WHY IT’S GOOD TO SEE RED

Owning your rage doesn’t make you a bitch, says Zoe Mcdonald

When was the last time you lost it with someone? Felt the prickling of irritation or offence grow into a swell of rage that overtook you? How did it feel? Good? Or like a loss of control? Despite the fact that emotions were talked about openly in my family, I have struggled over the years with my ability to articulate my feelings when I’m angry. At work and in relationships, I have often buried my anger, twisted it into passive aggression, dressed it up in black humour, or turned it inward as self-criticism. Before my separation, I was particularly bad at expressing my anger in my marriage. It always felt like a last resort, and I remember during arguments having a visual sense of this, as if I was edging closer and closer to the precipice, thinking that to get heard I had to lose it with technicolour, toddler-style abandon. There is something inherently shaming and debasing about this – like handing the other person the moral upper hand, where their shock and disgust can pass for reticence and control. But there was a glee, too, in those seconds before I jumped off the ledge, like rolling up my sleeves before a fight. A sense of ‘right then, I’m going to go there. And he won’t be able to ignore me’. On the rare occasions I did go there, though, there was no sense of victory, only a feeling of self-sabotage. What better way to undermine my own point than by regressing to a primal state where the most coherent sentence I could manage was ‘Fuck Yoooooou’. I felt ashamed, not empowered, and according to Soraya Chemaly, feminist activist, writer and author of new book Rage Becomes Her, I’m far from alone.

Often cited in lists of feminist influencers to watch, Chemaly became interested in exploring the ingrained cultural denial about female rage when she realised she had problems identifying and articulating her own. ‘Being taught your role as a female is to be pretty and pleasing tends to get internalised along with a tacit understanding that to be opinionated and assertive, and risk offending, contradicting or upsetting somebody else with your views, is risky and unfeminine, and, well… ugly.’

It’s a dangerous myth, says Chemaly, whose big theory in her new book is that we need to relearn how to connect with our anger and see it as our ally not our enemy. Why? Because not only do women who score the highest on ‘self-objectification’ – who regard themselves as an object of somebody else’s appreciation or judgement – tend to have the poorest ability to accurately interpret or identify their anger, but not acknowledging this powerful emotion can lead to depression, resentment and sadness. She argues that while boys’ anger and aggression is perceived