Celia Walden
Serena proves all women have an anger problem
I would give anything to express my own long-repressed rages so openly
Forget for a second whether she was right or wrong, robbed or not – and take a moment to identify the stages of female rage Serena Williams moved through at the US Open on Saturday. Because every angry woman will recognise them. And most of us are angry most of the time.
At first the tennis star’s interactions with umpire Carlos Ramos – who had just handed her a code violation for “coaching” – are tempered. She is trying to contain the rage and has lowered her voice in order to get her point across in a clear, balanced manner. It’s the “deep breath” woman-to-man moment (“I see you forgot to use a coaster again”) before the nuclear eruption. Coaching is “not something I do,” Williams points out, conciliatory to the point of saying: “I could understand why you may have thought that, but just know I’ve never cheated.”
So far, so controlled. It’s only after being reprimanded a second time that the still-simmering spark bursts into flame and the hectoring tone – enhanced by repetition – begins: “I didn’t get coaching! I didn’t get coaching! You need to make an announcement that I didn’t get coaching!” Out comes the jabbing finger – in music this would mark the moment the orchestra begins its crescendo – and suddenly the rage becomes its own self-perpetuating force, propelling itself onwards and upwards until it reaches full swell and breaks, along with Williams’s voice: “I don’t cheat! I have never cheated in my life! I have a daughter and I stand for what’s right.”
Fans and critics have variously identified this as Williams’s “you go girl!” moment of triumph – and the point at which she lets herself and the game down by conflating the injustice she has suffered (and I do think it was an injustice and that she didn’t see her coach “coaching” her from the stands) with every injustice every woman has ever suffered since Eve discovered she was only allowed to have that one wet blanket of a playmate, Adam.
I say it was both a triumph and a reminder of why women need to get better at rage. You’re not allowed to generalise (which is why I love doing it) but conflation is a stock stage of female rage. We collect scraps of injustices from our own lives, other peoples’, the past and fiction, and it all comes out in an explosion of Jackson Pollock-esque splats. So suddenly it’s no longer about the indelible
ring mark on the coffee table and the overall thoughtlessness but the neighbour’s cheating husband, the friend who got overlooked for a promotion at work and that misogynistic creep from the BBC drama we watched at the weekend. And while “ism” style conflation is understandable given the stack of grievances women have quietly been coddling for decades, it’s not helpful. It lends itself to the “hysterical” label men are all too ready to slap on any woman who shows even the meekest sign of discontent, and it distracts from the issue at hand. In this particular case, it also distracted from poor 20-year-old Naomi Osaka’s win.
And yet… wasn’t Williams magnificent? I would give anything to be able to express my own longrepressed rages so openly. That kind of rage can’t be expressed on social media – where every woman who “loses it” gets buried – and it can’t be expressed at home, where as wives and mothers we are supposed to be Zen-tastic Buddhas calming everyone else down. But oh, the power of female rage when unharnessed! If you could have bottled every ounce of molten fury visibly pumping through Williams’s veins as she laid into that umpire and unleashed it into a single lob, the tennis star would have her 24th major title right now – and not the $17,000 fine for three separate coaching violations that she has been given instead.
Williams didn’t deserve to have that final game taken away from her, and she was right to point out that no male player would have received the same punishment, so right now the rage levels – boosted by the chorus of men urging her to “calm down, dear” – must have reached record levels. I hope they stay that way, so that she can make full use of them in her next big game. Because as US Professor Brittney Cooper wrote in her book, Eloquent Rage, “Watching Serena play is like watching eloquent rage personified.”