horror-esque expression of rage combined with the alluring and empathetic wear of melancholia on their faces. I recited iconic lines of Mean Girls and insults from Jawbreakers to mimic their feminine rage when bullies tried to intimidate me. I absorbed the angry tears of Jennifer Check from Jennifer’s Body and tried to exude it out when I was noosed with sadness. I followed the antics of the sorority's ruthless characterization of the Chanels from the TV series ‘Scream Queens’. AHS: Coven and AHS: Hotel taught me to glamorize my pain and anger into a catatonic beauty of nihilistic girlboss attitude while wearing red-blood and black hawk couture. Legally Blonde made me wear pink while instilling the mindset that I could still smash the patriarchy looking like a real version of a Barbie. Maybe this anger was fetishized, but it gradually pushed me into venturing more of its whole.
Feminine rage is drastic and singed, ruinous in a principal way. But as Melissa Felbos affirms in her essay ‘Rebel Girl’, “…recognizing the invisible parts of oneself in another person can feel like a radiant kind of love.” Anger/rage/wrath/fury/whatever brand – it is one of the invisible parts, and when someone recognizes its potential lethality and beauty, the flames of this fury can be transformed into something revolutionary and powerful. But as a queer person navigating a patriarch-dominated society, I still have so much to be angry about. I remember my friends who told me the rawest details of their experiences with sexual harassment, and I can’t help myself but to feel unrest. My lips quivering with outrage to this aggression. I remember myself being on the receiving end of such belligerence and I couldn’t help but to ball my fists into a scissor and cut up pieces of my pillow until feathers flurried like clouds around me. Identical with Marissa Korbel, I shifted those inward anger into an outward expression – writing. With that art, she detailed her personal dawning “You could say rage is the root of everything I’ve ever written. Rage is the fuel of my voice. Now I’m afraid to be soft. I’m afraid to stop yelling. I’m only comfortable growing hot behind the ears, prickling.” I hope one day, I get to be the same – fizzing and thunderous with the earthquake of my rage. I want to have magic in my fingertips – crackling with lightning that it sizzles trees into wildfires. I want to lift a house with my brain, snap its foundation into brokenness, and scatter the pieces around like raining darts. I want a heart filled with acceptable anger – a message that feminine rage can be fully embraced.
Feminine rage is not something to underestimate. It’s a seismic wave on the ground – invisible in its quake, but noticeable in its danger and aftermath. It ranges to how it is felt: it can be silent and collected enough to shake the ground with a warning or it can be scuffling with violence that it tosses people on the ground and skyscrapers into a humbled bow. Or maybe, it can whizz past with a roaring determination – destroying cities or causing revolution.
References
Curtis, S. (2018, October 2). Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies: Amazing Women on What the F-Word Means to Them. Ballantine Books.
Feminism and Literature: Women’s rage - The Knowledge Loft - Free notes for General Paper (GP) tuition. (2018, October 7). The Knowledge Loft - Free Notes for General Paper (GP) Tuition. https://www.theknowledgeloft.com/society/feminism-and-literature-womens-rage/
Pleines, M. (12022, March 1). Women’s Rage. Women’s Rage. https://blog.pshares.org/womens-rage/
Dancyger, L. (Ed.). (2019, December 10). Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger. Seal Press.
Shaji, S. (2020, November 23). We Need More Angry Women In Fiction: “Female” Rage And Her Inner Worlds. Feminism in India. https://feminisminindia.com/2020/11/24/more-angry-women-fiction-female-rage-inner-worlds/
Pleines, M. (12022, March 1). Women’s Rage. Women’s Rage. https://blog.pshares.org/womens-rage/
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